Snowden Ate My Homework

The US Should Stop Blaming Snowden for its Own Inequities

As a teacher I hear all kinds of excuses for failure. A student, with typical adolescent melodrama, bemoans how difficult my tests are and how I’m ruining his grade. You see, I’m the reason that he is failing. It’s not the fact that, instead of studying, the student chose to play video games, or go to a party, or watch TV. So, clearly, the problem is me.

See how it works?

So I easily recognize the claims made by the US government as just another version of the “dog ate my homework.” Snowden’s revelations were embarrassing to the administrstion for a reason; the administration was doing question about stuff.it’s embarrassing when that stuff is revealed.however, the problem wasn’t the revelations but the stuff that was revealed.

So blaming snowden in for destroying the trust between the United States and its allies is a diversion. It’s no more valid than “the dog ate my homework.”

Snowden is not the reason why our allies are upset with us. Our allies are upset with us because we, meaning our representative government, was spying on our allies. The argument could be made that if you don’t want your allies upset, don’t spy on them.

of course, there’s an added element.

It’s naive to think that our allies didn’t know that we were spying on them. It’s equally naive to believe that our allies on spying on us. So in a way, Snowden’s revelation was the problem. Snowden’s crime is in putting presumably great nations in the absurd position of having to acknowledge publicly, and take umbrage over what they already largely see as the nature of international politics. Now nations all over the world are forced to put on an adequate performance before carrying on as always.

It’s a snowjob on the global scsle.

But it is not one of Edward Snowden’s making. He just opened the inconvenient conversation. This is not a matter of national security or compromised alliances. This issue is about the embarrassment of elite levels of government and putting protocols in place to ensure that such embarrassment never happens again.

But it is in the public best interest that such revelations continue to happen. Whistleblowers are the only available check against state and corporate secrecy.