(Published in China Daily, December 18, 2013)
Philip J Cunningham
Edward Snowden was for a
while considered Time magazine’s
most likely candidate for “Person of the Year” but in the end the editors
yielded the man-of-the-year slot to the Pope, the third pontiff so named. It
was a safe, if not a slyly calculated choice, as any pope has millions of
cheering followers and a pro-active one, such as Pope Francis, will have many
millions more. It is said Snowden came in second, another sly bit of PR
finesse, because it speaks to popular sentiment of the moment, implying the rogue
patriot actually stood a chance at snagging the top slot, while easing fears in
the Beltway, where NSA’s nervous ninnies can console themselves with the hope
that runner-ups for such accolades are soon forgotten. Who was the runner up
last year?
Over the years, Time has made some strange choices, flipping back and
forth between the safely mainstream and flippantly in-your-face. Every elected
president has been named since 1930, and foreign favorites of Time’s China-born
anti-communist founder, Henry Booth Luce, such as Song Meiling and Chiang
Kai-shek were slam-dunks, with a total of 11 covers between them. Nixon got the
nod twice, ditto for Obama, and so did Deng Xiaoping, honored in 1978 and again
in 1985, something proudly pointed out to me on a wall display when I visited
the Time bureau in Beijing.
The most controversial
choice in modern times was Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979; the backlash was so
ferocious that Time’s choices
have been fairly anodyne ever since.
Of course Snowden doesn’t
need validation from the US mainstream media, in fact he’s taught us to be
suspicious, very suspicious of it because so much of the media is in bed with
the government.
Not for nothing did the
intelligence-savvy Ed Snowden specifically refuse to deal with the New York
Times. The dear old “Gray Lady” has
a track record of being the handmaiden to the powers that be, a harridan
cheerleader for war (Syria being the latest example, Iraq another) and is quick
to dissemble and kill, or at least maim a news story if the feds want it that
way, --the case of the CIA agent abandoned in Iran for seven years being just a
recent example. Thanks to AP News, where real journalism is on the march, we
know about this. No thanks to the whining, finger-pointing “Gray Lady” that dishes out scorn and criticism on others but
can’t stand the heat of the kitchen.
Edward Snowden’s
soft-spoken contribution to helping Americans and the world become aware of how
unfettered US spying poses an existential threat to democracy is a gift that
keeps on giving. Through the dogged, determined and amiably combative Glenn
Greenwald, we learn something revelatory, often shocking, nearly every week as
the voluminous files are vetted and prepped with journalistic diligence.
Snowden is an unlikely
hero, a techie and geek who wanted to do something for the US in the wake of
9/11, and, as his history of Internet chats suggests, until recently,
politically conservative. This cautious and prudent young man considered trying
to correct what he saw as a broken system from within, but seeing how other
whistle blowers were pilloried by the government and spurned by the press gave
him pause. He collected information quietly, using spy-craft learned on the job
to cover his tracks, until he had, by some estimates, over one million
sensitive documents.
Last May Snowden made a mad
dash for Hong Kong, putting himself at risk in a way that still has analysts
scratching their heads. Why Hong Kong?
Once ensconced in a Kowloon
Hotel he contacted journalists and privacy advocates who he had long admired
from afar, including Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras. They broke the scoop of the year in the
Guardian, which named Snowden
its “Person of the Year.”
Readers around the world
were surprised at Snowden’s youth, amazed at the value of his loot, and taken
aback by his apparent lack of a getaway plan.
There was a modest
groundswell of support for Snowden in Hong Kong, but to be safe from the long
arm of American law, nothing short of a firm asylum offer from Beijing would
have guaranteed his safety. He booked a flight to Moscow with help from
Wikileaks. Hong Kong’s refusal to detain him at the airport, though couched in
diplomatic language, was a small victory for standing up to US pressure, which
under an agitated Obama, was turning into something of a full court press.
Snowden holed up in the
Moscow airport’s “sterile zone” for 39 days until an entry into Russia could be
arranged. Bereft of his earth-shaking thumb drives, he presumably had little to
offer his hosts other than an opportunity to say no to arrogant US
arm-twisting.
As University of Michigan
professor Juan Cole, himself a victim of White House spying during the war in
Iraq has written, Snowden’s revelations make Orwell’s
1984 “look like a lackadaisical libertarian
paradise” and Obama’s complaisance makes him look like a front man “for an
octopus-like secret government.”
Snowden has changed our
understanding of how governments actually work, especially the “Five Eyes”
governments who collaboratively spy on everyone all the time without legal
safeguards, while solemnly invoking an Anglo-Saxon axis in the name of
democracy, dissent and right to privacy.