He made my job harder and most of my military colleagues hated him. But he did the right thing.
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I
was an active duty Marine working in signals intelligence in 2013
when Edward Snowdenexposed the mass surveillance programs of theNational
Security Agency. Snowden’s alleged espionage had a lasting effect both
on my work and on my attitude toward it.
As
a cryptologic linguist and intelligence analyst, my day-to-day
activities were directly compromised when I was suddenly unable to use
certain methods and tools due to the leak. Not only that, Snowden’s
action created a moral dilemma for me as a member of the intelligence
community. I began questioning the morality of my work. If the public
was outraged by what Snowden leaked, will they be outraged by how the
U.S. is fighting terrorism?
The
Marine Corps is an organization brimming with intense patriotism, and
Snowden’s leak undoubtedly made the job of all intelligence personnel
more difficult. He instantly became a hated enemy to the majority of the
intelligence community. It was not uncommon to hear the sarcastic
comment “thanks Snowden” somewhere in the office on any given day.
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Unlike
in the rest of the country, there was no controversy about whether
Snowden was a hero or a traitor; blatant treason was how most military
members viewed what he did. I believe that we need people like Snowden
to keep our government in check. But any disagreement on my part would
have put my own security clearance at risk, so I kept my unpopular
opinion to myself.
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Snowden,
speaking Thursday to
the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics in a virtual webcast,
called his release of documents a public service and compared it to
Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience. Yet it seems that Snowden’s disclosures have done little to affect the NSA.
Mass
surveillance, the monitoring of an entire population by governments,
has seen wild growth in the USA since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. By
2013, NSA had built what is
likely the largest domestic intelligence apparatus in history.
By
2015, the agency had far more domestic data than it could use. For more
than a decade, the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens, infringing
upon their rights in the name of national security.
The
response from proponents of mass surveillance has been some variation
of the idea that we need mass surveillance to fight terrorism; that by
weakening the NSA’s surveillance abilities, we are letting the
terrorists win. When the Senate passed theUSA Freedom Act, which was to
end bulk collection of domestic data,
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill “a resounding victory for those who currently plotted against our homeland.”
In
the three years since Snowden’s leak, government agencies appear to
have grown more brazen than ever in their lack of respect for our
constitutional right to privacy. The NSA has been able to continue and
even
increase its surveillance efforts with little backlash from the public. In fact, the
Pew Research Center found in
December that only 28% of Americans were worried that anti-terror
policies had gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Twice as many
— 56% — were concerned that the government hadn’t gone far enough to
protect the country.
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But
this doesn’t mean that the NSA should be allowed free rein, or that we
can rely on the NSA to keep itself in check. This is an organization
with a history of privacy rights infringement, best known for its
secrecy. There’s even more reason now for unease.
Historically,
the excuse of national security has led to loss of basic human rights
within a clearly defined wartime period. That is not the case with
today’s war on terror. There is no conventional force; unlike previous
wars, the enemy is not one race, at one location, with one goal. We
cannot define how, when, or whether victory will even be achieved. That
means the relinquishment of privacy for the sake of national security is
especially dangerous for this conflict; our loss of privacy rights
could extend for an unknown amount of time.
We
must not falsely be convinced that our right to privacy is less
important than national security. If we continue to accept our
government’s reasons for domestic mass surveillance, the United States
will become reminiscent of George Orwell’s
1984. Domestic mass surveillance is not the solution to ending terrorism, and it never will be.
Dan
R. Sendik, a computer science student at Columbia University, spent
five years in the Marine Corps as a signals intelligence analyst
handling highly classified information.
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