PRO: Brought NSA's wrongdoing to light

WASHINGTON — Edward Snowden is a courageous American hero. He will be remembered as one long after the "war on terror" is over. By then our government will have some new excuse for violating Americans' rights and the rights of the rest of the world.

The National Security Agency has been collecting information about nearly every phone call in America. It is also collecting information about many emails. Snowden was the first person to expose this violation of Americans' private lives.

He won his first major legal victory on Dec. 16. A judge ruled that the NSA's gathering of the information was probably against the Constitution.

It's unfortunate that our media's reporting on our national spy state has let us down. It still treats what our government did as overeager efforts to protect Americans from terrorism.

But our government's actions obviously had nothing to do with terrorism.

Ordinary Citizens Targeted

Our government has spied on other countries to help give U.S. companies an advantage. It has also spied on the phones of foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. But let's put aside those actions. Even ignoring them, our spy state in the U.S. is doing more than just trespassing into our private lives.

Don't get me wrong: that's bad enough. Most people don't want to share the all the details of their personal lives with government spies. But the Obama government has managed to convince some of us that the NSA is just keeping our personal information in storage and not using it. We're led to believe that our personal information is sorted by computers to identify or investigate targets that have something to do with terrorism.

However, there is a mountain of evidence that says the opposite. This widespread gathering of our personal information is in fact being used against ordinary citizens who are simply involved in activities that are protected by our Constitution. Political organizers and public educators have been targeted.

Our government has the ability to use the NSA's information for the wrong purposes. It can crack down on political groups that don't agree with our government. It has already spied on anti-war groups. It also got inside groups that were planning to protest at the 2004 Republican convention.

In 2011, the Boston police, Boston Regional Intelligence Center and the FBI were very busy tracking activists. These were not terrorists, but members of protest groups.

As a result, the law enforcement groups seem to have ignored important intelligence. Information was literally handed to them about the terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon. This tells you a lot about what's important to our crooked national spy state.

Our Democracy Under Attack

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. was inspiring millions in the struggle for rights for African Americans. At the same time, the FBI was busy spying on his phone and harassing him.

Today it would have a constant flow of information. It would know not only about his every move and phone call, but about every activist in that movement across the country. That is the difference that technology makes and it's important that we don't let our government get away with it.

The spy state is also making the U.S. into a country run by companies and the military. They're becoming more powerful compared to our elected officials. That includes the president.

And it is our military and spies who are trying to block attempts to reduce the NSA's abuses.

It's not just your private life that is being invaded because of the abuses that Snowden exposed — it's bigger. The foundations of our democratic society are being attacked.

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ABOUT THE WRITER: Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This essay is available to McClatchy-Tribune News Service subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or Newsela.

CON: Spilled secrets of the wrong countries

Edward Snowden might not meet the definition of the word "traitor" under U.S. law. But in the way most people think of the word, it would certainly apply.

The Australian government thinks so. Snowden revealed intelligence operations in that country. This led Australia's federal attorney-general to call the ex-NSA contractor an "American traitor."

In disclosing national security secrets, Snowden was following in the footsteps of Julian Assange. He is the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks. Both men claim a noble purpose: to use the power of the Internet to expose the wrongdoing of evil governments. But in fact, they have told us almost nothing about countries like North Korea, Iran, China, Cuba and Venezuela.

Instead, they've mostly spilled secrets from nations ranked at the top of the Freedom House "Index of Freedom in the World." These are the democratic countries that hold free and fair elections. They're the countries that organize the peacekeeping and humanitarian missions to help people in need around the world. These nations combat the spread of nuclear weapons, support human rights, and fight terrorism and human trafficking.

Helped Undemocratic Countries

Regardless of why they say they did it, Snowden's and Assange's actions have hurt the countries that are the greatest champions of freedom and aided the world's most undemocratic countries.

Further, they have betrayed the idea of freedom. The Assange/Snowden view of the world says that complete transparency and openness equals freedom. This is not just being overly innocent — it's worse.

Respect for our private lives is an essential part of freedom. The government of free peoples is part of the people. The people elect it and the government rules on their behalf. Free societies recognize that keeping some secrets is a necessary job of government.

Democracies operate under the idea of "ordered liberty." They establish rules to protect both the individual and the country as a whole. Democracies guard both individual freedom and the safety of their people.

No one has the right to throw away those rules and substitute rules that he chooses. Disregarding ordered liberty doesn't advance freedom. It just creates chaos. And chaos enables evil and kills democracies like our own.

Snowden is neither "freedom fighter" nor "whistle-blower," exposing dishonest activities by our government. His leaks are broad and all over the place. The vast majority expose no wrongdoing whatsoever.

Betrayed His Government's Trust

What about those cases where Snowden might argue he has revealed government actions that may cross the line? His actions are still, at best, irresponsible.

The United States system of ordered liberty offers several ways to raise claims of wrong-doing without endangering our country. Federal agencies have inspector generals. Congress routinely investigates claims of government wrongdoing.

And, yes, we have "whistle-blower" protection laws. These laws protect people from being attacked by a government whose bad actions they need to expose. But the notion that Snowden had no choice but to leak secrets is indefensible.

Finally, Snowden betrayed the trust he was given by the U.S. government to safeguard the nation's secrets.

Free societies depend on trustworthy citizens. Bank tellers, lawyers, doctors, police officials and others in positions of trust can't decide that they get to choose what information should or should not be dumped out for everyone to see. If they did, we wouldn't be living in Assange's paradise of an open society. We would be living in North Korea, where no one is trusted … ever.

Edward Snowden has betrayed freedom. In the end, that's a much greater offense than intentionally acting like an enemy agent and traitor to his country.