Snowden revisited: From traitor to prophet of privacy in our digital dystopia

When Edward Snowden sought clemency for his crimes in 2016, I was opposed. A pardon, I wrote, “would inflict one more humiliation on the United States, and offer one more victory to those who believe they can defeat us because we are so foolishly adept at defeating ourselves.” Whatever good Snowden achieved from a free-speech standpoint was outweighed, I argued, by the harm. “As harsh as it is to accept, without Snowden — and without the truth he laid bare — America would be much stronger and more secure, and the road ahead would be much less treacherous and uncertain.”

At the tail end of the Obama years, the verdict of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence felt definitive:

Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.

I’m not here to disavow my opinions from back then. But I am here to add to them.

The digitized dystopian government I saw coming over the Trump years, and what many see now that it’s fully ensconced in Washington, looks an awful lot like the seemingly unpatriotic scenario painted by Snowden himself. Passing off Snowden’s disclosures as meaningless to the interests of citizens, of import only to the U.S. military-intelligence complex and its adversaries abroad, was a fraud of a sort — based on the swiftly invalidated assumption that our government would never turn its military and intelligence capabilities against American citizens for reasons of ideology, not national security.

Proof of this criminalistic ideological turn is that the biggest difference between who took Snowden’s warnings seriously under Obama and who takes them seriously now under Biden is what political party they’re in. Back then, Snowden’s cries resonated with the left. Since then, the left has been utterly domesticated into the Biden regime’s deep-state digital dystopia. Now, Snowden’s warnings only find a hearing on the right. Not only does the right still have enough of an open mind to be willing to countenance what the regime denies, but the right has no choice: The right is the enemy of the regime, much more so than, to take a random example, Hamas.

The rolling collapse of the January 6 narrative concocted, produced, distributed, and enforced by the regime shows plainly what almost everyone knows deep down: There was no “insurrection.” Trump supporters are not a threat to our national security. The persecution of the political right under cover of “domestic extremism” is a wholesale violation of our elementary rights. Trump voters and dissident voices online provide no national security justification for the indefinite suspension of our constitutional government in favor of a closed surveillance and censorship regime, much less one running, as this one does, based on woke social credit.

So today, when you see Snowden’s posts on X raising an unprecedented alarm, there is nothing un-American about taking them seriously. In fact, the un-American choice is to ignore the fact that, as he puts it, “the NSA is just DAYS from taking over the internet.” Because, this time, it’s not just Snowden hitting the panic button.

To the credit of the Brennan Center for Justice, a longtime left-wing outfit, Liberty and National Security codirector Elizabeth Goitein is laying out the severity of the threat posed by the latest Washington power grab — notionally, an act of Congress but driven by deep-staters we can’t vote in or out.

“Through a seemingly innocuous change to the definition of ‘electronic communications surveillance provider,’ an amendment offered by House intel committee leaders and passed by the House vastly expands the universe of entities that can be compelled to assist the NSA,” Goitein reports. “If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored — such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc.”

Does anyone think the American experiment can endure much longer under conditions like these?

Sadly, we’re in this predicament for deeper reasons than the malevolent agenda of wild-eyed ideologues. We can’t just chalk up today’s crisis to campus crazies or Marxists marching through the institutions. As I laid out in my 2021 book “Human Forever,” the root cause is that the dominance of digital technology has thrown the legitimacy of every government into question, including the regimes of the strongest digital powers in the world.

That’s because the essential nature of the social compact has been revolutionized, and whatever the form of government at play, the people need to buy in. The question is simple: On what basis do today’s ruling elites propose to exercise digitally supercharged sovereignty over their country’s people and machines? In China, India, Israel, Russia, Europe, the U.K., and here in the United States, regimes are scrambling in their way to lay out an answer strong enough to command the full assent of their people.

Only one of the world’s top digital powers has a Bill of Rights. And, without a doubt, our Bill of Rights makes re-establishing sovereignty in the digital age more difficult since, here, to preserve our constitutional system, our government needs to trust us to access and use incredibly powerful digital tech. We need to trust each other, too.

Our adversaries want to undermine or destroy that trust. It’s so easy to believe we don’t have the time or luxury to take on the “extra” work of building and sustaining that trust.

That trust can’t be faked. It can’t be simulated or stimulated into existence. It can’t be programmed or automated. It can’t be found in the free market, bought in an online marketplace, or forged through feel-good TV. It can’t be taught in universities, and it can’t be learned from the best of books. The trust we need comes only through lived spiritual experience. If we refuse to accept the risk of that difficult process, no whistleblower, military, or constitution can save us.