Politically Liberal Law Professor Geoffrey R. Stone’s Harsh Condemnation of Edward Snowden — for Leaking the Government’s Large Scale Telephone Surveillance Program — Demonstrates What Happens When Smart and Ignorant People Get Caught Up in Logically Circular Thinking about Appropriate Government Employee or Contractor Behavior

11 June 2013

Not exactly a thoughtfully analyzed intellectual position

Here is what esteemed law Professor Geoffrey R. Stone wrote yesterday about the Government’s telephone metadata snooping and Edward Snowden's leaking of it:

[B]ased on what I know from the media thus far, [Edward] Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor, but he is most certainly a criminal who deserves serious punishment.

I say this as someone who believes strongly in government transparency, but even more strongly in the orderly rule of law.

Snowden knowingly accepted a position of trust in his relation to the government. He did not have to accept his job, but he did.

A clear condition of that job was his voluntary agreement not to disclose any classified information - that is, information the disclosure of which could reasonably endanger the security of the nation.

There is no reason on earth why an individual government employee should have the authority, on his own say so, to override the judgment of the elected representatives of the American people and to decide for the nation that classified information should be disclosed to friends and enemies alike. Such an act is a complete usurpation of the rule of law.

Professor Stone goes on to impugn Mr. Snowden for his “ill-informed, arrogant and amateurish judgment.”

Professor Stone is not alone in coming to that quickly negative rendered judgment

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen joined a host of other pundits in condemning Mr. Snowden, when he wrote:

Everything about Edward Snowden is ridiculously cinematic.

He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic.

He jettisoned a girlfriend, a career and, undoubtedly, his personal freedom to expose programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever Googled anything.

History will not record him as “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers.” History is more likely to forget him.

Problems with the Stone-Cohen (and fellow travelers’) position

Let me grant, up front, that Mr. Snowden may have a personality screw or two loose.

Certainly, his self-immolation into pariah-hood seems an odd way to cope with a situation that he might have been able to finesse with less self-harm and almost equally beneficial results.

On the other hand, critics like Stone and Cohen have left mind-boggling holes in their anti-Snowden arguments.

The two most important of these are:

(1) Neither critic knows what Snowden does.

Neither man had his hands on the information that Mr. Snowden somewhat believably says he had access to.

So, Stone and Cohen are not in a firm factual position to belittle the scope of potential worrisome wrongdoing that Snowden claims to have seen in the National Security Agency’s behavior.

(2) The critics’ condemnation of Mr. Snowden revolves around the “rule of law,” but neither man has the wit to recognize that the Snowden Problem is exactly the same slippery moral slope that the Nuremburg Trials had to deal with after World War II.

Just when is it appropriate for a government employee or military member to rise up against laws, or highly questionable behavior under the law, that appears to be morally or Constitutionally wrong?

To jump to the harsh conclusions that both Stone and Cohen do is to prejudge both the situation and Edward Snowden’s personal value system.

Professor Stone, as a law professor, should know better than to make such foolishly shortsighted statements

Stone, writing with an eye for immediate detail, rather than the broad picture asks:

[W]ho gets to decide when classified information should be made public.

Who gets to put the national security at risk?

And afterward, for some intellectually obtuse reason, the Professor jumps to the assumption that Snowden is a complete ignoramus, and that he should have involved his superiors — or wiser counsel, presumably someone like Stone — before endangering the nation’s security.

Here, Stone’s own abysmal ignorance and temporary lack of analytical acuity shows.

Since when does letting people know that the Government has the means to intercept telephone metadata endanger national security?

As Richard Cohen more perceptively implies, Google is everywhere and everyone knows it.

I defy anyone to make a rationally persuasive case, based on the information that we have thus far, that Mr. Snowden did a horrifically nation-harming thing.

Second, Professor Stone is taking for granted that Government “higher ups” will consistently act with wisdom and in accordance with appropriate morality. Apparently, the illustrious professor is completely unfamiliar with the phenomenon that power corrupts.

It is Snowden critics’ emotion, not logic, speaking

The outpouring of anti-Snowden sentiment is the kind of emotional reaction that expects, when people are confronted with an important, psychically-charged issue that cannot be resolved by uttering a convenient nitwitism.

This Fourth Amendment “stuff” is not easy — but . . .

Pretending that the Fourth Amendment — which covers searches and privacy issues — is not implicated by the Government’s anti-terrorist snooping is (frankly) idiotic.

Even Bill Maher, whom I harpooned for his complacent failure to recognize why the Constitution exists, admitted that the United States is on a “slippery slope” with the Obama and Bush Administrations’ electronic prying.

Unlike Snowden’s critics, I do not trust Government to act ethically and in accordance with historically important American “Freedom” values as time marches on.

“Pete, would you have done what Mr. Snowden did?”

No. But I’m a prisoner of my military-like honor.

For me, the oath to serve takes me down Professor Stone’s road — probably even under circumstances in which a righteous and more nimble man would loudly bail. You will not find someone, who understands more acutely than I, the moral dilemma that Germany’s Wehrmacht officers were in during the World War II era.

Depending upon my level of knowledge of the Nazis’ doings (had I been alive then), I might have failed that inescapable soul test.

My awareness that I might have failed the Wehrmacht Dilemma is precisely the source of my respect for Bradley Manning and, perhaps, Edward Snowden.

The moral? — Honor, ultimately, is a personal thing

Honor, predictably, gets all twisted up in our psychic strengths and dysfunctions.

I think that Professor Stone and Richard Cohen are ethically wrong:

to be so condemning of a man, whom they do not know

and

of a situation that they are only slightly familiar with.

There is an Eastern Hemisphere spiritual aphorism to the effect that, we should not be fooled by the messenger’s disturbing camouflage, when it is her message that is the teaching’s substance.

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