What Hillary Clinton Got Wrong About Edward Snowden

Hillary Clinton made her stance on Edward Snowden perfectly clear at Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate. In her mind, Snowden is a person who called attention to important issues, but went about it in an improper way. She said he should have been a whistleblower, and that by stealing and leaking data, he put Americans at risk. She's wrong.

Clinton said that Snowden "stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands."

Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept has a nice writeup asking what, exactly, Clinton meant with that comment: There's been no evidence that Snowden's document stash has ended up with the Russians or Chinese, and there's been no evidence whatsoever that any of his leaks have had a negative impact on national security or have led to the deaths of any Americans.

But perhaps more importantly, Clinton made the assertion that Snowden could have had just as much of an impact on the surveillance debate had he raised his issues with the NSA through the proper whistleblowing channels.

"He broke the laws of the United States. He could have been a whistleblower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower," Clinton said. "He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that."

This answer is naive at best, but more likely it's a calculated way for her to dodge the issue of what should happen to him. Either way, her assertion is patently false. (For the record, Lincoln Chafee is the only candidate who said Snowden should not be prosecuted; Bernie Sanders suggested Snowden should be prosecuted but that the beneficial information he leaked should be considered in his sentencing.)

First of all, Edward Snowden testified to European Parliament last year that he made 10 complaints within the NSA before deciding to go rogue. As a private contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton, he also wouldn't have been by the laws that protect government whistleblowers.

"I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them," Snowden testified. "As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process."

Even if Snowden had been protected as a whistleblower, there is no evidence to suggest that a formal US complaint or even a congressional inquiry would have had even a fraction of the impact that his systematic release of documents through trusted journalists has had.

Snowden wasn't the first to cry foul about the US's surveillance state. Thomas Drake, an ex-NSA mathematician shared unclassified details of the NSA's programs with Congress and with Baltimore Sun reporters. His revelations made headlines for a few days, then went away.

Now, when you hear about Drake, it's usually because his life has been completely ruined because of his whistle blowing status.

If you become a whistleblower, "You have to mortgage your house, you have to empty your bank accounts," Drake said in a 2014 documentary called Silenced, which followed the plight of Drake and other whistleblowers under the Obama administration. The only place that would hire Drake was an Apple store.

Whistleblower after whistleblower has been silenced, marginalized, and, at times, jailed by the Obama administration: John Kiriakou, the man who uncovered the CIA's illegal torture program, was the only man who went to prison because of it. The Obama administration has vigorously tracked down information leakers in the federal government, and has prosecuted them ruthlessly.

Without Snowden, the mass surveillance debate we've had over the last two years would never have happened. Had Snowden followed in the footsteps of other whistleblowers, where would we be now? Where would he be now? It's hard to say. My guess is we'd still be largely in the dark, and Snowden's freedom would still be left in the lurch.