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The Great Divide | 125

Americans, including members of Congress, about the proper role
of the FISA court, including whether it should conduct its business
in secret. If Snowden had released only these two documents that
related to unwarranted domestic surveillance and other possible vio-
lations of the law by the NSA, it would be difficult for any reasonable
person not to see his actions as a potentially valuable public service.
Indeed, additional safeguards were necessary in an age in which new
technologies enabled mass surveillance of the public. As the three-
judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would later
find, Congress had not intended Section 215 of the Patriot Act to
be used to justify the bulk collection of American records. If he had
limited his illegal downloading to the few documents about bulk col-
lection, it would be more difficult to argue that he was not a whistle-
blower in the spirit if not the letter of the law, and even a hero in
the struggle to preserve our civil liberties. But in fact, Snowden took
a great many other secret documents that did not bear on the civil
liberties of Americans. He claimed he was acting on behalf of citizens
in foreign countries by exposing the NSA’s and the CIA’s spying
operations abroad, but that same claim could also be made by any
espionage agent stealing U.S. secrets to benefit the people of another
country.

As a result, the Snowden case produced a great divide in the
American appreciation of him. On one hand, he has been almost
universally lauded and lionized by what might be seen as the main-
stream media, by numerous academics, and even, as we have seen,
by members of Congress. The journalists who assisted him, Green-
wald, Poitras, and Gellman, have been celebrated for the roles they
played in bringing Snowden’s revelations to the public and received
the 2014 Polk Award for national security reporting. The Post and
The Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined
documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

In other circles, the reaction has been very different. American
and British intelligence officials, senior members of the Obama
administration, and members of the oversight committees of Con-
gress do not view Snowden as a hero or even an authentic whistle-
blower. Instead, they see him as a betrayer of secrets who willfully
brought damage to the United States and benefits to its adversar-

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