On Snowden and the Enduring Need for Civil Disobedience

As MLK himself would've no doubt pointed out, there were others participating in the Civil Rights movement. These movements aren't reduceable to the famous minds of Great Leaders, though of course those in power (who want people to obey leaders) try to frame history that peculiar way.

Snowden has a much smaller pool because 99.9% of Americans can't break these unjust laws. We simply don't have information to leak.

MLK and Ghandi made a political decision to accept punishment, so did Snowden. I don't believe any made a moral decision that punishment was just.

I've been enjoying your comments throughout this thread a good deal, because you raise a lot of great points of discussion. But it appears that, in total, you're very distracted by the likes of MLK and Gandhi, and it's somewhat preventing considering things from a higher, more abstract level where you can reason about civil disobedience itself, pulled apart from the particulars of how some disobedients have practiced it.

The most effect strategy depends on the circumstances. If Snowden can maximize publicity by playing cat-and-mouse with the U.S. government for weeks, maybe that's a good enough reason for him to resist being arrested by U.S. authorities. The implications of personal conscience also depends on the small print. People might agree with your general argument for the draft, but at the same time deny that the Communist takeover of Vietnam was anything close to a national emergency. After all, the eventual defeat in Vietnam did not cause the U.S. to cease to exist.

Many contemporary political philosophers seem to take Gandhi and MLK as examples, but I'll take Hobbes and Locke any day over them: as soon as the state steps over the limits of its strictly circumscribed powers, you are under absolutely no obligation to obey the parts of its law that exceed the limit. You may voluntarily choose to obey the punishment part for one reason or another, but that's just your choice and it's irrelevant to the legitimacy of your cause. (Hobbes said that death row inmates have the right to try to escape from prison, because in his theory, the state was never authorized to execute people.)

Submitting to punishment only shows a strong fidelity to law. The link between submission to punishment and purity of motivation is, though a serious consideration theoretically, a tenuous connection practically. There is nothing in submitting to punishment that absolves a disobedient of acting for "personal gain or fame".

Moreover, submitting to punishment may be okay in a nearly just society, but the further one moves from that ideal, the weaker the connection becomes between effective civil disobedience and submission to punishment becomes.

So strip the labels entirely before applying them ruthlessly.

That said, let me talk to the heart of your argument, which is more about whether his actions are justified, rather than what they are called. I would say that Snowden's goals are twofold, in my mind. One goal is to expose a secretive and possibly illegal operation perpetrated by a government that is supposed to represent the will of its people, that was being kept secret despite the fact that publicly acknowledging it arguably does not compromise it as a means of stopping the organizations that it is purportedly targeting, and thus the secrecy was not essential to the operation, but rather was to keep people ignorant of the violation of their privacy.

The second goals is to encourage other people to come forward with information that they feel satisfies these criteria.

The third goal, which is really, in my mind, a non-goal, is to expose the government's harsh treatment of people who reveal government secrets.

Facing trial and potentially being incarcerated furthers only the third of these goals, which is not really even a goal. It hurts the second goal significantly. And it is largely irrelevant to the first goal, which is accomplished whether or not he is penalized. Successfully fleeing prosecution advances the second goal significantly, and only hurts the third goal. I don't see how the fleeing prosecution affects the first goal in either direction, which is the most important one.

So are his actions justified? I think, as do many others on this site, that the first two goals here are very important ones, and the third is not important, so in my opinion, yes, justified. I hope his conscience is clear. The other question, whether they are effective, is separate, and remains to be seen. I am not optimistic; violations of privacy cause no real substantial harm until they do, and at that point it is too late to protest. I haven't even switched away from google, and my parents don't even know who Edward Snowden is.

There are reams of paper that could be easily filled by 'laws' that were passed in a 'lawful' fashion, but that were contradictory to the Constitution of the United States, thereby making their effect a nullity at best. The Constitution is there to uphold the rights of the citizenry, but also to empower the government to uphold the law, while at the same time restraining the government such that it cannot violate the citizens' rights in doing so. See recently, Prop 8, DOMA, et al.

American Jurisprudence[1] tells us that laws in violation of the Constitution are not laws at all, and further, that no one is obligated to obey them, nor are any courts obligated to uphold them just because they were otherwise lawfully passed.

The assertion here is that the collection of private data by our government is in violation of said Constitution, and the legality of that law will likely hinge on the Supreme Court's decision on whether or not that data is indeed private or not. Thus far, we know that at least parts of the program in play have been deemed unconstitutional, and it seems that the NSA is performing them anyway. But as the government is empowered to govern through the consent of the governed, how can we have consented to a program we know nothing about? If its only discussion is done in secret?

In that regard, if we assume good faith on all parties, then we can say that at the very least, somebody needed to bring it to the attention of the public, and that person could also reasonably concede that the government in violation would have no subsequent authority to imprison or punish them, except falsely - for which I can't see even the most ardent civilly disobedient person willing to subject themselves to.

In summary though, I agree that civil disobedience is a term faultily applied here, but for perhaps the polar opposite of your reasoning.

[1] - http://constitution.org/uslaw/16amjur2nd.htm

Now the question to you is how do you define property rights and how exactly state legitimately acquires property? You cannot use the same argument shifted one generation back ("it was paid by previous users of the state") because it'll be circular argument. There must be some valid legitimate source of good produced by the state (who exactly, btw?) before anyone was taxed.

I believe there never was any legitimate source of state income which then can be "traded" with you for taxes. It was always violent extraction first, then questionable "service" after that. Because logically, if there were no violence in the first place, it would never be called "tax", but "payment". No one would ever talk about "giving fair share" and "contributing to society". If there was a private gathering of individuals who voluntarily raised money and made some service, they wouldn't need to make any propaganda about how good it is to pay. Because there wouldn't be any violence to justify with moral commandments.