Sunset of Patriot Act shows messy US democracy superior to Russia’s managed farce

William Echols

The expiration of the US Patriot Act and ensuing political drama demonstrates that despite the histrionics of Russian state media, even a battered and limping democracy is infinitely preferable to a managed one.

At 12:01a.m. on the dot, the US government lost, at least in the interim, the right to collect the telephone records of US citizens in bulk. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also seen its powers to surveil curtailed, including extended wiretap powers for so called “lone wolf” terror suspects, as well as those who change phones.

The whole process has thrown Capitol Hill for a loop. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell had simply hoped to extend the Patriot Acts controversial provisions, which were passed in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

When the House of representatives voted 338-88 to do away with bulk sweeping collection of phone records, opting to replace it with a system to search telephone company databases on a case-by-case basis, McConnell successfully routed them by rallying the Senate to reject the the so-called USA Freedom Act. But when he attempted to temporarily extend the Patriot Act in its previous form, it was not a member of Obama’s Democratic party that threw a wrench in the works. Rather it was McConnell’s junior partner from Kentucky —Senator Rand Paul.

Paul, like Senate Majority leader McConnell, also opposed the USA Freedom Act, but not because he was trying to show off his national security bona fides. No, as a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, Paul rejected it because it did not go far enough in protecting US citizens’ fourth amendment rights. At least, that was the narrative he was selling.

“This is what we fought the revolution over. Are we going to so blithely go along and just take it? Well I’m not going to take it anymore,” Paul said in a passionate and lengthy appeal from the Senate floor.

Paul’s rousing soliloquy provided a moment when populist sentiment, presidential ambition, and genuine ideological commitment converged —a perfect storm of big stage politics.

And few within his own party were happy about it.

“We shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive, and we certainly should not be doing so based on a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of [former NSA contractor] Edward Snowden,” McConnell said.

Republican Senator Dan Coats from Indiana said that “going dark” or allowing the Patriot Act to expire “is a risk on American lives.”

Senate Republican and former presidential  hopeful John McCain went as far as to say that Paul had put his politic ambitions above national security.

“He obviously has a higher priority for his fundraising ambitions than for the security of the nation,” The senator from Arizona said.

Paul reacted harshly, even going so far as to accuse some within the US political establishment of secretly wanting “an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.”

Despite the heated rhetoric, McConnell, recognizing defeat, has cleared the way for a compromise vote later this week. It’s a move Paul himself admits he cannot stop.

But Paul does offer to put forward amendments that would further tighten up the USA Freedom Act (which he fears will merely make the US government “better at collecting our phone records”), or any compromise legislation that comes forward.

Whatever the outcome, Sunday’s dramatic showdown represents what the Guardian called “the first rollback of NSA [National Security Agency] surveillance since the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Act.” 

There are many (including the author) who believe the reformed surveillance regime will unlikely go far enough in returning America to a homeostasis where the balance between security and individual liberty are optimized. But Sunday’s showdown shows that the US system of representative democracy, while certainly having been weakened over the past several decades, is still robust enough to be reformed.

Be it sweeping surveillance, the militarization of police (or the interconnected war on drugs), wealth inequality, or the undue influence of big money in politics, the system remains reactive to change (albeit imperfectly). As the ongoing battle to legalize marijuana (and by extension end the drug war and resultant practice of mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses) shows, sometimes the federal government and powerful corporate lobbyists are unable to stop the popular will. They can trammel those efforts, yes, but scuttle them irrevocably, no.

The Republic may be distressed, but there is still room for correction, despite efforts from Washington’s authoritarian critics to show that  US-style democracy in irreparably in decline.

Thus, idealists and leftists  who have been suckered in by Kremlin propaganda efforts would be wise to keep one thing in mind: those who want you to sound the death knell for democracy don’t hope to reform it —they want it to die.

And no matter how apparently complex the methods, its pretentious pseudo-philosophical roots or penchant for muddying the waters or theatrical shows of hyper-complexity, their message is quite simple: Democracy is an illusion, the world is corrupt, nothing will ever change that so just allow us to continue stealing from our pre-ordained fiefdoms and accept the illusion of stability our authoritarianism grants you. One should also bare in mind that the Russian elite only believe this message to a degree. They want people in the West to believe it so that they’ll pressure their leadership to leave Moscow alone. They want Russians to believe so that they’ll remain cynical subjects, and not become empowered citizens. But where these same elite chose to park their money and their families cuts through all of the white noise. They can tell you everything they want to about a decadent West in decline. But it’s their lifestyle choices that bear witness to the truth.

The recent drama over the Patriotic Act, ultimately, provides the perfect foil for what makes America’s imperfect democracy infinitely superior to Russia’s ‘sovereign democracy’ —a hollow rebranding of authoritarianism.

Moscow, after all, seized on the strange circumstances that brought Snowden to Moscow nearly two year ago as a means of smearing Washington. Russian propaganda relentlessly hammered home the point that the US had essentially descended into a quasi-Stasi like state or whatever Orwellian cliche was handy. Washington has done itself few favors on this count. But the source and vehemence of the criticism was particularly rich, given the circumstances.

When asked how he felt about the Snowden revelations during his annual Q&A session in December 2013, Putin said he was jealous of Obama because “he can get away with it,” in reference to the NSA spying program.

As I wrote previously, the statement is patently absurd, given that Russia actually has its own system to intercept telephone, internet, and other forms of communication media called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM). Due to the nature of Russian propaganda, however, few Russian citizens know about it.

As the traumatized children of a totalitarian state that transmogrified into a barely functioning democracy (and then a fake one), Russians undoubtably believe there government is spying on them. They just don’t care to brush up on the details, or challenge it for that matter. Perhaps one of the greatest boons for the Kremlin regarding the NSA spying scandal, and the reason why Snowden became a regular component of prime time Russian viewing, is that many Russians were able to say to themselves “see, things are not any better over there in America.” 

This manner of thinking provides a boon to a deeply traumatized populace. Russians have become deeply disempowered by their system, despite their overwhelmingly consistent support for Putin. Knowing they cannot change anything, knowing they will not change anything, their resentment (and the cognitive dissonance between cultural hypermasculity and political emsaculation) pushes them for interpretations of the world that shows things cannot be any other way.

They want to be absolved of the crime, chaos and degradation that is rife in Russian society. Figures like Snowden allow them to do just that. But there is one problem with this black and white reductionism —the devil is in the details, and the details are legion.

Regarding SORM, Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and author of several books on Russian intelligence, told the now defunct Moscow News that “The Russian system is even more advanced [than the American one].”

In the run up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, Ron Deibert, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of Citizen Lab, similarly told the Guardian that SORM was like the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program “on steroids.”

“The scope and scale of Russian surveillance are similar to the disclosures about the US program but there are subtle differences to the regulations,” Deibert told the daily. “We know from Snowden’s disclosures that many of the checks were weak or sidestepped in the US, but in the Russian system permanent access for SORM is a requirement of building the infrastructure.”

So in a country which gives security services cart blanche to monitor domestic internet and telephone communications with zero governmental oversight and a compliant state media, that Russian media would lead the charge against the NSA spying is beyond disingenuous.

In the United States, for example, US citizens have potentially seen their data swept up in bulk collection efforts due to a loophole in Section 702 the of FISA Amendments Act of 2008: “Procedures For Targeting Certain Persons Outside The United States Other Than United States Persons.”

Without a doubt, it is troublesome to know that a US citizen’s email could get caught up in a bulk collection effort. But it pales in comparison to Russia, where eight government agencies can tap into analogous internet surveillance programs directly targeting its own citizenry with virtual impunity.

What’s more, Russia regularly employees its security services to spy on opposition figures, often capturing them in compromising situations which they themselves have orchestrated.

In 2010, for example, video footage allegedly showing three opposition figures having sex and/or doing cocaine with an amateur model known as ‘Moo-Moo’ was released in a calculated and coordinated fashion.

And yet when Snowden asked Putin whether Russia surveilled its citizens in masse during an annual call in show in April 2014,  Putin answered that Russian intelligence services were under the tight reign of “the state and society,” adding that they neither had the money nor the technical knowhow available in the US.

The US Embassy in Moscow would later tweet that Snowden would likely be interested to know that Russian law allows for the “control, storage and study of all data in the communication networks of the Russian Federation.”

But in Russia, there will be no talking heads on state TV putting Putin on blast for obviously lying. There are no firebrand members of a genuine opposition decrying Moscow’s blanket surveillance of its own citizenry [with the exception of one man forced into exile], nor the outrageous use of its intelligence services to not only spy on citizens opposed to the current regime, but to actually entrap them in compromising situations to destroy their credibility. There has and never will be a debate in the Duma on whether to roll back or eliminate SORM all together. Putin answers to no one, not his rubberstamp legislature, and not his citizenry. There are no checks and balances, no hope for internal reform, no pressure valves through which citizens can see their grievances redressed.

That’s why the Russian state media is so obsessed with so-called ‘Color Revolutions.’ In order to plunder the country to the fullest, Putin and his inner circle created a system where leaders are left with only one exit strategy from the Kremlin: leaving feet first.

And Sunday’s drama shows that despite all of the United States’ flaws, even imperfect systems can be objectively better, no matter the sophomoric attempts to employ post-modernism as a means of proving otherwise.

Meanwhile, Russia’s obsession with Ferguson, Baltimore and other manifestations of “afromaidans” have completely failed to understand (or blatantly misconstrued) the nature of protest in a democracy. Few people (if anyone) in America was actually attempting to overthrow the system. Rather, they were trying to make it live up to its promises.

The hashtag reads ‘Black Russia,’ a play on the now out of favor ‘New Russia.’

With the debate on NSA spying set to continue this week, no one can be sure of the outcome. the The lack of predictability, the lack of foregone conclusions, however, is a boon, and not a detriment to the country.

When faced with rocky waters, the US system still allows for the potential of changing course. Putin’s power vertical, in contrast, has left the nation on a rickety ship that can either steer an increasingly perilous course or go belly up. From the dark corner Putin has painted himself into, if a color revolution comes to pass, it will not be a US plot. Rather, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I spy a ‘f*** up’: Edward Snowden’s strange Moscow sojourn

William Echols

In a media landscape where talking heads reduce individuals to sinners and saints, NSA leaker Edward Snowden is equal parts savior and heretic. But the choices the 31-year-old “hacker”, “spy”, “traitor” and “patriot” made, and their subsequent fallout, are as convoluted as the strange life he leads in the shadow of the Kremlin.

Edward Snowden is easy to like. Affable, intelligent, soft-spoken, and brimming with that very specific form of American idealism, he is a spy cut from the cloth of the millennial generation. For those who grew up on the espionage novels of John le Carre, the image of the spy in a reversible mackintosh walking with cobblestone echoes is a familiar one. Rather than code breaking Cambridge cryptographers, spies were (seemingly) distinguished men of prodigious intelligence whose craft was contingent on pure observation and a mastery of human psychology.

But Snowden, with his tech-guy flair, collared shirts, and square-rimmed glasses, is a spy for the modern age; an age where wranglers, and not debonair men of mystery, rule the espionage roost.

Yes, for someone of his age cohort, give or take a few years in either direction, he is a spook, but a spook who walks, talks and speaks in a manner that is direct and familiar. And yet, there is also something in his genial but self-possessed manner that belies a deeper shrewdness. Often characterized as a low ranking analyst who was out of his depth, in a May 2014 interview with NBC, Snowden, with an air of unwavering confidence (some would call it arrogance), made it clear that it was folly to reduce him to a mere contractor.

“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” he said.

“Now, the government might deny these things. They might frame it in certain ways, and say, oh, well, you know, he’s a low-level analyst. But what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to use one position that I’ve had in a career, here or there, to distract from the totality of my experience.”

The unexplained Hong Kong flight 

In that same NBC interview, Snowden admitted he had never intended on ending up in Russia, saying it came about because the United States government decided to revoke his passport and “trap” him in a Moscow airport, where he had flown to from Hong Kong with the hopes of catching a flight to Cuba (and beyond).

That story was always an odd one. When Snowden first made revelations of massive NSA spying from a boutique hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong roughly one year prior, the defense of his decision to head to the quasi-city state was almost academic in nature.

Rather than debating the strength of the island’s English common law tradition, the likelihood of his extradition, or Beijing’s human right’s record, that proponents would sidestep the logistical issue in his destination was much more telling. When Snowden hoped onto a plane in Hawaii on May 20th with four laptops which gave him access to some of the US governments most highly classified information, was there ever a doubt he would not eventually be seeking asylum somewhere? Was there ever a question of seeking asylum in China? If the answer is yes to the former and no to the latter, the choice to fly to Hong Kong simply does not gel.

If it had always been his intention to head to Latin America (though countries such as Iceland were also floated at the time,) why not just go there? After all, one of his first contacts and primary advocates was Glen Greenwald, a one-time Guardian columnist who has lived and worked out of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil for years.

Of the 21 states where WikiLeaks activist Sarah Harrison sent asylum requests to while Snowden was holed up in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for over a month, six of those states, including Brazil, were in North or South America. Ecuador was one of two states he initially sent his application to (Iceland being the other.)

Hong Kong was alway a strange choice, and muddled justifications behind it as a dentition always fell flat, prompting a whole host of accusations. At first, he was accused of working for the Chinese. And not longer after Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia on August 1, 2013, a report surfaced in the independent Russian daily Kommersant claiming that the former NSA contractor had lived in the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong for several days.

Greenwald would later claim the story was “fabricated”, while  Anatoly Kucherena, an attorney who represents Snowden’s interests in the Russian Federation, also denied the reports. Kucherena, who took on Snowden’s temporary asylum case pro bono, is no stranger to Moscow’s elite and an avid supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also happens to serve on a board that oversees Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

Depending on one’s reading of the situation, it might come as no surprise that Kucherena would go on to represent former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich after he fled Ukraine in February 2014.

Torture proof? 

Snowden was always acutely aware (or at least ready to manage) claims he was working as a double agent.

Before his asylum case was settled in Russia, he assured former two-term republic Senator Gordon Humphrey that the information which had come into his possession could not be pried away under duress.

“Further, no intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China),” he wrote.

“You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.”

Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project (and whatever prejudices that might entail) , called Snowden’s immunity to torture claim “laughable.”

Foust, perhaps intentionally, was obfuscating the fact that Snowden did not  necessarily mean that he could withstand Rubber-hose cryptanalysis, but rather lacked the ability to decrypt the information  in his possession without the support of a third party.

Whatever the case, during a December 2014 Amnesty International event, Snowden said his security in Moscow “was great,” adding that he lived a “fairly normal life” and commuted on public transport.

Whether or not Moscow flipped Snowden is open to debate though claims that he had came from all the likely sources. Former CIA case officer and regular CNN guest Robert Baer, for example, believes Snowden might have “betrayed” his country while working as a communicator in Geneva from 2007 to 2009.

Others say that Snowden might have come into contact with Russian agents while attending a ‘security analyst and ethical hacker’ course in New Delhi in 2010.

India, after all, was once home to the largest presence of KGB operatives outside of the Soviet Union, having previously been described as “the model of KGB infiltration of a Third World (countries which were neither aligned with the West or the Soviet Union) government.” The claim, whatever the evidence, seems logical enough, right?

Putin’s unenviable ‘envy’ for Obama

That Snowden has be so widely assailed from people with deep ties to the US intelligence community should come as no surprise. Such speculation is interesting as an intellectual exercise, but is far more the product of deductive reasoning than any sort of fact finding mission. Anonymous sources and unsympathetic former US spooks are not in and of themselves enough to label Snowden as a traitor.

From a logical standpoint, that Snowden would be given shelter on Russian soil on anything other than a pro-bono basis seems highly unlikely. But what Russia would consider proper renumeration is anyone’s guess. After all, just the presence of Snowden in Russia is a big enough thumb in Obama’s eye to make make Putin crack a smile (and a knowing wink).

When asked how he felt about the Snowden revelations during his annual Q&A session in December 2013, Putin said he was jealous of Obama because “he can get away with it,” in reference to the NSA spying program.

The statement is patently absurd, of course, given that Russia actually has its own system to intercept telephone, internet, and other forms of communication media called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM).

Following the initial Snowden revelations, Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and author of several books on Russian intelligence, told the now defunct Moscow News that “The Russian system is even more advanced [than the American one].”

In the run up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, Ron Deibert, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of Citizen Lab, similarly told the Guardian that SORM was like the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program “on steroids.”

“The scope and scale of Russian surveillance are similar to the disclosures about the US program but there are subtle differences to the regulations,” Deibert told the daily. “We know from Snowden’s disclosures that many of the checks were weak or sidestepped in the US, but in the Russian system permanent access for SORM is a requirement of building the infrastructure.”

So in a country which gives security services cart blanche to monitor domestic internet and telephone communications with zero governmental oversight and a compliant state media, for Putin to say Obama is getting away with anything is beyond disingenuous.

In the United States, for example, US citizens have potentially seen their data swept up in bulk collection efforts due to a loophole in Section 702 the of FISA Amendments Act of 2008: “Procedures For Targeting Certain Persons Outside The United States Other Than United States Persons.”

Snowden said as much in a surreal, revelatory, at times juvenile and yet hard hitting interview with comedian John Oliver in Moscow earlier this month.

That a US citizen’s email or, in the case of Oliver, “dick pic”, could get caught up in a bulk collection effort is troublesome. But it pales in comparison to Russia, where eight government agencies can tap into analogous internet surveillance programs directly targeting its own citizenry with virtual impunity.

What’s more, Russia regularly employees its security services to spy on opposition figures, often capturing them in compromising situations which they themselves have orchestrated.

In 2010, for example, video footage allegedly showing three opposition figures having sex and/or doing cocaine with an amateur model known as ‘Moo-Moo’ was released in a calculated and coordinated fashion.

‘Moo-Moo’, otherwise known as Ekaterina Gerasimova, is believed to have slept with six politicians or journalists unsympathetic to the power vertical, including one time Newsweek editor Mikhail Fishman, who could allegedly be seen snorting cocaine while Gerasimov was seen walking naked behind him in leaked footage.

Viktor Shenderovich, a journalist and the script writer whose reputation and marriage took a serious blow as a result of another sex tape with Gerasimova, claimed “federal authorities” were behind the leak. Alexander Potkin, onetime leader of the far-right Movement Against Illegal Immigrants said it was proof that citizens had no “guarantee” of their private lives being protected.

And yet when Snowden asked Putin whether Russia surveilled its citizens in masse during an annual call in show in April 2014,  Putin answered that Russian intelligence services were under the tight reign of “the state and society,” adding that they neither had the money nor the technical knowhow available in the US.

The US Embassy in Moscow would later tweet that Snowden would likely be interested to know that Russian law allows for the “control, storage and study of all data in the communication networks of the Russian Federation.”

For anyone familiar with the Russian propaganda strategy of whataboutism, that Moscow could gain a sense of moral superiority on account of Snowden’s revelations, despite the fact that Russia’s leadership condones far more intrusive surveillance against it’s own citizenry, is a coup de theatre of epic proportions. Everything after all, is PR.

‘He’s clearly being exploited’

And how does Snowden feel about all of this? Well, if he is aware of it at all, his made for television question for Putin regarding mass surveillance will arguably be his first and last foray into Russian political matters (at least for domestic consumption) which doesn’t occur across a kitchen table. On the plus side, it also appears he won’t be forced to become a shill for the regime.

In an interview with Michael Weiss published in the Daily Beast on Monday, Soldatov said that Snowden has likely been relegated to only discussing NSA-related issues with American journalists as a condition of his temporary asylum. But Snowden’s apparent refusal to deal with Russian outlets, even state media ready to heap accolades on him, shows that he has likely struck some sort of a deal with Moscow, whereby he’ll never “be used by Russian propaganda.”

That does not mean, however, that he’s not being “used” for propaganda purposes.

“He’s clearly being exploited—after all, many repressive measures on the Internet in Russia were presented to Russians as a response to Snowden’s revelations,” Soldatov said.

“For instance, the legislation to relocate the servers of global platforms to Russia by September of this year, to make them available for the Russian secret services, was presented as a measure to assure the security of Russian citizens’ personal data.”

Soldatov says that Snowden’s insistence that he’s secure in Moscow belies the fact that he lives such a secretive life in Russia. This reality is further complicated by the fact that he did ask Putin, and only Putin, a veritably stage-managed question about surveillance within the Russian Federation.

“There is some problem with logic here,” Soldatov said. “For instance, I would understand if he says, ‘Look, I cannot comment on Russian surveillance, this is not my war.’ Instead, he asked his question about Russian surveillance. And he is not transparent. I just don’t get it.”

The way we…and Snowden get by 

Of course, those allowing for slightly more nuance, who neither need to crucify nor canonize the former NSA contractor, could easily see a solution to this conundrum. People redraw lines every day of their lives in order to survive. If one does not take a one drop of venom poisons the well logic, Snowden’s everyday existence in Moscow could be a see how far I can bend without breaking philosophy, with the Russian government equally testing their limits. After all, just because one side in this equation is infinitely more powerful than the other fails to account for one simple reality: Snowden’s mere existence in Moscow is better for both sides, even if a secret or word were never to be shared.

A year after his revelations, Snowden said if he ended up in chains at Guantanamo, he’d be okay with that. But there is no denying his flight to Moscow, and the propaganda value he provided to a quantifiably more repressive government than his own, tarnished his crusade.

Snowden need not have ended up in chains on strictly moral grounds, that is true. Daniel Ellsberg, who was charged in 1971 under the Espionage Act as well as for theft and conspiracy for copying the Pentagon Papers, himself said that comparing Snowden to him for leaving the country and seeking asylum rather than facing trial were being unfair.

“The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago,” he said.

Broadly speaking, Ellsberg is right, but contextually speaking, he is wrong.

If Snowden had made it to Iceland or even Ecuador, his position would be more or less unassailable. But if his decision to go to Hong Kong was a fluke, and his subsequent stranding in Moscow unfortunate, it’s ultimately on his head.

Ironically, between dick pic jokes, no one put Snowden on the ropes harder than John Oliver did.

Snowden made a decision to outsource the vetting of classified materials to journalists. The New York Times would subsequently fail to properly blur out the name of a NSA employee on a slide the paper published, which just so happened to outline the very legitimate surveillance target of Al-Qaeda in Mosul, Iraq.

Snowden himself admitted that there had been “f*** ups “in the way some of the information was handled. But his  admission was followed up by a justification that in journalism, “we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty.”

Oliver was not so forgiving.

“You’re giving documents with information that you know could be harmful which could get out there … We’re not even talking about bad faith, we’re talking about incompetence.”

Taking ownership of your f***ups 

The simple fact is, Snowden is at the top of the NSA leak chain of command, and is thus ultimately responsible for how it all plays out. Likewise, ending up in Moscow is also his f*** up, that is, unless he was actually a double agent, which, given the means by which he choose to release the information, he likely wasn’t. But if he is a patriot, he must also accept that any boost he’s provided to a hostile foreign government for the sake of confronting his own government’s misdeeds is on his shoulders. None of that undoes the good that Snowden’s done via the NSA leaks (though judging by the general insouciance of the US public, that good might be needlessly low.)

This reading of the situation is unlikely to satisfy his detractors in the US intelligence community who are still working out a portmanteau for traitor and defector. Nor will it find quarter among the likes of Glen Greenwald or Oliver Stone, who have a laser-like focus when it comes to what is good and what is bad in the world. That Snowden could be good and bad, that he could have tried to help his country in some ways and betrayed it in others, that he could have been selfless enough to speak out and give up his life in paradise but then selfish enough to give succor to Putin’s regime after his own missteps found him stranded in Moscow, and not Quito, is a position that few are willing to take.

Snowden has walked with far more silent footsteps through the streets of Moscow than Western spooks pounding out those cobblestone echoes during the height of the Cold War. And yet the trajectory of his flight and the velocity of his landing continue to reverberate throughout the world. Any normative valuation of his final impact is difficult to suss out, though it is unlikely to be an either/or proposition. But for those looking to beatify or damn the “hacker”, “spy”, “traitor” and “patriot, the lines have clearly been drawn in the sand.