Ales Bialiatski waves from behind prison bars. Photo by Frontline.
Edward Snowden, the anarchist hacker who conspired with WikiLeaks to assault US intelligence and then fled to Russia as a defector, is on the short list to win the Sakharov Prize given annually by the European Parliament.
He does not deserve this prize because he has not used peaceful human rights methods but instead has used coercive hacking; Sakharov by contrast never harmed national security or leaked files but used moral witness through his writings as a dissident and legislative action in parliament.
The other two candidates on the short list are Ales Bialiatski, the Belarusian human rights defender and leader of Viasna (Spring), the human rights group, and Malala, the Pakistani girl who challenged the Taliban over girls' education and was shot by them.
Of course Malala is an eminently qualified candidate for this prize and I'd be happy if she got it because she represents the fight for intellectual freedom, knowledge and human rights that Sakharov embodied.
I actually don't think she's really under consideration, however, because I think Amnesty International, by giving her their annual prize just now, has essentially undercut the parliament -- and probably with some connivance. In part, Amnesty, which is nothing like the once proud and effective organization it was in the 1970s and 1980s when it focused on prisoners of conscience, is doing some reputational-laundering here -- over Gita-Gate -- their firing of their gender advisor, Gita Sahgal, who spoke out against their terrible policy of giving jihadists a pass.
So let me concentrate on the other two contenders.
Snowden, as you would have gathered if you read my other blog Wired State, does not deserve this prize because he betrayed his country, broke his professional oath, and attacked and hacked and exposed a liberal democratic state under the rule of law that in fact has many other avenues for expressing minority criticism of this type.
Efforts to make Snowden into a "whistleblower" just haven't stuck in America, whatever the fashion in Germany (this nomination is coming from the German Greens and other leftists). Because even people who think he "raised legitimate issues" (I don't ) are made very queasy by his running to Russia and China with his files.
The claims that America blocked his exits to Latin America just don't wash when you consider his leaks were long-planned, his contacts with radical activist journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras were many months in the making, and he even quit one job and took another to be able to hack better -- and in my view, hack to order -- getting the geek's special wonky stuff like the alleged undermining of algorithms to appeal to nerds in and out of government -- and using a specific wish-list or perhaps simply the list of failed litigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, i.e. on Verizon metadata.
He could have flown to Brazil or Ecuador at the get-go, with Greenwald, and given his press conferences there. No one has ever been able to adequately explain why he didn't. Despite the spewing of insults against British intelligence experts, Greenwald just can't persuade us that the Chinese and Russians don't have either files or confessions or some useful intelligence from Snowden.
Former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden has said that Snowden can't be called a whistleblower because he hasn't shown anything wrong.
I put it a different way: human rights groups who have blessed him as a human rights activist have lost their way and their moral compass in celebrating criminality here and adopting a Bolshevik "end justifies the means" credo -- indeed, they cannot show a single case where a single real human being's rights were violated. Instead, they can only show hysterical hypotheticals.
I knew Andrei Sakharov in the 1980s and visited him and his wife Elena Bonner a number of times and helped them with their political prisoners' list. I translated various documents over the years and when Sakharov came to the United States, I was among the human rights activists who met with him and took part in human rights meetings with him.
The chief reason why Andrei Dmitrievich could never be compared with Snowden is because he never betrayed his country. He never leaked secrets and certainly never stole files.
All of his activity was legal and open and grounded in human rights -- not the coerciveness of hacking and "direct action".
Sakharov, as the inventor of the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union, certainly knew secrets. But he was a person of honour and took his obligations seriously and was never accused of leaking any secrets even by the morally bankrupt Soviet Union.
While he was in the US, there were certainly military men waiting in the wings who would have been happy to discuss these topics with him - to the consternation of the Reagan Administration, he opposed Star Wars and to the annoyance of various "peace" scientists he approved of MX missiles -- but he did not have such meetings. He made it clear that he could be trusted regarding his own country's defense, whatever his critique of its human rights practices; indeed, that was why Gorbachev invited him to return from exile in Gorky and continue his "patriotic work" as Gorbachev described it at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. And it was also why he was able to get an exit visa -- still required by the Soviet regime at that time -- to visit America.
Sakharov had a request of Gorbachev, nonetheless when they had their famous phone call. His friend Anatoly Marchenko had just died after a prolonged hunger strike to call attention to the poor conditions in labour camp -- much as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has today in her Mordovian camp. He urged that Gorbachev release all the prisoners of conscience at that time -- hundreds -- on the very list I mentioned.
Marchenko had been beaten and mistreated and transferred to another prison to further punish him and silence his protests -- he died demanding the full release of political prisoners that Gorbachev had only partially started at that time.
Sakharov had cases; he raised them. He did not leak or steal; he used the human rights method of peaceful, lawful actions.
By contrast, Snowden "started a conversation" about sweeping generalizations with a grandstand and an anarchist stunt, a "propaganda of the deed" that so far seems primarily about bringing to power a small band of radical anarchists who demand total encryption -- and lack of accountability -- for themselves, and maximum transparency for everyone else.
Sakharov was elected to the Soviet parliament; no one elected Snowden.
Sakharov worked modestly and slowly but morally by trying to change laws and practices, as frustrating as it was. Snowden arrogantly cut ethical corners and acted rapidly by committing what most people do recognize is a in fact a crime.
I could explain much more, but I fear that the "treason chic" about which Jamie Kirchick has written so compellingly has completely gripped people's minds -- one typical German woman I have debated on Twitter has no interest in visiting Russia or hearing about its many problems or explaining why WikiLeaks never leaks anything from Russia, but is endlessly and frightfully obsessed about what she sees as some kind of American surveillance state out to get her personally. Not surprisingly, this young woman was ignorant that some of the terrorists who committed the mass crime against humanity on 9/11 in New York thrived in Hamburg for a time...
Richard Lourie, a translator of Sakharov, implies Sakharov would back Snowden because generally, he would chose the person who represented "openness of government" or "open society".
But hackers can't claim to be denizens of the open society when they encrypt themselves totally to hide their anarchist crimes and rip away the protections of legitimate institutions in a democratic society through force.
Sakharov is dead and no one can speak for him on this question -- indeed, his followers are divided about Snowden. But I can't believe Sakharov would chose the person who maniacally defied reasonable rules for intelligence operations using radical revolutionary methods rather than the lawful methods of the human rights movement -- and leave behind the humble man who simply took European values seriously. I just can't.
So meanwhile, there's Ales Bialiatski, a man of exemplary dedication now in a grim Belarusian prison who I have also met a number of times in Belarus or at international conferences such as the OSCE Human Dimension Meeting.
Belarus is overshadowed by many other more compelling human rights dramas in the world such as in Syria, but like Syria, it shares an enabler -- Russia -- and Europeans are reluctant to tackle the Kremlin, upon whom they depend for natural gas, which is why Belarus continues to fester.
What's most disgusting about Bialiatski's case isn't even Lukashenka -- the last dictator of Europe is a known quantity.
It's the two EU members who collaborated with Belarus to jail Bialiatski.
When the Belarusian government demanded information about Bialiatski's bank accounts for his human rights group abroad -- where they had to be because independent human rights work is persecuted in Belarus --- both Lithuania and Poland shamefully complied and set up Bialiatski to be falsely charged with "tax evasion" -- which was preposterous because he ran a legitimate non-profit organization that had never been found to be engaged in any unlawful activity in the countries abroad where he was forced to work outside of Belarus.
Later, both Vilnius and Warsaw apologized for this awful error that cost Bialiatski his freedom, but it was too late. They never should have had such automatic cooperation with a dictator in the first place, of course, and they should have shielded human rights people whom they welcomed in their country. They didn't.
And that's why the European Parliament needs to give Bialiatski this prize -- because of their own shame in failing a man who lived for European values -- and in resistance to the Kremlin, the same oppressor of Sakharov.
They must not give the prize to a hacker who has made common cause with a persecutor of numerous human rights advocates, Vladimir Putin.
I would support Bialiatski because (a) he's in prison in Belarus; (b) he's a non-violent opposition figure; (c) he's imprisoned on trumped-up charges.
There's little doubt the tax evasion charge against Bialiatski was concocted to downgrade him to a common criminal. He is in fact a non-violent political prisoner.
Psychologically, (a) is the most important to me: other things equal, I will always support a prisoner over a free person.
Posted by: Alex K. | October 08, 2013 at 02:40 AM
Nice job. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis. Snowden is no champion of freedom of thought, if words still have meanings. Observe the spectacle of American intellectuals (from both the left and the left's new pals, the libertarians) cheering on Russia's current strongman, Vladimir Putin. Do they really love Putin? Probably not. But libertarians loathe President Obama with an all-consuming, corrosive, blinding hatred, and Putin, in their eyes, made Obama look weak, while aiding and abetting the new libertarian hero, Snowden. So much for libertarians' credibility (such as it is).
Speaking of western intellectuals, I thought I would take this opportunity to place an excerpt from Harrison Salisbury's review of Marchenko's "My Testimony" (New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1970). Salisbury at that time was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times. He could be described as a liberal intellectual.
Marchenko's book (he writes) is "a melodramatic account of his imprisonment. It is badly written, splotched with purple rhetoric, oozes with self-pity and tries quite vainly to equate Marchenko's experiences with the blinding terror of Stalin's days. All Marchenko succeeds in doing is to bore us."
Salisbury, the western intellectual, was "bored" with the bloody crimes of the post-Stalin U.S.S.R., in much the same way that contemporary Americans are bored with events outside their own comfy borders.
Posted by: Kizone Kaprow | October 22, 2013 at 03:08 PM
I may be wrong but I believe Marchenko was in prison for an umpteenth time when Salisbury committed his boredom to print. Marchenko did not enjoy much freedom in his adult life - it was all jail, prison, labor camp, exile. "...equate Marchenko's experiences with the blinding terror of Stalin's days." The terror machinery had been downsized radically but it has not been fully dismantled to this day. The commandant of the labor camp where Nadezhda T. of Pussy Riot was held until recently told her, "In matters of running the camp, I am a Stalinist."
Posted by: Alex K. | October 28, 2013 at 10:43 AM