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Wednesday, Jun 19, 2013 6:15 PM UTC

Snowden’s real crime: Humiliating the state

Here's the reason the NSA leaker will never be forgiven or forgotten: He stood up to power and embarrassed it

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Topics: Edward Snowden, NSA, NSA whistleblower, Whistelblower, Crime, Criminal Justice, Violence, Occupy Wall Street, slavery, Surveillance, Bradley Manning, States,

Snowden's real crime: Humiliating the state

As Edward Snowden’s name is bandied about — with a debate emerging over whether he is a hero or a criminal, whistle-blower or traitor — the words of philosopher Walter Benjamin, who wrote about the relationship between law and violence, come to mind. In his 1921 essay “The Critique of Violence,” Benjamin discusses the law’s goal to pursue the monopoly on violence:

The law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.

Here Benjamin restates one of the fundamental goals of classical liberal political philosophy, at least for philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, namely to eliminate the use of violence from everyone except the state and its duly appointed deputies. This is why in Locke, the state “agrees” to protect the rights of individuals in exchange for individuals giving up their right of retribution and punishment. The right of violence becomes the sole provenance of the state, whether through the death penalty, prisons or defense of the state itself.

However, as we also know, the state monopolizes and regulates the use of violence in the interests of those who have the most influence over the state: these wealthy men who decide the personification of the state. In the 1600s English North America, this would have been white Englishmen. In the 1910s, Benjamin was interested in the role of workers in challenging the monopoly of state violence.

Understood in this way, the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain ends. The antithesis between the two conceptions emerges in all its bitterness in face of a revolutionary general strike. In this, labor will always appeal to its right to strike, and the state will call this appeal an abuse, since the right to strike was not “so intended,” and take emergency measures.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, unions aroused a widespread secret admiration from a public that was weary of the state’s imposition. Today, as Occupy and other movements point out, the most influential are still the 1 percent — though the colors, sexes and sexualities of this privileged demographic have been somewhat expanded.

For example, Locke’s story of slavery is more accurately read as the story of colonialism, and eventually, imperialism. Strangers attack Englishmen. Englishmen fight back and win. They have the right to kill the strangers, but grant them their lives in exchange for their agreeing (at least implicitly) to be slaves. It is an apologia for the conquest of American Indians. But in the modern moment, it is a story that is replicated by Samuel Huntington in the “Clash of Civilizations.”

Back to Benjamin, who is thought to have committed suicide in Southern France as he was trying to flee from the Nazis. Here is another excerpt from “The Critique of Violence”:

The same may be more drastically suggested if one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.

How might this apply to Edward Snowden? Snowden’s crime, if you will, was that he disrupted the state’s ability to protect its monopoly of violence by exposing its widespread surveillance activities. He did this despite the widely claimed fears of interested parties that doing so would “undermine national security,” and in the face of the state’s insistence that these activities are justified and justifiably secret. In this sense, the fact that he challenged the prerogatives of the state itself makes his alleged crime so much more transgressive than, for example, merely lying to Congress about weapons of mass destruction, starting a war with a random nation in which tens of thousands die, or torturing rendered persons. None of these latter crimes are a threat to the state itself, and for that reason may be readily forgiven and forgotten. Manning and Snowden are, however, “great criminals” in that their actions embarrassed and undermined state power. They can never be forgiven or forgotten.

So, for a significant portion of the public, there seems to be an — open or perhaps grudging — admiration of Snowden because he has dared to challenge the state’s monopoly on violence. He challenges the state even as he acknowledges that the state will use every resource at its disposal to exact its revenge. We know from the tragic example of Aaron Swartz that challenging the Department of Justice will require endless resources, from millions of dollars of legal know-how and the filing of endless FOIA requests. We know from the example of John Kiriakou that even going through formal channels of whistle-blowing — including being “the first CIA officer to call waterboarding ‘torture’; to reveal that the CIA’s torture program was policy rather than a few rogue agents; and to say it was wrong” — will not stop the state, even a state led by a “transformative presidency,” from making sure that no one disturbs its monopoly on violence.

In this case, therefore, the violence of which present-day law is seeking in all areas of activity to deprive the individual appears really threatening, and arouses even in defeat the sympathy of the mass against law. By what function violence can with reason seem so threatening to law, and be so feared by it, must be especially evident where its application, even in the present legal system, is still permissible.

What makes Snowden so interesting is that it appears that he is an old-fashioned “believer” in the American project — someone who wanted to fight the good fight, to uphold American principles and ideals, as the U.S. government has long professed is also its mission. He contracted to work for defense contractors who in turn worked with the NSA, and for that reason did not begin his (short-lived) post-military career with misgivings about the American imperial project. As he got to see how its affairs were being misconducted, he continued to believe in “doing the right thing.” What also makes Snowden remarkable is his awareness that

the “US Persons” protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.

Whether or not one agrees with his actions, whether or not his politics and ideology mesh with the ideas of the right or the left, it will always be a remarkable sight to a see a lone person stand up to the Leviathan, composed as it is of its myriad eyes — all watching, waiting, to clamp down on any threat, no matter how trivial — to its relentless monopolistic pursuit of violence, and power.

Falguni A. Sheth

Falguni A. Sheth, a professor of philosophy and political theory at Hampshire College, writes about politics, race, and feminism at translationexercises.wordpress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @FalguniSheth. More Falguni A. Sheth.

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