Can The Edward Snowden Trickle Turn Into A Flood?
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If we accept that moral outrage is at work, then the US security apparatus is lumbered with a situation that is far from future-proof: it is both enormous and an at-least-sometimes practitioner of compromised ethics. You can maybe keep a secret in a small group. But where you have hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians working daily on dubious activity, sooner or later you are going to spring a leak.
The size of the US security apparatus is unknown, but The Washington Post in “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control” said it contained nearly 1,931 private companies working in 10,000 locations, employing millions (854,000 of whom hold top-secret security clearances.) Responding to the PRISM break, Chuck Hagel, Defense Secretary, has ordered a wide-ranging review of the Defense Department‘s reliance on private contractors, but the business model can’t change without doubling or trebling the size of the government, so it won’t change.
Size is compounded, ironically, by the share-ability of digital media. The same levers that allows the NSA to collect and store everyone’s private communications, routinely and forever, allows the morally scandalized NSA worker to distribute toxic policy documents to the public.
As things stand, Snowden’s fate hangs between gritted-teeth promises to bring him to justice, potentially under the US Espionage Act, and a fair degree of public outrage which may offer him some wiggle room. But whatever his outcome, the point is somewhere among the millions of ordinary people with ordinary Western values working in national security, expect the next scandalized citizen to be moving into place.
So here’s the potential future game changer: perhaps with a bit of courage-in-numbers, the leaks won’t come in ones, but in tens or hundreds.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamgordon/2013/06/12/edward-snowden/
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