Edward Snowden"The Unlikely James Bond"

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EDWARD SNOWDEN: “THE UNLIKELY JAMES BOND”
By Alan L. Chrisman
It’s been over a year now since Edward Snowden fled with thousands of copied U.S.
government files. The debate is still on whether he is a whistleblower or has committed
espionage. Recently there have been several articles and books about just how he did it and
possibly his motivations.
Vanity Fair magazine in their May issue had a long well-researched article with the timeline and
his background. Snowden certainly seems like an unlikely James Bond, although the company
who produced the James Bond films has announced they will make a film about him. But it
sometimes does read like a cloak-and-dagger narrative, with encrypted messages, code names
and a secret rendezvous with only the few journalists he trusted. One of these is Glenn
Greenwald, who’s an American living in Brazil but working for The Guardian newspaper, who
has recently released his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and The U.S.
Surveillance State. Luke Harding’s earlier book, The Snowden Files, provides interesting
information as well.
As I said, Snowden is an unlikely spy. He actually comes from a long history of military men and
both his father and grandfather were in the Coast Guard. Also Snowden was only a high school
drop-out and mainly self-educated on computers, although he took some advanced community
college courses. But this 20-something, computer geek got hired by the U.S. government and
received security clearances. U.S intelligence services budgets ballooned, reacting to 9/11, and
they hired thousands of computer workers, mostly contracted through private companies that
became a billions-of-dollars government gravy train. At first, Snowden was hired as a basic
computer technician, but later part of his job was to find flaws within the system to prevent
foreign hackers. But when he suggested changes, this conservative but bright young man, felt
ignored by his supervisors, which may have been part of a personal motivation for doing what
he did. He began to have reservations about the whole U.S. government spying system,
gathering massive amounts of information even on its own citizens. He saw what had
happened to several whistleblowers before him, some charged under an out-dated Espionage
Act of 1917.
On May 17, 2013 Edward Snowden left without telling his family, or even his girlfriend (who
seemed to be just the opposite of this quiet computer nerd; she a free spirit, often posting half-
dressed photos). He flew to Hong Kong alone and found himself holed up in a Hong Kong hotel
room, purposely signed in under his own credit card, so he wasn’t working for a foreign power,
and afraid he could be tracked down at any time. There he met with the only three journalists
he trusted, including Greenwald, warning them not to bring in their cellphones, because he told
them the government could even hack in through their cellphones and use them as a
microphone. They noticed that whenever Snowden did have to leave his hotel room, he had
placed a glass of water and a napkin near the door to tell if someone had entered while he was
away, a trick right out of an old spy movie.
He hoped to possibly seek asylum in Iceland, or Ecuador. That other most prominent
whistleblower, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, was in exile in Ecuador’s embassy in London. But
Snowden knew he had to get out of Hong Kong, and the U.S. would soon revoke his passport.
Amazingly, there was a typo error on his detention form, and he managed to slip by at the Hong
Kong airport. Also the Hong Kong government evidently, not wanting to get in the middle of
China and the U.S., had decided they just wanted rid of him. Assange (although he was not that
happy that Snowden would soon be eclipsing him as the latest whistleblower media darling)
sent one of his assistants and his rumoured girlfriend, to accompany Snowden. They boarded a
flight to Moscow with a route through Cuba to Ecuador orat least that was to be his plan.
But as we know, he got stranded in Russia where he is still, hoping to one day, to be accepted
by another country (or who knows, even work out a deal with a future U.S. administration). He
now finds himself, ironically, a guest of Putin, not exactly known as a respecter of human rights
and opponent of the West, so some have accused Snowden of treason. But Snowden
maintains that although he escaped with his laptops, he actually didn’t leave Hong Kong, with
the data, but has entrusted those files to those few reporters he trusted and their outlets, like
The Guardian, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. So far, they have published only
small parts of that information (supposedly he copied perhaps upward of 50,000 to 200,000
files), which has had earthquake reverberations, not only in the security areas but in
everybody’s daily lives. For we now know that the government is listening in to all of us, not
just supposed threats. At one time the N.S.A. had wanted all phones, computers and devices
sold, to contain a secret chip so the government could eavesdrop. It had been rejected, but
they had found other ways to do it since, Snowden revealed. Even meta data can reveal much
more about us than we realized. Snowden said that with as little as someone’s e-mail that he
and the N.S.A. could hack into anyone in the world. The Obama administration had to admit
they had tapped into even allies like Germany’s Merkel.
There is no such a thing as privacy anymore. Big Brother is already here. The Canadian spy
agency, CSIS was reportedly listening in to WiFi at some Canadian airports and is sharing all
kinds of information with the U.S. It was bad enough that corporations and search engines
were recording our every click and selling it to commercial interests, but now our phone
conversations and electronic messages are potentially being monitored as well and by our own
governments. There are especially whole younger generations for whom this new media has
become ubiquitous and dependent on, without perhaps even thinking about what once was
private. But as I said, all of us must now be on guard. In Julia Angwin’s new book, Dragnet
Nation, she advises us to use 30 to 40 characters for our passwords and even cover names for
our e-mail. What’s it going to be like in the coming age of thumbprint and facial recognition
and drone technologies, which hackers are learning to invade as fast as they are being
invented? Snowden’s journalists have hinted that what he has given them and they’ve released
so far is only but the tip of the iceberg and there are more possible shock waves to come. Yes,
Edward Snowden is an unlikely James Bond but we owe him a large debt of gratitude for
making us aware of what we’re each going to have to deal with , whether we all agree with his
motives or not. It should make an interesting film. And no doubt, this story will continue to
unfold with ramifications for all of us.



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