Persuasive Essay On Edward Snowden

The global hunt for Edward Snowden is damaging U.S. interests in ways that go far beyond the intelligence data he leaked.

The wild flight of the fugitive leaker — from Hong Kong to the transit area of Moscow’s Sherymetyvo Airport, and perhaps on to Ecuador — has turned into a public humiliation for the White House. U.S. officials publicly threatened “consequences” if Snowden wasn’t returned, only to be openly rebuffed by Chinese officials and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This made embarrassingly clear how little leverage President Obama has in Moscow or Beijing (and how much wiser it would have been to request Snowden’s return in private).

Most disturbing, the Snowden affair has enabled some of the world’s worst human rights offenders to portray themselves as champions of
complaints by claiming America does likewise. Such charges are bogus — and they know it. Whatever your opinion about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, the fact is that Congress OK’d them and set up special courts to monitor them. The U.S. public can debate whether the controls should be tightened, and demand change.

In China, no Congress or courts govern surveillance nor can Chinese citizens oppose it. Government hackers break into the software of international companies such as Apple to steal industrial secrets — on a massive scale. As Obama noted, that’s not normal intelligence gathering; “that’s theft.”

Then there’s Russia, where the state controls all major newspapers and national TV networks, which are still the major news source for the bulk of the population. Journalists are beaten up or murdered, and the perpetrators, conveniently, are never found. Political dissenters are cowed, arrested, or driven into exile.

So when Putin praises Snowden as a “human rights activist” who “struggles for freedom of information,” it’s hard not to gag. Any Russian who did similarly would wind up in the gulag or