LET IT SNOWDEN! LET IT SNOWDEN! LET IT SNOWDEN!

I’ve been rumination over this Snowden business for a long time, and it keeps rearing its ugly head every time my teen-aged daughter brings up the subject. Unfortunately, she brings up the subject a lot. She also thinks that what Snowden did was an admirable thing. I don’t!

Don’t get me wrong. I think our National Security Agency (NSA) has been acting way outside the limits of its constitutional power when collecting private emails and cell phone records of U.S. citizens without a special warrant authorized by a judge. After the terrorist attack on September 11th, a special court was created to deal with government requests regarding sensitive surveillance requests when national security is involved, but the NSA has apparently been bypassing our judicial system. The NSA has routinely acted without first presenting evidence to the special court that there is probable cause to believe that the persons whose emails and cell phone records were collected were engaged in terrorist activities. That circumvention of established procedures has been illegal and must stop!

Enter Snowden, the man who revealed to the world the NSA’s illegal surveillance. There is something admirable in Snowden’s desire to reveal an injustice when he learned of it, but Snowden chose a course of action that went way, way, way, way beyond the act of revealing the NSA’s illegal surveillance. Snowden stole the keys to the Kingdom, too!

To put this in better perspective, imagine a bank employee discovers that the bank has been keeping slaves in the bank’s vault on behalf of a customer who is involved in human trafficking. Over a weekend when the bank is closed, the bank employee sneaks into the vault, takes pictures of the slave and also takes ten million dollars belonging to the bank. The employee then sends the photos of the slaves to a newspaper, along with information about the bank’s role in facilitating the human trafficking, and then leaves the country with the bank’s ten million dollars. Revealing the bank’s role in illegal slave trade is admirable. Stealing the bank’s money is not! The employee’s theft is not justified by the admirable revelation of the bank’s illegal activities.

That is Snowden’s crime. Snowden revealed the NSA’s illegal activities, but he has also stolen massive amounts of data and information regarding the entire surveillance capabilities of the United States, and when that information falls into the wrong hand, and it will despite whatever Snowden claims, people, both here in America and abroad, will die because their covers will be compromised. Those deaths will be on Snowden’s hands…and there’s nothing admirable about that!