Per
SOP, since Edward Snowden began revealing the details of the NSA's
Orwellian surveillance program, establishment pundits have been doing
their best to denounce his actions and denigrate the man personally.
This is an easy
task for the reflexively authoritarian segments of the
American audience, for whom
denunciations from the likes of Peter King, John Boehner, or Dick
Cheney will do.
For
the large audience of those who think themselves of an educated,
liberal mind, with serious concern for issues of rights and privacy, a
somewhat more
complex assault
on Snowden's actions or his person is
necessary -- something that rings of those same concerns, and gleams
with the patina of an intellectual exercise.
Thus, out come the big intellectual-ish guns, loaded up with some
logical-ish ammunition, in order to oh-so-complexly critique what
Snowden has done. For example, we hear from
Geoffrey
Stone, Professor
at the University of
Chicago Law School, who hired Barack Obama to teach constitutional law:
[I]t’s
extremely important to understand that if you want to protect civil
liberties in this country, you not only have to protect civil
liberties, you also have to protect against terrorism, because what
will destroy civil liberties in this country more effectively than
anything else is another 9/11 attack. ... So it’s very complicated,
asking what’s the best way to protect
civil liberties in the United States.
