As is the case with so many whistleblowers who disclose evidence of government misconduct, the government and commentators are quick to attack whistleblower Edward Snowden's character rather than focusing on his disclosures.
It's surprising that such a reputable forum like The New Yorker, which published Jane Mayer's award-winning article on other NSA whistleblowers (and my clients) Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, would run such an uninformed character assassination of Snowden from Jeffery Toobin. Toobin's name-calling ("[Snowden is a] grandiose narcissist") is irrelevant to Snowden's whistleblower status and a transparent attempt to divert attention from the larger issue at hand: the government's widespread domestic surveillance of innocent Americans.
As a lawyer, you would think Toobin would read the laws, including the legal definition of whistleblowing, which Snowden quite clearly meets, and the surveillance laws the NSA is side-stepping to conduct its massive domestic spying operation.
Watch my colleague at the Government Accountability Project, Kathleen McClellan, take on Toobin's outlandish arguments on CNN:
Toobin's primary argument is something to do with the completely irrelevant fact that Snowden went to "China." (I'm not sure it's worth giving Toobin the benefit of the doubt of knowing that Hong Kong and "China" are not the same). Regardless, if there is any question worth asking about Snowden's current location, it is why in a country with a First Amendment does a whistleblower not feel safe to expose what is very reasonably believed to be government abuse and illegality?
Snowden's disclosures say far more about the government than they do about Snowden. They reveal that the Obama administration has been engaging in - and expanding - widespread electronic surveillance on millions of Americans who are not suspected of any wronging and who have no idea the government is collecting dossiers on them so the government can, as Senator Diane Feinstein said, "go through it later" when and if someone becomes a suspect. Under a bastardized secret interpretation of an already extraordinarily broad surveillance power (Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act), the government has been secretly collecting millions of Americans' phone records. It has been using a loophole in FISA Amendments Act to take Americans' data directly from tech companies on a vast scale. The President has authorized offensive cyber-attacks against countries with which the U.S. is not at war. There are more far important questions to ask about these issues than about Snowden's high school transcripts.
But, it's no wonder the government would rather have the media focus on digging into Snowden's character when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is scrambling to gloss over prior congressional testimony denying that NSA sweeps up millions of Americans' communications with explanations like:
I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.
The American people should not be fooled by the smears thrown at Snowden. They are the same accusations used against Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Drake, and they are a transparent attempt to distract the media and the American public from the more significant issue: that the government has been secretly spying on its own citizens.