"Foreign
Policy"
Every year on the Fourth of July I sit down and read the
Declaration of Independence. It's a habit I got into some
years ago, but I take a peculiar pleasure in reading through the
founding principles of the American Revolution, archaic language
and all. In these days of creeping executive power, supine
journalism, and reflexive threat-inflation, it's a valuable
reminder that governments exist to serve the people -- and not
the other way around.
On this
Independence Day, I am wondering what the Founding Fathers would
have made of Edward Snowden. The question is obviously a bit
absurd, as they could hardly have imagined something like the
Internet, or even the telephone, back in 1776. But they would
have understood the ability of a government to seize the mail
and to investigate and harass those suspected of disloyalty. And
they surely would have understood the concept of risking one's
future for the sake of one's ideals.
It is of
course possible that they would have seen Snowden as some
members of Congress do, as a man who betrayed his country by
releasing classified information. But isn't it also possible
that they would have seen in him a kindred spirit -- someone who
took an irrevocable step on a matter of principle? In
particular, they might have seen in him a man who recognized the
natural tendency of governments to extend their control over
citizens, usually in the name of national security.
Let us not
forget that the Founding Fathers repeatedly warned about the
dangers of standing armies, which they rightly understood to be
a perennial threat to liberty. Or that James Madison
famously warned that no nation can remain free in a state of
perpetual warfare, a sentiment that Barack Obama
recently quoted but does not seem to have fully taken to
heart. The Founders also gave Americans the
Fourth Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution because they understood that defending
individual privacy against the grasp of government authority is
an essential human right as well as an important safeguard of
freedom.
The United
States can no longer protect the country's security with a
citizen militia, of course, and a permanent defense
establishment has become a necessary evil in the competitive
world of contemporary international politics. But the Snowden
affair reminds us that large and well-funded government
bureaucracies have a powerful tendency to expand, to hide their
activities behind walls of secrecy, and to depend on a cowed and
co-opted populace to look the other way.
Snowden
may have broken the law, but so did the Founding Fathers when
they issued that famous declaration 237 years ago. They did so
in defiance of a powerful empire, just as Snowden did. The world
is better off that they chose to defy the laws of their time,
and Snowden's idealistic act may leave us better off too. I
suspect Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of those
revolutionaries might have understood.
©2013 The Foreign Policy Group,
LLC.
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