iSpy: The NSA's Transparent Flake of Snow(den)

Apart from contested pretenses torrenting the fourth estate, Snowden's 'criminal' revelations shouldn't a come a surprise in context of post-9/11 policies such as the Patriot Act. In mid-June, 30-year-old Edward Snowden – then-NSA contractor employed at Booz Allen Hamilton – leaked publications on NSA data mining programs to the UK's Guardian newspaper. Labeled 'PRISM', these NSA cloak-and-dagger activities were - and still are! - designed to harbor and surveil American digital communications in realtime. Subsequent to verbal onslaught by American officials, Snowden fled the States for Hong Kong to evade U.S. prosecution. Then bullied by a 1996 extradition treaty between the U.S. and Hong Kong, Russian diplomats within the Kremlin assuaged Snowden by vowing him political asylum. Presently en route to an unnamed nation, purportedly Iceland, Ecuador, or Cuba via Moscow, Snowden is under fire by the American government for nothing more than violating a nondisclosure agreement and giving credence to federal liability. You can kill the messenger, but you can't kill the message. Nevertheless, let’s dissect the liberal and dictatorial synthesis of which the mainstream media incessantly peddles to the public.

Snowden is a “traitor”, but “if you see something, say something”! Snowden is a hero, a willing martyr for truth and justice, for disclosing illegitimate government operations despite deserting his six-figure annual paycheck, girlfriend, and comfortable residence in Hawaii. Beneath the rhetoric, Obama – consenter to the assassination of guiltless children and recipient of Nobel Peace Prize and Man of the Year awards – is the true traitor…and yet is paraded throughout the euphemistic ‘Home of the Brave’ while criminal dragnets are surveying Snowden. Director of the NSA James Clapper is, too, an American belligerent and adversarial constitutionalist. When questioned by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden just a few weeks back as to if the NSA “collects any type of data at all on millions of Americans”, Clapper blatantly perjured by replying, “not wittingly”. Exposing crime is not a crime; committing crime is a crime.

Snowden “stole” information belonging to the American public. This erroneous notion defies that Snowden, himself an entity of the American public, published a trove of documents (therefore theoretically under his possession) and refunded Americans autonomy over the democratic model. It is of the public’s pursuit to define and sanction policies and programs of the federal government. Snowden is not a vile thief, he is a valiant whistleblower. The NSA’s, not Snowden’s, warrantless surveillance and wiretapping, amidst PRISM, illegally sabotaged the metadata of and jeopardized the privacy of we, the people. But...if you’re doing nothing wrong, why do you need to have rights?

On June 22, the Obama Administration charged an instigator of civil disobedience deliberately juxtaposed with a high-school dropout, Ed Snowden, with ‘espionage’. Though, handing classified information to, not the American people, but the enemy is indicative of espionage. Either Obama needs a refresher course in law at his Massachusettsan alma mater, or perhaps this legal slipup is merely confirmation that the U.S. government views you and me as ‘the enemy’. Reversely, the National Security Agency should be incriminated for espionage; illegally fabricating the groundwork to an Orwellian surveillance state. Elicited by Senator Dianne ‘Gun-Grabbin’’ Feinstein, Snowden - if anything - should be indicted for treason, not espionage. Even so, Snowden aided his country by rekindling transparency to an establishment laden with opacity - not the inverse, as the liberal media illustrates. Implying that Snowden’s silence and compliance, to unconstitutional ultimatums, would yield no crime fosters the perils of American indifference. In an empire of lies, the truth becomes treasonous.