Imagine a heaping plate of spaghetti teetering on the edge of a table. A few strands of pasta have already fallen to the floor, and now the whole darn thing seems a breath away from toppling. This is basically the situation faced by the intelligence and political communities in dealing with Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old National Security Agency contractor responsible for what some call one of the biggest intelligence leaks in American history.
Snowden revealed that the NSA collects data from millions of Americans, and has the cooperation of several of the country’s largest internet and telecom companies. He also disclosed that during the 2009 G-20 summit, Great Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ monitored delegates’ phones and tried to get their passwords.
And Snowden now, in effect, says you ain’t seen nothing yet: “All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” he said in a Q&A.
But these truths are not exactly unnerving Washington. Indeed, as The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Green notes, consensus has at long last come to Congress.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.