Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Books
  • Blog
  • Submissions
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Whom to Tell: Snowden

December 18, 2015

Edward Snowden first reported his ethical concerns to his superiors and colleagues over a period of six months. He even showed them evidence of alleged unconstitutional wrongdoing. And he deliberately chose not to blow the whistle to Congress because he viewed it as part of the problem.

“Those efforts were almost always rebuffed,” Snowden complained to Greenwald. “They would say this isn’t your job. Or you’d be told you don’t have enough information to make those kinds of judgments. You’d basically be told—not to worry.”

Snowden was more specific about his inside whistleblowing attempts in a 2014 interview with the Washington Post. He told reporters that while he was working for the National Security Agency as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee in Hawaii he had voiced his ethical and moral concerns to four superiors—two in NSA’s Technology Directorate and two in the agency’s Threat Operations Center, where he worked. In the Post interview, Snowden said he not only told the four superiors that he was concerned about the volume of data the NSA was collecting about unwitting Americans but he also showed them a color-coded NSA heat map that continuously tracked NSA electronic data collection on Americans . . . in real time.

After allegedly blowing the whistle to deaf ears for months, Snowden decided he had no choice but to go public. His logical leak targets were the Washington Post and the New York Times, two newspapers that commanded domestic and international respect and had a history of welcoming whistleblowers. The problem was that Snowden didn’t completely trust either newspaper. In his mind, they were not aggressive enough and were overly cautious in dealing with government wrongdoing.

In spite of his misgivings, however, Snowden eventually gave the Washington Post a set of classified documents describing PRISM, a top-secret NSA surveillance program (chapter 6 includes a description of PRISM). Snowden gave the paper seventy-two hours to publish a PRISM story, or he would offer his documents to another newspaper. His skepticism and mistrust of the Washington Post turned out to be well founded. After reviewing the PRISM files, the Post assembled a team of lawyers to consider the legal implications of publishing a story about the highly classified snooping program and to advise the paper about the legal risks of doing so.

According to Snowden, the attorneys made unreasonable demands, while issuing bone-chilling liability warnings to Post management. In the end, Snowden concluded that the newspaper—though not necessarily its reporters—was
paralyzed by fear. As Greenwald put it in his book No Place to Hide, Snowden was “livid that the Post had involved so many people, afraid that these discussions might jeopardize his security.”

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Booz Allen Hamilton, Congress, Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, NSA, PRISM, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Threat Operations Center

Recent Posts

  • On the Line Between Memory and Invention Lies the Story by Kimberly Olson Fakih December 11, 2022
  • Six Thoughts on Historical Fiction by Don Zancanella, author of A Storm in the Stars August 8, 2022
  • Seeing Red – an essay by Margaret Hermes, author of The Opposite of Chance (available in paperback March 2022) April 20, 2022
  • In the Shadows of The Unknown Woman by Brooks Hansen October 18, 2021
  • Thoughts On Writing IN THE FIELD By Rachel Pastan August 3, 2021
  • Old Enough to Have Succeeded, but Also to Have Failed: on writing the short stories You Would Have Told Me Not To by Chris Coake available in paperback July 27, 2021 July 26, 2021

Categories

  • Delphinium Authors
  • General
  • New Books
  • News

Tags

1954 acceptance speech artists Austria autobiographical Books Booz Allen Hamilton bottoming out celebrity demotic Dostoyevsky dysfunctional Edward Snowden fame fiction fiction-writing Fitgerald Fuhrer George Elliot Germany Hemingway Historical Fiction holocaust imagination James Frey Jewish Karen Silkwood literature Memoir memoirist Middlemarch Nabokov Nazi Nazis Nobel Prize novelist novelists NSA Reading redemption Sobibor style World War II writers writing

Archives

  • December 2022
  • August 2022
  • April 2022
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2013

© 2023 · Delphinium Books. All rights reserved.