Update (June 13):
I saw this blog post suggesting that Snowden was worried by the surveillance state in 2006, because someone with the handle The TrueHOOHAh, whom the blog identifies with Snowden, comments at a site called arstechnica:
“NSA’s new surveillance program.
That’s the sound of freedom, citizen!”
on May 19, 2006.
May 2006 would be only two years after Snowden had signed up for the Special Forces and then the NSA, where he worked as a security guard.
ORIGINAL POST
The otherwise admirable Jacob Hornberger, by a series of false equations, rhetorical overstatements, and misleading analogies arrives at the equation,
SOPHIE SCHOLL = EDWARD SNOWDEN
Well, we applauded Sophie Scholl in “Mobs,” but just as reductio ad hitlerum is a rhetoric of desperation, so too is such “sophi-stry.”
Asserting without evidence that every self-proclaimed act of whistle-blowing (endorsed by such notable organs of the state as The Guardian and The New York Times, mind you) must be the same as the resistance of the White Rose is merely an admission that you have no other arguments on your side except US versus Them.
This is an appeal to the mob and demagoguery. I had hoped for more from Mr. Hornberger.
So for him… and for all the LRC cohorts who see any refusal to buy the latest creation of the intelligence services as a sign of “commies,” “Obamaites,” and government stooges…..let me, as none of those three, count the incredibly obvious differences between Sophie Scholl and Comrade Edward:
1. Sophie Scholl was the child of a principled family, with a history of political dissent. Her father and brothers were dissenters. Her friends at high school were chosen for their political opinions. She had a credible history of being a dissenter of conscience. Her father was imprisoned for a critical remark about Hitler.
1. Edward Snowden is the son of two officers of the US security state that he now proclaims he can’t abide.
His family lived all its life off of the state, with no evidence that they ever objected. His father belongs to the US coast guard; his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology in the US Federal Court in Baltimore. Functionaries of the police state, dear reader, are not known to spawn dissenters.
Maryland – the environs of the capital of empire and site of all too-many judicial fixes, anthrax scares, CIA capers, and political assassinations – is as good as the belly of the beast.
In that belly, Edward was quite happy.
He joined no political parties, wrote no papers denouncing the empire, organized no protests.
In fact, he repeatedly sought employment in the security state and not in any innocuous (if there be such) part of it.
He enlisted in the US Army….and not in 2001, when he might be forgiven, since 9-11 had just occurred (whatever you think of that).
No. He enlisted in 2004 (2003 in some accounts) when the whole world had already marched against the Iraq war, when the evidence of torture and the use of Daisy Cutters and white phosphorus in Iraq was all over the internet.
At a time when the REAL equivalent of Sophie Scholl, Sergeant Samuel Provance, was outing his seniors in the army and facing genuine harassment rather than wall-to-wall coverage from the major media, Edward Snowden was signing up for the Army, and not just the Army, but the Special Forces.
By then special forces had already been proved to be involved in war crimes. But Edward the Dissenter was eager to join them.
2. Sophie Scholl’s brother was arrested in 1937 for participating in the German Youth Movement.
2. Edward Snowden’s sister is an attorney in Maryland who has not been arrested for anything.
3. Sophie Scholl was an avid reader, with a deep interest in philosophy and theology. She graduated from high school and wrote a paper entitled “The Hand That Moved The Cradle, Moved The World.”
3. Edward Snowden dropped out of school, got a GED, and studied computers at a community college. In other words, his principle interests were technical. Again, no obvious signs of philosophical objections to the state, or even interest in the question. To all appearances, a guy looking to make a good living the quickest way he could.
4. Sophie Scholl was a committed and public Christian who had developed a philosophical and religious objection to Nazism.
4. There is no public record of Snowden having any kind of principled philosophy of resistance to the state until his recent anointing by the spectrum of official activists in the US. [Correction: There are arstechica forum posts under the handle, the TrueHOOHA that express an awareness..and a distrust..of the surveillance state (see update at the top of the page).
5. Sophie Scholl took a job as a nursery school teacher, hoping to get out of working in the National Labor Service, at the time a requirement for anyone who wanted to go to University. In other words, she jeopardized an academic career for which she had great talent in order to be true to her principles.
5.Edward Snowden, as a computer expert, could easily have worked in the private sector, but chose to join the military. He was in the US Army Reserves for all of 4 months, long enough to break his legs and get discharged. Not long enough to face fire, do anything difficult, or get any awards. He didn’t even have the persistence to go back and finish his 14 week training.
Instead, convinced of the goals of the US military (saving people from oppression), he went one better. He opted to join the National Security Agency as a security guard (a cushy and well-paying job needing not much in the way of expertise or hardship).
6. When her nursery teaching proved insufficient, Sophie Scholl reluctantly joined the auxiliary war service, although still in the innocent field of nursery teaching. Afterward, she enrolled in the University of Munich in Biology and philosophy. By then, she was already practicing passive resistance to the war and was a vocal and public part of a group of artists and writers who were struggling with moral questions about the individual’s duty under a dictatorship.
Sophie Scholl formed the White Rose after listening to an anti-Nazi sermon by the Catholic Bishop of Munster and after a long discussion of the issues in correspondence with her boyfriend.
6. The only evidence we have that Snowden had any interest in privacy rights is the insistent repetition by The Guardian, the New York Times (known outlets of state disinformation) that he had stickers of the Electric Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project on his laptop. This is very much the type of signalling used by Rolling Stone in its write up of Jacob Applebaum (one of the Wikileaks group). In that piece, “The Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace,” there were the same type of pointed references to Applebaum’s liking for the movie “V for Vendetta”. Vendetta is a movie most likely intended to prep the public mind for the role of the hactivist-hero (think of Julian Assange or Anonymous) as the new mouthpiece for globalist propaganda, following the discrediting of the major newspapers in the wake of the Iraq War.
Apart from that, Tor encryption is known to have back-doors for the US government and allied corporations. It was likely pushed for just that reason, by Applebaum and his colleague at Wikileaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an employee of Microsoft, a corporation with close government ties.
7. While in the University, Scholl and her circle started passing out pamphlets encouraging Germans to engage in passive resistance to Nazism. Passive resistance is completely consistent with the Christian principles in which the White Rose believed.
7.
Snowden’s only political engagement was to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and then donate $500 to Ron Paul in 2012.
He left the CIA not because he had any differences of opinion about their mission or modus operandi.
He left to become a private contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, a lucrative defense contractor, acquired by the Carlyle Group at a cost of $1 billion and a probable profit of $3 billion.
Booz Allen makes a healthy profit from promoting the security state. Edward was making money off of that.
Contractors of the state are paid a whole lot more than employees and have to conform to no rules. I need not remind you that the whole heart of the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib was the nexus of private contractors and CIA – precisely where Snowden chose to position himself.
As a system administrator for all of 4 months at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden was stationed in high-priced Hawaii at a salary of $200,000 (by his account) or $ $112,000 (according to his bosses). He passed out no pamphlets objecting to torture, war, propaganda, or anything else, as far as I know.
8. Sophie Scholl’s boyfriend was also a resistor, with whom she had long impassioned discussions about moral questions.
8. Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills is self-described as a “world-traveling pole dancing superhero,” language that is not only juvenile but bears the marks of an intelligence creation. Nothing is as likely to get hits as much as a “sex angle” of some kind.
Remember the Assange story and Julian’s “reputation”? Whether you consider it good or bad, it is likely to be riveting to the mass of young self-styled rebels.
Snowden admits he had a very “comfortable” life with her. No earnest discussion of moral conundrums have come to light so far.
However, well before his emergence as a latter-day Gandhi in June of this year, Snowden did approach a film-maker in January 2013. That was Laura Poitras, who happened to have written about a more credible NSA whistle-blower William Binney. Poitras is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. MacArthur is one of several foundations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller) known to collaborate with the CIA, according to Frances Stoner Saunders (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War).
Poitras’ film “Bin Laden’s Body Guard” was funded by the Guggenheim Fellowship and by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Poitras also just happens to be a board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation, along with Glenn Greenwald, and – surprise! – old faithful Daniel Ellsberg. She has also been involved with “surveillance teach-ins” with Jacob Applebaum.
And while Greenwald asserts that Poitras’s harassment by Homeland Security (she was detained and questioned at the border on many occasions) was for no reason at all, The Weekly Standard (admittedly a neocon outfit) reports, credibly, that there was reason for it, because some soldiers allege that she had foreknowledge of an Iraqi ambush and didn’t warn American soldiers about it.
[This is not to endorse any harassment of Poitras on that account. It’s merely to demonstrate that there’s a lot more going on here than a rerun of The White Rose.]
The Freedom of Press Foundation, which strongly supports Manning and Assange, was formed only in 2012. On its website, it endorses wikileaks, truthout, and some new outfits that I’ll check up on as soon as I have time.
To a cursory eye, it looks like a recently cobbled together effort.
Meanwhile, just in case you miss the point, Greenwald has been pushing Snowden as a “hero” and “whistle-blower” on his prominent blog at the Guardian.
It’s much the same way he pushed Julian Assange from his blog at Salon, making sure to let you know that if you had any questions about St. Julian, this qualified you for public branding as a totalitarian.