Kevin Gosztola at FDL has written a fascinating piece on how Edward Snowden came to understand – by chance – the scope of the Bush administration's warrantless spying program.
It was a chance encounter with a classified document which set everything in motion:
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made the ultimate decision to become a whistleblower when he came across a classified 2009 inspector general’s report on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program during the administration of President George W. Bush. He read about the program and found it was illegal, according to an interview with New York Times reporter James Risen.
In the recently published interview, which took place in the past week, Snowden says during a “dirty word search,” which is what systems administrators do when checking the computer system “for things that should not be there in order to delete them and sanitize the system,” he discovered this report that was “too highly classified to be where it was.” He opened the document to be certain it did not belong and “curiosity prevailed.”
He read about the program that had been developed to operate outside the law and understood someone needed to act. “You can’t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have,” he said. Also, “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”
In the years that followed during his various contracting roles, Snowden copied and kept documents and files which chronicled what he considered to be grave surveillance abuses. However,
he hoped that the Obama administration would reverse such abuses, and believed in Obama's promise to turn away from Bush-era overreaches. Which is why he waited until after Obama's reelection before coming forward.
When it became clear, in 2013, that 'unconstitutional' spying was expanding under Obama, and not contracting, Snowden decided to come forward.
According to Snowden, he no longer has possession of the files, as it wouldn't be "in the public interest" for him to keep them. Nor has he given them to any foreign entity, as some have alleged.
Indeed, it appears the only people who now have the files are a select group of journalists, principally Glenn Greenwald, who just days ago announced that he was leaving The Guardian.
His departure may signal the release of much more difficult and revealing facts about the scope of U.S. spying.
Spying Snowden decided he needed to uncover in 2009.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, just out from Oneworld Publications.