WASHINGTON – It was a battle of national security giants. At stake: whether National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was justified in leaking a trove of documents to journalists around the world.
The jury: the audience of an Intelligence Squared debate on the topic Wednesday.
After a civil but heated debate among four high-profile panelists, the side arguing in favor of Snowden’s actions – Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and Snowden’s legal counsel, Ben Wizner – managed to convince more audience members than National Review editor Andrew McCarthy and former CIA Director James Woolsey, who argued against.
The debate took place months after Snowden released classified documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post and Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker who lives in Berlin. The documents contained information on top-secret NSA programs, including one monitoring phone calls of world leaders and another collecting metadata from Americans’ phone calls made in the U.S.
Although Ellsberg and Wizner were declared winners of the debate, the verdict does not reflect the opinion of the majority of Americans. Most Americans – 54 percent – disapprove of Snowdens actions, while only 31 percent approve, according to a CBS News poll conducted in January.
Ellsberg and Wizner argued that without Snowden, there would not have been as robust a debate over privacy and surveillance in the U.S.
“Edward Snowden is justified because he provided to journalists and through them to us information that we had a right to know and that we had a need to know,” Wizner said. “The debate we’ve had and that we’re still having would not have happened any other way.”
McCarthy and Woolsey said nothing could justify the national security threat caused by Snowden’s leak.
“Once you release material that had been classified or restricted for any reason, you release it to the world,” Woolsey said, citing several CIA undercover operations abroad that were thwarted as a result of terrorist and enemy organizations becoming aware of the programs through the leaked documents.
Snowden made the right decision to release the NSA documents to journalists, who have worked with their editors to decide which parts of the documents to release, Ellsberg and Wizner said.
McCarthy and Woolsey, on the other hand, said Snowden’s decision to leak the documents represented too much power concentrated in one person. It would have been more responsible for Snowden to go up the chain of command in order to expose the privacy issues he saw at the NSA, Woolsey said.
The debate was broadcast on NPR and live streamed on the Intelligence Squared website. The audience voted before and after the debate for the side they agreed with, and whichever side persuaded the greatest number of audience members to switch to their position was declared the winner. After the debate ended, those arguing Snowden was justified convinced 25 percent of the audience, while the side arguing against convinced only 6 percent.
