Comment

Civil Liberties Hero Edward Snowden Commits Massive Civil Liberties Violation

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AntonSirius7/06/2014 11:09:34 am PDT

Benjamin Wittes over at Lawfare had the same reaction:

Finally, I want to say a word here about the ethics of this leak. Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls. They are subject to strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the Taliban don’t have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy price. Yes, the Post has kept personal identifying details from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden did not keep personal identifying details from the Post. He basically outed thousands of people—innocent and not—and left them to the tender mercies of journalists. This is itself a huge civil liberties violation. And we should talk about it as such. I suspect, alas, that we won’t.