WASHINGTON — For an international fugitive hiding out in Russia from American espionage charges, Edward J. Snowden gets around.
May has been another month of virtual globe-hopping for Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, with video appearances so far at Princeton and in a “distinguished speakers” series at Stanford and at conferences in Norway and Australia. Before the month is out, he is scheduled to speak by video to audiences in Italy, and also in Ecuador, where there will be a screening of “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary about him.
But
there have been far more consequential victories for Mr. Snowden’s
cause two years after he flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong carrying laptops
loaded with N.S.A. secrets.
Two weeks ago, a federal appeals court ruled
that the first N.S.A. program he disclosed, which collects the phone
call records of millions of Americans, is illegal. Last week, the House
of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to transform the program
by keeping the bulk phone records out of government hands, a change
President Obama has endorsed and the Senate is now debating. And Apple
and Google have angered the F.B.I. by stepping up encryption, including
on smartphones, to scramble communications and protect customers from
the kind of government surveillance Mr. Snowden exposed.
The
fallout has been deeply satisfying to Mr. Snowden, who at first feared
that his revelations might be ignored, said Ben Wizner, an American
Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents him. But the debate about
Mr. Snowden is far from over.
“His
life is very, very rich and full,” Mr. Wizner said, eager to refute
predictions by Mr. Snowden’s critics in 2013 that he would end up in
bitter obscurity in Russia. “What a remarkable public citizen he’s
become. How fitting that he has been able to use technology to defeat
exile and participate in the debate he started.”
American
intelligence officials tell a different story about the saga that began
on May 20, 2013, the day Mr. Snowden flew to Hong Kong. Mr. Snowden’s
decision to leak hundreds of thousands of highly classified N.S.A.
documents to selected reporters still prompts fury from many in the
Obama administration, who say his revelations taught terrorists and
other adversaries how to dodge the agency’s eavesdropping. They note
that his disclosures, some of which were printed in The New York Times,
went far beyond the phone records collection, touching on many programs
that target foreign countries and do not involve Americans’ privacy.
“The
only debate we’re really having in the U.S. is about the very first
document that Snowden produced,” said Stewart A. Baker, a former N.S.A.
general counsel and outspoken critic of the leaks, referring to the
secret court order authorizing the phone records program. “The rest of
the documents have been used as a kind of intelligence porn for the rest
of the world — ‘Oooh, look at what N.S.A. is doing.’ ”
In
a new memoir, Michael J. Morell, former deputy director and acting
director of the C.I.A., expresses the dark view of many intelligence
veterans, even blaming Mr. Snowden’s leaks for empowering the Islamic
State extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
“ISIS
was one of the terrorist groups that learned from Snowden, and it is
clear his actions played a role in the rise of ISIS,” Mr. Morell writes
in “The Great War of Our Time,” offering no elaboration. “In short,
Snowden has made the United States and our allies considerably less
safe. I do not say this lightly: Americans may well die at the hands of
terrorists because of Edward Snowden’s actions.”
Given
such assessments, prosecutors have shown no inclination to offer Mr.
Snowden a plea bargain he would accept. The Russian government granted
him a three-year residency last summer, and he has no obvious prospect
of leaving any time soon. Even if Mr. Snowden acquired some kind of
travel documents — the United States has revoked his passport and he is
not a citizen of Russia, so he has no Russian passport — he would face a
high risk of arrest in any other country and a return to the United
States for trial.
Some
Russian commentators have remarked on the paradox of Mr. Snowden’s
calls for liberty and privacy from President Vladimir V. Putin’s
increasingly authoritarian country.
“All
these months he’s been pretending successfully he was not in Russia,
but just somewhere, in some limbo,” Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who
runs an investigative website covering Russian intelligence, said in an
email. Mr. Snowden has found asylum, he added, “in a country which is on
a crusade against Internet freedoms.”
Mr.
Snowden’s main source of income, his lawyer said, is speaking fees,
which have sometimes exceeded $10,000 for an appearance. His American
girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who represented him at the Academy Awards
ceremony in February, has joined him in Moscow.
But
Mr. Snowden’s standing, if complicated, is still a far cry from what it
was after he first went public from Hong Kong in June 2013 as the
source of the leaked N.S.A. archive. In Congress and on cable television
at that time, there was much talk of treason, suggestions that Mr.
Snowden must be an agent of Russia or China and even calls for killing
him with a drone strike.
To
date, there has been no evidence that Mr. Snowden took the N.S.A. data
on behalf of any other country or shared it except with journalists.
(Mr. Morell, the former C.I.A. official, says he believes that Mr.
Snowden would have rebuffed any offers from Russia or China, “given his
mind-set and his clear dislike for intelligence services of any
stripe.”)
And
he has proved a far more lasting draw than many predicted. His gaunt
visage, with the shaggy haircut, stylish glasses and thin beard, has
appeared on T-shirts and posters worldwide.
He
was edged out by Pope Francis as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for
2013, and a campaign on Facebook and by Norwegian politicians to put
him forward for the Nobel Peace Prize fell short. But he has given a
hip, young face to the abstract anxiety shared by many people in the
United States and beyond about the menace posed by government snooping
when it is fully empowered by technology.
At
Princeton this month, the director of the university’s program in law
and public affairs, Kim Lane Scheppele, introduced Mr. Snowden to a
crowd that filled a large auditorium and two overflow rooms. She
acknowledged that it was unusual for a program on law to feature as
speaker someone facing serious criminal charges.
“But
the very size of this audience today,” she said, “indicates that Edward
Snowden has done something very important, by disclosing information
that alerted the public to what was being done in our name.”
Then
the huge, projected image of Mr. Snowden himself loomed over the stage.
He laughed sheepishly, muttering about looking like Big Brother.
The
next week, he spoke to the Nordic Media Festival in Bergen, Norway, a
day after the court ruled against the N.S.A.’s phone data program. “This
being struck down is really a radical sea change in the level of
resistance that the United States government has faced thus far,” Mr.
Snowden said, clearly excited. He predicted a ripple effect far beyond
that program, saying, “It will affect every other mass surveillance
program in the United States going forward.”
Last Friday, at Stanford, he fielded the inevitable question: Is he a hero or a traitor?
“It’s
not about me,” he insisted. “It’s about us. I’m not a hero. I’m not a
traitor. I’m an ordinary American like anyone else in the room.”
But he was not in that room in California, and he spoke a little wistfully about that.
“If
the opportunity was presented, I would of course come home,” he said.
“Because that’s where I live. That’s where my family is.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/world/europe/snowden-sees-some-victories-from-a-distance.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/world/europe/snowden-sees-some-victories-from-a-distance.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
