Snowden on NBC complicates matters

Can one single, hour-long news special change a person’s mind about Edward Snowden? Is it possible to go from thinking of him as a traitor to seeing him as a patriot, or vice versa?

I don’t know, but his eloquence, his reasoning and what seemed at times like meticulously scripted and greatly thought-out responses were powerful, and had the mesmerizing effort of tapping into that sweet spot of each and every Constitutional literalist in the country.

Yet there were moments that caused a double-take, moments that cemented “traitor” in my mind, just as I was convinced “patriot” in my heart.
Regardless, that was one hell of a piece of journalism Wednesday night by NBC and a dynamite interview by Brian Williams.

Snowden sat down for his first American interview from Moscow, where he is exiled and living one year of temporary amnesty courtesy of the Russian government as he evades criminal espionage charges from the United States for the hundreds of thousands of classified documents he stole and leaked to the media.

Snowden shared with the world the wide-ranging and specific details on a vast spying network that saw National Security Administration and Central Intelligence Agency personnel tapping the phones of our allies, peering into the private conversations of U.S. citizens on American soil, going through our Internet traffic and much, much more.

Of course, it was all done in the name of security, many of these personal incursions justified by the Patriot Act and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that kicked off this new age of surveillance.

I had lukewarmly leaned toward the idea that Snowden was doing more harm than good in many ways, alerting nations, both friendly and enemy, of our tactics and the depth of our surveillance programs.

And when he all but declared himself a legitimate spy during the interview, talking about his CIA and NSA training, and the government confirming he had at some juncture jumped through the psychological hoops necessary to become a spy, I said to myself: “Traitor!”

The idea that he either had or was about to take an oath to be entrusted on America’s behalf with critical and sensitive information meant to help protect us made his crimes far worse than some high-level defense contractor finding the gumption to stand up against perceived tyranny.

This took it to a different level. It made him more guilty, if that’s even possible.

Then I listened to him; really listened to him. And his words hit me in that place, at that gut level.

Through that exacting monotone and those pauses you could drive a truck between, through that insistence that he would not take a long prison sentence, through his tendency to seem like he was overstating key points even though U.S. officials time and again confirmed small seeds of his larger yarn, you could feel his conviction. You could see that he believed what he was doing was in the best interest of the American people.

Is he, in fact, a patriot?

“Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the — the violations of and encroachments of adversaries,” Snowden said. “And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies. They can be officials who, you know, need a little bit more accountability. They can be mistakes of government and — and simple overreach and — and things that — that should never have been tried, or — or that went wrong.”

He calmly explained, how like so many of us after 9/11, the inclination was to serve, to pitch in, to help the government protect us.

Yet did granting the government unprecedented authority to “protect us” create a monster? Did allowing ourselves to sacrifice some of our rights and privacies for the greater good ignite a historic overreach of executive power? Were the sophisticated weapons of espionage turned on us before we ever knew what was happening?

Seems like it. And while many of us have known this for a long time, Snowden brought it to light to a wider audience. On Wednesday night, he and NBC brought it home further, in a more human way than ever before, tapping into that idea of what it means to be American and to live, die and be free.

In the end, preconceived notions are hard to defy. If you thought Snowden was a patriot or a traitor before, the interview likely did not change that opinion greatly. But if you were on the fence, like me, it just made the conversation both more complicated and heartfelt at the same time.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, May 30, 2014.