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It is like something out of a spy thriller. On May 20th, Booz Allen technical assistant Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong carrying multiple computers that contained secret data from the National Security Agency (NSA). After leaking information about NSA spying activities to the British newspaper The Guardian, Snowden went public on June 9th and set off an international incident, as the United States government charged him with espionage, willful communication of classified intelligence to unauthorized persons, and theft of government property and demanded his extradition from Hong Kong. Snowden managed to slip out of the country and after residing for over five weeks in Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted him a one year asylum on August 1st. Last week, in part because of the Snowden incident, President Obama cancelled a planned summit next month with Putin, leading some to speculate whether the U.S. and Russian governments are returning to a Cold War mindset.
This brief will break down Snowden’s run from the U.S. government, which has taken up much of the summer, a brief overview of the state of U.S.-Russian relations, and then will examine the implications created by this messy international incident.
Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.
Who is Edward Snowden?
Just glancing at his past, one would not expect Edward Snowden to be the man behind one of the biggest international incidents of 2013. A high school dropout, Snowden attempted to become part of the U.S. Army Reserve Special Forces in 2002, but dropped out after the army says that he did not complete training. Snowden briefly served as a security guard with the NSA at a covert location and found his technical expertise in demand at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked from 2007-2009, where he then began working for the NSA as a contractor. Three months prior to his flight to Hong Kong, Snowden was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton as a technical assistant/infrastructure analyst – the governments asserts the former, Snowden asserts the latter – that was contracted to perform work for the NSA in Hawaii. According to Snowden, he became uncomfortable with the surveillance activities conducted by the U.S. government and believed that President Obama would clean up these activities, as he pledged to do in his 2008 presidential campaign. However, Snowden says that he quickly saw President Obama giving the same latitude, if not more, to NSA surveillance activities than former President George W. Bush.
To get away from his job in Hawaii, which was paying him more than $100,000 a year, Snowden put in a request to be treated for epilepsy and then made his dash for Hong Kong. Hong Kong might an odd location for a whistleblower to go to and Snowden admits that his first choice was Iceland, which he said shared his political and social values. However, Snowden feared that the U.S. government would pressure Iceland to hand him over, so Hong Kong was a better place, as he felt there would be more difficulty in America pressuring Hong Kong and Chinese officials to do something with him. While in Hong Kong, Snowden granted interviews with The Guardian and began revealing the extent of U.S. surveillance and intelligence gathering operations. The Chicago Tribune of August 7th notes that Snowden revealed that the NSA has a program known as PRISM, which gives the agency access to Internet data from companies like Facebook and Google. Also, Snowden was critical of how the government used the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to sign off on gathering metadata, which recorded the time, duration, and telephone numbers carried by service providers like Verizon. After the U.S. government filed espionage charges against Snowden on June 14th they requested his extradition, but Hong Kong and Chinese officials allowed Snowden to leave the country on June 23rd and fly to Moscow, Russia. U.S. officials were irate at this development, but Hong Kong officials argue that the American request to hand over Snowden did not meet the necessary legal requirements for an extradition and since he had committed no crimes on their territory that he was free to leave. WikiLeaks has taken credit for paying for Snowden’s upkeep and travel during his run from the American government.
When Snowden arrived in Russia he literally became a man without a country as the U.S. government revoked his passport, which left him without a feasible travel document. It was rumored that Snowden was looking to head to Ecuador, which has provided diplomatic asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. In fact, Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, England since June of last year (Assange is fleeing questioning by Swedish authorities on sexual assault charges). The Ecuadorian government seemed amenable to allowing him travel, but quickly went back on its offer. Snowden allegedly sought asylum in up to twenty-six countries, but these efforts failed to get him out of the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Countries that Snowden appealed to, like the Netherlands, largely rejected his asylum request because he was not present inside of their borders to file the request, which is mandated by law.
American authorities attempted to convince the Russian government that it was best to hand Snowden over, but President Putin was rather lukewarm to these overtures. At first, he claimed that Snowden was an “unwanted Christmas gift” and wished that he found a destination. As the Brookings Institution pointed out on August 9th Putin also told the press that if Snowden sought asylum he would need to quit releasing information that was harmful to the American government. However, on August 1st Putin decided to grant Snowden’s plea for asylum for one year, thereby giving temporary shelter and allowing Snowden to leave the Sheremetyevo airport after more than five weeks. American officials are furious and some wonder if Snowden is leaking NSA information to Russia in return for asylum. Some even speculate that he was not in the Sheremetyevo airport for the last several weeks and was instead sheltered by Russia’s FSB, which is the modern day version of the KGB.
Tension in U.S.-Russian Relations
In 2009, Vice-President Joe Biden announced in Munich, Germany that the Obama administration wanted to “reset” relations with the Russians. The Obama administration believed that the U.S.-Russian relations had significant deteriorated under President George W. Bush, who angered the Russians by supporting uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, cancelled the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so that the U.S. could pursue missile defense work, and then planned installing a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which Russia interpreted as a way to deter their nuclear arsenal (the U.S. government argued that the missile defense shield was for protection from an Iranian nuclear strike). As the Council on Foreign Relations notes on August 8th, the early years of the Obama presidency showed promise toward this “reset” was Russia improved its cooperation with the United States concerning Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. also supported Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, eliminated plans for a missile defense system for the Czech Republic and Poland, and signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the Russian government, which went into effect in 2011.
However, U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated for the last several years. First, it is alleged by some foreign policy experts that President Putin loathes President Obama and does not think very highly of him. Second, Russia and the U.S. are locked on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, with the Russians openly funneling weapons and support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Obama administration favoring a joint international effort to make Assad leave and possibly provide weapons to moderate elements of the Syrian opposition. It should be noted that Russia was largely an opponent of ousting the late Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Although they went along with a Security Council resolution authorizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to set up a no fly zone to protect civilians in Libya, the Russians have since argued that they were duped, since the no fly zone became a way for NATO to actively assist Libyan rebels in toppling the Gaddafi regime. Extempers should not that Russia is applying this principle to some extent in Syria and it is not likely that they will support another UN resolution that would give NATO similar privileges there. Russia also disagrees with the Obama administration’s view of the Syrian conflict, arguing that the alternative that would emerge if Assad was overthrown would be worse. The Russian government also has extensive ties with the Assad family. The Obama administration is trying to convince the Russians to change course, but Russia appears unwilling to do so and it leaves the U.S. is a dangerous position of possibly engaging Russia in a proxy war in Syria, along with Iran and Hezbollah, if it attempts to arm and actively assist Syrian rebel groups.
There is also the question of human rights in Russia. Vladimir Putin remains a popular figure in Russia and is seen by the masses as someone who restored stability to Russia after the chaotic 1990s, where the “shock therapy” (a.k.a. massive privatization) of the former Soviet economy sold Russian state assets to domestic and international investors for a mere fraction of what they were worth and Russia’s outlying regions like Chechnya demanded independence. Nevertheless, Putin’s government does not care much for genuine democracy and it has imprisoned opponents like oil tycoon Mikhail Khordorkovsky, who was critical of Putin and found himself arrested, stripped of much of his wealth, convicted of tax evasion in 2005, and then subsequently found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering to keep him behind bars until 2017. Human Rights Watch is also critical of the Russian government in its efforts to restrict the efforts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), undermine freedom of assembly and expression, and imprisoning migrants in horrible conditions. Conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan offers an interesting theory that without communism, Russia is moving back towards an Eastern Orthodox conservative mindset and this has some proof in Russia passing a law this June banning the spread of “propaganda” about homosexuals to minors and fining participants in gay pride parades. Anti-gay sentiment in Russia has led to attacks on openly gay individuals and there is a grassroots movement to boycott the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi over this issue. President Obama has embraced the LGBT cause while in office and has criticized countries that do not offer protections to homosexuals. While President Obama has refused to endorse an Olympic boycott, he is facing pressure to do more about the situation from domestic gay activists. Boycotting his upcoming summit with Mr. Putin might be a way for him to express solidarity with this part of his base without wading into the waters of an Olympic boycott, which would be divisive domestically and lead to some unfavorable comparisons with President Jimmy Carter, who boycotted the Soviet hosted 1980 Summer Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Finally, as Haaretz points out on August 7th, Putin signed a law last year that banned American adoptions of Russian children, which was seen as retaliation for the United States sanctioning eighteen Russians for human rights violations. In fairness, though, this was linked to reports of child abuse of Russian adopted children and after one unfortunate incident where an adoptive parent sent an adopted child back to Russia alone on a plane. Some commentators, though, linked the adoption ban to the progress of the gay rights movement in the United States and the legalization of gay marriage in more states.
Implications
The immediate implication of President Obama’s decision not to have a summit with Putin next month is that it could cast a chill over U.S.-Russian relations. However, some analysts argue that does not really matter for the Russians. The Los Angeles Times of August 7th noted that the Russians refused to answer President Obama’s call for making deeper cuts to strategic nuclear weapons in his address in Berlin in June. Also, Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies, told the Council on Foreign Affairs on August 8th that the Russians aren’t very concerned about arms reductions because their defense strategy calls for elevating the status of nuclear weapons. USA Today of August 7th also pointed out that Russia is not focused on making the United States happy at the present time. For example, Russia is monitoring its interests in the Middle East very closely and is also working to solidify economic and geopolitical links with Europe and China. The United States hardly appears on the radar screen. Worse, the United States is viewed unfavorably by some Russians for taking advantage of the country in the aftermath of the Cold War and extending NATO’s boundaries through former Soviet republics and blame the United States for being too cozy with the Russian leadership. Also, the next G-20 summit is going to be in St. Petersburg next month, so President Obama will still be traveling to Russia, making the cancellation of the recent summit more symbolic than anything else. Extempers should take careful note of Russia’s geopolitical stance in their speeches on this subject and should make sure to clarify that Russia is not overly concerned with President Obama’s present actions.
Another angle that extempers need to consider regarding the topic of Snowden and his impact on U.S.-Russian relations is that the American and Russian governments view the Snowden situation differently. For the United States government, Snowden is a traitor who divulged government secrets without authorization and should be treated like a common criminal. The Russians, though, as Politico points out on August 7th, view the situation as an intelligence issue that is akin to the days of the Cold War. The United States has given asylum to thousands of Russian citizens during the Obama presidency, as other U.S. administrations have also done, and some of these people Russia has demanded back to answer for crimes committed in disputed regions like Chechnya. Politico also notes that America has refused to give Russia espionage subjects like Colonel Alexander Poteyev, who fled to the U.S. in 2010 after tipping off the U.S. government about a Russian sleeper cell. Those sleeper agents were arrested and exchanged for four alleged American spies that Russia was holding. This exchange occurred in Vienna, Austria. Russia convicted Poteyev in absentia of high treason and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. However, the U.S. has no plans of handing him over, even as nationalist Russian lawmakers argue they should be willing to do so for Snowden. Julian Ioffe, expert on Russia, writes in the New Republic of August 7th (in an article that has some foul language) that America has backed Putin into a corner with no alternatives. Extempers would be wise to explain that the American government should consider a swap to get Snowden from Russia if they really want him. Putin cannot afford to lose face with Russian nationalists, so if the U.S. wants Snowden badly enough they need to give Putin an offer that he cannot refuse.
In domestic terms, Snowden has aroused the passions of privacy advocates and opponents of civil disobedience. The Hill on August 7th reported that Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and an important participant in the 1960s civil rights movement, compared Snowden favorably to Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and said that he was “appealing to a higher law.” After those comments were published, though, Lewis was quick to backtrack and say that he did not support what Snowden did. Potential Republican presidential contender Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has also compared Snowden to Martin Luther King, Jr. Paul, like his father, represents more of a libertarian wing of the Republican Party that is growing in strength. A vigorous defense of privacy rights might help the Republican Party appeal to younger Americans and libertarian voters and go a long way towards crafting a new winning coalition. For his part, President Obama already seems to be ceding ground on the NSA debate. The National Journal of August 9th writes that President Obama announced on Friday that he will push Congress to rewrite Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which greatly aids the Federal Bureau of Investigation in gathering information during investigations by reducing the threshold required for probable cause, will assemble an independent commission made up of intelligence, civil liberties, and privacy and tech sector experts to review current surveillance efforts and issue a preliminary report in sixty days, and that the NSA will have a high-ranking civil liberties official. Another potential move is to have a civil liberties advocate before the FISA court, which could add an opposing voice when the government seeks authorization for surveillance exercises. President Obama has said that Snowden is not the reason for these reforms, as they were considered earlier in his administration, but there is little doubt that the public outcry over Snowden’s revelations have forced the administration to act. The Washington Post on August 9th reinforces this point by saying that previous efforts to get the administration to discuss surveillance activities went nowhere before Snowden. For example, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) was stonewalled when he asked the NSA how many Americans were having their information collected by the agency. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Wyden in March that the NSA had not collected data on Americans and Wyden and fellow Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) were never given the FISA Court’s legal opinions concerning their interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. These examples demonstrate a wall that legislators were constantly running into before Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA’s data collection efforts. Extempers would be wise to recount these incidents if they draw a question pertaining to how important Snowden has been in the current civil liberties debate.
In closing, the Snowden situation will not disappear like some other issues extempers will face during the 2013-2014 season. Snowden will have a year to plan his next move in Russia and his presence might be an embarrassment for President Obama when he visits the G20 summit if Snowden appears on Russian television on the same day. Snowden might be giving away national defense secrets to Russia and China, endangering the United States, or he might reveal even more embarrassing information about the administration’s civil liberties record, thereby alienating younger, more civil liberties-conscious voters. Snowden may not avoid prosecution forever, but his revelations have placed civil liberties and constitutional protections back in the forefront of the national security debate. The result may be a more restrained role for intelligence services going forward and a potential issue that both major party presidential candidates will have to address in 2016.