With talk of amnesty in the air, it’s a good time to define “whistle-blower.”
Spoiler: It ain’t Edward Snowden.
Whistle-blowers expose wrongdoing or corruption. Real whistle-blowers even enjoy legal protections. As President Obama said of Snowden: “There were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”
Snowden didn’t do that. To the contrary, Snowden specifically sought his job as an NSA contractor and took its oath for the sole purpose of violating it, stealing American secrets and then making them public. Which he did before accepting asylum in a genuine police state, Vladmir Putin’s Russia.
In December, one NSA official told “60 Minutes” he would consider amnesty for Snowden provided he could get assurances about other, unreleased data. Now The New York Times has declared that Snowden “deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight.” The Times wants “a plea bargain or some form of amnesty” that would let him live a life — we kid you not — “advocating for greater privacy.”
And in defending his editorial, Andrew Rosenthal conceded the notion of political asylum for Snowden is “bizarre.”
The Times, of course, is the paper that worked with Julian Assange to publish the WikiLeaks documents, which weakened our counter-terror operations by informing our enemies what we knew and how we track them. During the Bush years, the Times also exposed a program tracking terrorist financing. Apparently, the Times does not believe that among the rights of a free people is the right to have certain things kept secret.
We’re with former NSA director Michael Hayden, who said the Times’ plea for amnesty will not go anywhere. We also agree with what he told The Daily Beast about the real message amnesty would send to others thinking of espionage: “If you are going to do this, make sure you steal enough secrets to bargain for clemency.”