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The Great Divide | 117

Barack Obama’s presidency, there were six government employees who, as a matter of personal conscience, shared classified information they obtained from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and the U.S. Army with journalists. They were all convicted: Shamai Leibowitz in 2010, Chelsea Manning in 2013, John Kiriakou in 2013, Donald Sachtleben in 2013, Stephen Kim in 2014, and Jeffrey Sterling in 2014. Like Snowden, they claimed to be whistle-blowers informing the public of government abuses. But because they disclosed classified documents, they were dealt with as lawbreakers. All six were indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Sterling, a CIA officer who allegedly turned over a document to James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Times, was sentenced to forty-two months. The most severe sentence was meted out to Private Manning, whom an army court sentenced to thirty-five years in a military stockade, as noted earlier.

The prison time that others received did not go unnoticed by Snowden. He had been following the Manning case since 2012. In fact, he posted about it shortly before he began stealing far more damaging documents than Manning had. He would therefore likely have been aware that by revealing state secrets he had sworn to protect, he would be risking imprisonment unless, unlike Manning, he fled the country. His motives, no matter how noble they might be, would not spare him—any more than they spared the other six—from determined federal prosecution.

The view of those on the Snowden side of the divide is grounded not in legal definitions but in a broader notion of morality. Snowden’s supporters do not accept that the law should be applied to Snowden in this fashion. A writer for The New Yorker termed it “an act of civil disobedience.” His supporters argue that Snowden had a moral imperative to act, even if it meant breaking the law. They fully accept his view that he had a higher duty to protect citizens of all countries in the world from, as he put it, “secret pervasive surveillance.” That higher duty transcended any narrower legal definitions of lawbreaking. Ben Wizner, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented Snowden since October 2013, argues that Snowden’s taking of classified documents was an “act of conscience” that overrode any legal constraints because it “revitalized

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