We're a Different Country Now

If there was a Zen prize for whistleblowers, Snowden would win without trying: he checks and labels everything, he thinks out the moral, he cross-references and relates the material to possible future outcomes.

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Snowden might have taught us to expect to be monitored, but his message, that our freedom is being diluted by a manufactured fear of the evil that surveillance ‘protects’ us from, is not being heard. Louder and clearer to many is the message that comes from the security state mind, a suspicion carried on the air like a germ, that certain kinds of journalism, like certain aspects of citizenship, are basically treacherous and a threat to good management. This germ has infected society to such a degree that people don’t notice, they don’t mind, and a great many think it not only permissible but sensible and natural, in a culture of ‘threat’, to imagine that privacy is merely a luxury of the guilty.

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Snowden shone a light into [...] a world where we forgot that it is for governments to be transparent and for individuals to be private. The reversal of these things is the spirit of the age.

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There was never any question of Ben Bradlee blocking the efforts of his reporters at the Washington Post at the time of Watergate or destroying notes gleaned from Deep Throat, their best source. James Goodale, the lawyer for the New York Times while it was attempting to publish the Pentagon Papers, made the case most strongly that it was a First Amendment issue, and that the paper had a duty to present the material brought to it by Daniel Ellsberg, believing it would enlighten the public as to what the government was doing. Though an injunction was sought by the US attorney general, it was rejected by the judge, Murray Gurfein, who said, memorably, that ‘a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.’

  London Review of Books

We’ve come a long way, baby.