Mr. Pincus’s main criticism seems to be:
A real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published, made certain that they didn’t harm security and remained in the country to face the consequences of his actions.
Let’s go through that assertion by assertion.
A real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published…
Snowden isn’t a storyteller. He’s an analyst. He doesn’t know what pieces he needs to make the story understandable to the public. And he couldn’t hold a back-and-forth conversation with a reporter to determine that, because he certainly would have gotten caught. So, he took everything relevant to the allegations that he was making, and let someone who he deemed to be trustworthy who was a storyteller make the decision about what should be published. And such decisions were, indeed, made: as of 2013, only 1% of the leaked documents have been published.
A real whistleblower would have […] made certain that [the documents] didn’t harm security…
Well, let’s see how much the leak has affected national security…
Well, that was informative.
Oh, well, surely “harm” is an objective word that can’t be used to twist the narrative so that he couldn’t have released anything without “harming security”…
Snowden, defending himself during an exclusive NBC News interview with Brian Williams, said that the government had never shown “a single individual who’s been harmed in any way” by his disclosures.
But Michael McFaul, who left the ambassadorship earlier this year to teach at Stanford University, said that the revelations had damaged American diplomatic relationships with friendly countries who were upset by National Security Agency surveillance.
“That’s damage to the United States,” McFaul said. “If you’re a patriot, you don’t want to damage our relationships with our allies.”
And, finally…
A real whistleblower would have […] remained in the country to face the consequences of his actions.
When the Espionage Act forbids defendants from using “public interest” or “no harm done” as defenses, why should he return? His conviction is pretty much guaranteed; why should he be forced to choose imprisonment over exile? Why do his actions after the leak make him a “bad” whistleblower?
