Edward Snowden, Frenemy of the State

• Date: 01 March 2017
• Author: Tarzie
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12179

Edward Snowden, Frenemy of the State

By TARZIE

ABSTRACT. The Edward Snowden whistleblowing event is a calculated

spectacle of pseudo-dissidence that has more in common with

Hollywood-produced propaganda than with genuine whistleblowing.

This article presents evidence that Snowden has lied on a number of

occasions, calling his credibility into question. Nothing that Snowden

has revealed was truly a secret, since several previous whistleblowers

had reported, since 2002, about illegal mass surveillance of American

citizens by the National Security Agency. Snowden’s most striking

difference from other NSA whistleblowers is the warm embrace from

mainstream media,which has made him a celebrity. The 1998 theatrical

film Enemy of the State contained the same sorts of revelations offered

by Snowden, and imparts a number of messages to its audience about

the security state that are strikingly similar to recurring messages in the

Snowden Affair. Since that movie was made with assistance from the

CIA these similarities are important to considering how authentic and

socially useful his whistleblowing is. It seems evident from Snowden’s

support for the renewal of the Patriot Act (now the Freedom Act), that

he objectively serves the interests of the surveillance state, rather than

the public it spies upon.

All Spies Lie

There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s Snowden, in which journalist Glenn

Greenwald, played by an aptly fulminating Zachary Quinto, clashes

with his editor at The Guardian, Janine Gibson (Joel y Richardson). At

one point, Gibson says she prays for the authenticity of the court order

authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that

will run with the first story based on Snowden’s documents.

Greenwald: (disgustedly) Are you actually questioning that?

*Tarzie is a Brooklyn-based blogger who writes about media, propaganda, and the

intelligence community.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 2 (March, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12179

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C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Gibson: Glenn, no one has ever seen a FISA court order. There’s no

precedent here.

Greenwald: Our source risked his life for that document. It’s real.

Of course, Gibson’s wariness is entirely appropriate to being both an

adult and particularly an editor, but it is with Greenwald we are surely

meant to sympathize, even though he could not have known with any

certainty at that point who Snowden was, what he was aiming to do, how

authentic any of his documents were, or if, in fact, he was risking his life.

Since, even by Stone’s own account, his film is a highly embellished

chronology of Snowden’s journey from would-be soldier to whistle-

blower, it is impossible to know if this conversation actually took place.

However, it certainly rings true, given that, even in the lionizing hands

of Oliver Stone andportrayed by comely Zachary Quinto, Greenwald is

customarily charmless. It also accurately conveys the role Greenwald

assumed from the beginning, as disciplinarian of anyone who would

not accept as gospel truth everything Snowden or his apostles said,

questioned their methods, or suggested, correctly, that Snowden’s

documents merely added details to National Security Agency (NSA)

capabilities thatwere already known.

Construction of a truth-concealing biography is among the oldest

tricks in spycraft. But in an environment where even an editor is not to

question any part of Snowden gospel, because, according to that gos-

pel, “he risked his life,” scrutiny of the Snowden biography is the stuff

of conspiracy kooks. There is never any acknowledgment in high pla-

ces that the only thing we can know with near certainty about Snow-

den’s origins is that he is connected enough to the intelligence

community to have access to top secret NSA documents. Anything else

we can only accept on faith. The authorities that can verify or deny his

statements are unreliable by design.

Therefore, we cannot know for sure whether Snowden told the truth

when, in a 2014 interview with NBC infotainer Brian Williams, Snow-

den said:

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.

(Cole et al. 2014)

Edward Snowden, Frenemy of the State 349

However, there is a logic puzzle elegance to that statement. If true,

he has disclosed that he routinely lied about who he was, as spies do,

and is therefore a liar. If false, he simply lied to Brian Williams and is

therefore a liar. No matter how you look at it, Greenwald’s mandatory

credulity in the sceneand in real life is unwarranted to say the least.

In fact, by the time the story Gibson andGreenwalddiscussinthescene

had been published, Snowden had alreadyliedtoGreenwald,Poitras,

and their Guardian colleague Ewan MacAskill about at least one thing:

the length of time he’d been at the Mira Hotel. Greenwald reported in his

book, No Place to Hide, that Snowden had checked into the Mira on May

20, 2013. However, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal showed

that while Snowden had been in Hong Kong at that time, he did not check

into the Mira until June 1, under his real name, no less, just two days before

his meeting with Greenwald and Poitras (Epstein 2014). One of Snow-

den’s Hong Kong attorneys, Albert Ho, later confirmed this, claiming that

Snowden had been at the home of his “carer” (Bradsher 2013).

The lie about Snowden checking into the Mira on May 20 is

enshrined not only in Greenwald’s book, but in Laura Poitras’s docu-

mentary Citizenfour, and in Oliver Stone’s feature film, Snowden.Given

that Snowden’s deception leaves more than a week unaccounted for,

this is, by any yardstick, a whopper, especially given how tantalizingly

Ho’s “carer” suggests “handler,” and potentially turns the whole story

upside down. It is a testimony to how vigilantly circumscribed is the

“debate,”—as Snowden and his apostles call this thing he started—that

more than three years later, no one following this saga has any idea

who this “carer” is and no one has bothered to ask or investigate.

That’s Entertainment

Of course, one critical lie is enough to place Snowden’s whole story in

doubt, but this is not something his most enthusiastic admirers want to

acknowledge. The political type most inclined to find someone like

Snowden inspiring is an unbecoming combination of self-conscious

knowingness and credulity. At first glance, they are laudably inclined to

take everything the government and the corporate media say with a

heavy dose of salt. But this skepticism is not grounded in a true under-

standing of how power works. So, no less celebrity-obsessed than

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology350