Would You Hide Ed Snowden In Your Home?

Ever hear someone bitterly decrying "all Germans" as Nazis? I heard plenty of that growing up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn and later I heard plenty of it when I lived in Amsterdam. But there was always one response that could stop anyone going down that path in their tracks-- something about a family that took a Jew or a resistance fighter in and hid them from the Nazis in their home. The state of Israel has an honorific for such people: "Righteous Among the Nations." There are even rules and regulations governing who gets the term applied to them. For example, assistance has to be substantial and has to be given without any financial gain expected in return. The Righteous Among Nations get medals, a certificate of honor, honorary Israeli citizenship and, if they live in Israel, a pension and free health care for life. As of January 1 there were 25,271 such men and women from 45 different countries, including 553 from Germany. The largest numbers came from countries occupied by Germany: Poland (6,454), Holland (5,351), France (3,760), Ukraine (2,472) and Belgium (1,665). There was even one each in Japan (Sempo Sugihara), Vietnam (Paul Nguyen Cong Anh), Cuba (Amparo Pappo), Egypt (Mohamed Helmy) and El Salvador (Jose Arturo Castellanos).

Why bring this up? I was looking at the results of polling data that showed that today 50% of Germans view Ed Snowden as a hero and, more to the point, 35% of Germans would hide Snowden in their home to protect him from the U.S. This account of Laura Poitras showing the second Snowden interview comes from Michael Gurnow's book, The Edward Snowden Affair:

Though audiences were hard-pressed to believe the claim in June, Poitras lets Snowden repeat, “There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where communications can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed.” He lists the most important excised files as being, “The Verizon document,” because “it literally lays out they’re [members of the intelligence community] using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals and they’re applying it to the whole of society by basically subverting a corporate partnership through major telecommunications providers and they’re getting everyone’s calls, everyone’s call records and everyone’s internet traffic as well.” He then lists Boundless Informant. He pauses before labeling it “a global auditing system for the NSA’s intercept and collection system that lets us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress and to specific congressmen in response to previous inquiries about their surveillance activities.” He then adds PRISM, “which is a demonstration of how the U.S. government co-opts U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud [online storage sites], and even to just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”

Poitras has Snowden reiterate his motives for action before closing the interview: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can. Now I’ve watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy-driven way I could, which is to wait and allow [ ... ] our leadership, our figures, to sort of correct the excesses of government when we go too far. But as I’ve watched, I’ve seen that’s not occurring. In fact, we’re compounding the excesses of prior governments and making it worse and more invasive, and no one is really standing to stop it.”

The declaration that his motive was to take a personal stand and to set an example is one which the world had yet to hear. Snowden reveals that his initial goal was to clear his conscience and avoid hypocrisy by no longer supporting what he believed was unjustifiable. Snowden ceased being complicit in the mechanisms which he deemed were responsible for exploiting personal freedoms and removed himself from the advantages which that society offered.