Mission Probably Not Exactly Accomplished, But...

I've tended to view the Edward Snowden story with some skepticism because I do not suffer heroes gladly. The idea that someone ever goes completely out of their way to do a thing at great cost, without any thought to reward and ever mindful of possible retribution, hits me as bad code. As is often done at year-end, there is a kind of search for someone who has defined the year and possibly given us a narrative that explains where we are at this point in time. I'm not persuaded that what he did was exactly great, but as a person who very much spoke to what was happening in 2013--Snowden is your man.

I must wrestle a bit with the copy that became the title: "mission accomplished" is a phrase of two words that came to mean something rather different when they were uttered, 10 years ago, by a president making a ridiculous pose that was highly praised. In that instance, a figure abristle with the possibility of making history stood embellishing an untrue claim, and hammered home the cynicism of the regular lies with which his administration operated.

We are a decade later faced with a young idealist who came from out of the blue who presents us with possible hard truths that we might not be able to swallow entire, that promises us that while his job is done, and a very troubling one it was, the intelligence community's job is not. I expect, fear, and propose that it was possibly damaging. I also wonder if it wasn't necessary. The technological capacity to gather and archive data is vast. The necessary human ability to analyze it is finite. In the wrong hands, targeted data regarding a subject derived from sig int alone might be useless. I just recently did several minutes' long searches for info related to evangelical missionary work in Africa and also white supremicism. They might meet a metric for establishing what my interests are, but it might take humint to determine why I searched those subjects (although readers of my blog might get it at once). Otherwise I might find myself in the Christian militant skinhead bucket of potential watch-lists--just based on my recent reading.

Regardless of his motivations and methods, Edward Snowden raised necessary questions and caused endless systematic reconsideration within the intelligence community. And while a part of me has always been certain that the Powers That Be would pinpoint the mildly extralegal activities of Snowden's biggest worries and craft a very special law just to sanction whatever thing wide-awake people might balk at, fact is, I think the revelations might have caused a little change from compliant private communications network companies and US gov't officials who did not want to deal with this question.

I don't think I have to accept that he was all about just doing good, to have done some. I still say how he did it was hinky. But that, too, is kind of representative of the year we just had.