Ed Snowden - Human Hero Intervenes on Machine Logic
Doug Rushkoff
2013-06-25 00:00:00
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I wonder if Ed Snowden - the 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee behind last week’s series of leaks about NSA surveillance on the American public - will be rewarded with the same admiration. You’d think we would be even more outraged by what he uncovered than we were by the surveillance of Ellsberg. After all, it’s not just one lone loose cannon being wiretapped here, it’s all of us. 

Snowden has not uncovered a human conspiracy here, but the workings of the machine itself. And it’s a machine that really does require some human intervention. 

In the coming months I expect a campaign to be waged against this young man that will make the one against Ellsberg look like child’s play. His enemies have the full force of the machine - every email he’s written and every phone call he’s made - to use against him. This won’t be pretty. But before we decide that Snowden was smiling too much in his videotaped interview with The Guardian, earned too much money, or somehow betrayed his lovely girlfriend in Hawaii in a personal vendetta against his former bosses at the intelligence agencies, let’s take just a moment to consider his particularly human act of heroism.

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