I think he is.
And I think it's a completely legitimate question to ask.
This article -- The Effects of the Snowden Leak Aren't What He Intended -- asks the serious question about damages to the NSA caused by these leaks.
Yes, as even the lefty NPR concedes, Edward Snowden caused enormous damage to the NSA's ability to track terrorists through electronic communications. The NSA's work is perfectly legitimate in tracking known terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab in Somalia -- among the most deadly in the world, despite having been "beaten" and "driven out of their stronghold" as the experts have assured us.
EITHER the terrorists got so much information about how the NSA does its tracking from Snowden's leaks and moved to even more encrypted or secret means or even non-electronic means like couriers OR the NSA has been so preoccupied with lock-down and clean-up after this enormous Snowden damage that it was unable to keep tabs on these American jihadists. Awful.
If you don't want to hear this from me -- a long time and strenous critic of the anarchist hacking movement and all its criminality -- hear it from NPR, the lefty "progressive" radio station.
That is, this article was written before the tragic terrorist assault on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, in which at least 68 people were killed, hundreds injured and some still remain hostage.
But the premises articulated are now HUGELY relevant.
My comment (in moderation):
This article was written before the tragic Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Kenya. A number of the terrorists from the United States. They deliberately traveled to Africa to join Al-Shabaab. Yet they couldn't be tracked and stopped.
The NSA is a necessary and legitimate agency working under the law to track things like this. None of the revelations of Glenn Greenwald and others from Snowden have produced a single actual case of a violation of human rights or any evidence whatsoever that the NSA should not continue pursuing this legitimate mission.
They are not whistleblowers, but activists bent on an anarchist assault on America -- because they can. Revelations about this or that machine capacity is not a case. Arguments from FISA courts or internal debates only illustrate that the system works, not that it is corrupt. Those violations that are found are errors or are not indicative of a policy (like LOVEINT, which is about employee misbehaviour). Issues like the artificial constructs the DEA is forced to make in using NSA intel aren't cases or examples of violations either -- they are indicative of the interconnected world we live in, the very real hostile forces we face, from drug lords to terrorists, and the need to watch them effectively while preserving civil rights.
The press needs to be less giddy about Snowden and chasing the cool kids on this, they need to ask where the actual human cases of abuse are.
In the end, Snowden disrupted or even seriously crippled the ability of the NSA to do things like follow Al-Shabaab terrorists home grown in the US.
So we must seriously ask whether we have to thank Snowden for Westgate. His choice of residence also begs the question, as WikiLeaks has long been documented to collaborate with the Kremlin.
* * *
Now, isn't it possible that even if there had been no Edward Snowden, the US might have missed this one? After all, Al Shabaab has struck before.
Sure. But it did happen after Edward Snowden's leaks and for ever more, I will keep asking the question.
NPR did get one thing very wrong in this piece, however: that Snowden's effects were "unintended". Snowden worked very deliberately and likely for a longer time than we've been led to believe with hackers helping WikiLeaks -- itself essentially a hackers' organization which does indeed incite and help and reward the hacking of others even if itself pretends to keep a distance from actual coercive unauthorized use of computers -- which is what hacking is, it's not what hackers themselves claim, which is always innocent or so technical that only a tiny handful of criminals actually commit it as they define it.
Hacking is social hacking, it's taking part with Moscow in "active measures" to influence public opinion, it's any use of a system in ways the owners and operators did not intend. There are actually nerds to claim Snowden is "not a hacker" because he "had authorized use". Bullshit. He did not have authorization *to leak files to the public and to the enemy* duh.
Anyone who simply reads Assange's writings -- and you can read the essence of his thinking in his book published with Jacob Appelbaum called Cypherpunks -- will instantly grasp that he wishes to overthrow not only governments, but the Internet itself, as he sees it as too dependent on "neoliberal" (i.e. capitalist) structures like businesses and banks.
And they will realize if they simply read what he writes that far from reforming the US government, or making the NSA merely refine its civil liberties practices, Assange and his comrades want to destroy these institutions of a liberal democracy society and replace it with revolutionary huntas run by hackers. They do mean harm and therefore the results are not accidental.
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