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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Edward Snowden’s Julian Assange is an Unfamiliar Julian Assange There is an unquestionable contradiction between Snowden’s opposition to Assange’s arrest and the rhetorical games he plays with Assange’s character in his memoir, Permanent Record. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks’ former editor Julian Assange have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, they share important similarities: both are perceived as dangerous enemies by the United States government, and both have been documentary subjects of filmmaker Laura Poitras. On the other hand, they clearly disagree when it comes to the means of achieving government transparency and accountability. After all, if Snowden had agreed with Assange about publishing practices, it is likely that he would have followed Chelsea Manning’s example and sent the NSA documents he collected and disclosed in 2013 to WikiLeaks. The recent publication of Permanent Record, Snowden’s 336-page memoir, takes the Snowden-Assange dynamic to new—and problematic—heights. When Assange was forcibly dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in early 2019, Snowden was among the leading voices condemning the arrest of the WikiLeaks founder, calling it a dangerous assault on journalism. But in his memoir, Snowden uses rhetorical tricks to present Assange and WikiLeaks as his deceitful and irresponsible foils in a blatant and seemingly self-serving effort to highlight his own trustworthiness and accountability. Indeed, reviewers at the Washington Post and New Yorker have already seized upon Snowden’s anti-Assange rhetoric to serve their own anti-Assange agendas. Proponents of press freedom have become accustomed to Pentagon and national security state attacks on Assange, but Snowden’s puzzling claims about the white-haired Australian and his transparency organization are exceptionally dangerous because they come from an otherwise highly respectable and trustworthy source, and at a time when there is otherwise a virtual media blackout on WikiLeaks. To be sure, Snowden deserves recognition as a courageous whistleblower and as a global champion of privacy rights, but in Permanent Record, Snowden appears willing to use a political prisoner for personal gain, deliberately distorting the truth and perpetuating the imperialistic propaganda that threatens not only Assange’s health but also his very life—just like the corporate media and national security state he exposed in 2013. Permanent Record by Edward SnowdenSnowden first distinguishes himself from Assange in a discussion of hacker handles, or online pseudonyms used by hackers so that they can conduct their online affairs without detection by authorities. When Snowden first made contact with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, he used a series of disposable handles, such as “Cincinnatus” and “Citizenfour,” so that he could hide his true identity until he was confident that he could trust them with his cache of classified NSA documents. “The final name I chose for my correspondence,” Snowden explains, “was ‘Verax,’ Latin for ‘speaker of truth,’ in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called ‘Mendax’ (‘speaker of lies’)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.” Snowden’s play on Assange’s youthful handle implies not only that Assange is deceitful but also that Assange intends to be deceitful. This insinuation is curious, given that WikiLeaks’ has published over 10 million documents, all of which have been authenticated. Nevertheless, Snowden’s remark is, ironically, not meant to be truthful; instead, it is meant to establish a rhetorical heuristic between Snowden-as-trustworthy and Assange-as-untrustworthy. Assange took inspiration for his handle from Horace, a Roman lyric poet from the first century BCE whose writings became extremely popular during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe. Enlightenment philosophers found in Horace’s writings many Latin phrases, such as sapere aude (“dare to know”) and carpe diem (“seize the day”) that proved useful for their time. Following the Enlightenment philosophers whom he admired so much, Assange adapted one of Horace’s Latin catchphrases to create his online identity. “Every hacker has a handle,” Assange writes in Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography, “and I took mine from Horace’s splendide mendax—nobly untruthful, or perhaps ‘delightfully deceptive.’ I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity.” From his own perspective, Assange chose the handle “Mendax” not because he wished to “speak lies” and deceive the public, as Snowden’s interpretation suggests; rather, Assange chose the handle “Mendax” because it described what he conceived of himself doing, namely, disguising his identity to more effectively speak the truth. “Untruthful” applies not to the content of his speech but to his identity as the speaker. After all, a true statement is true regardless who says it, and if true statements can be made more easily by hiding one’s identity, then the motto splendide mendax, to be untruthful for a good cause, is perfectly fitting. Snowden’s rhetoric, therefore, reveals his ignorance of the true meaning of Assange’s handle. By willfully ignoring the origins and connotations of Assange’s “Mendax,” Snowden transforms Assange into the vicious foil against which he measures his own virtue. Snowden distinguishes himself from Assange a second time, in his explanation for why he chose not to publish the NSA disclosures through WikiLeaks. Describing the WikiLeaks of 2010—which he claims “operated in many respects like a traditional publisher”—Snowden praises Assange’s organization for partnering with The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel in its reporting on the documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. According to Snowden’s history, however, WikiLeaks lost its way after publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the U.S. State Department Cables. “Due to government backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted.” Because Snowden had already resolved to make sure his NSA documents were redacted to protect sensitive information, he concluded that WikiLeaks’ “switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs.” The first problem with Snowden’s account is that he offers an inaccurate and superficial history of WikiLeaks’ publication practices. An accurate generalized history of WikiLeaks’ publishing goes something like this: Before the Manning leaks, WikiLeaks largely self-published unredacted materials. But in working with corporate media outlets to publish the Afghanistan War Logs, WikiLeaks came under criticism from the U.S. government, corporate media, and other imperialistic detractors for failing to redact sensitive information. So, when it came to publishing the next batch of Manning documents, the Iraq War Logs, Assange allowed redactions and agreed to hold back a portion of the documents for extra review. A similar policy was used for the Cablegate publications (though, the State Department cables were eventually published in after when a foolish Guardian journalist disclosed the password to the document archive in his book). Snowden also ignores the fact that the corporate media journalists and editors that WikiLeaks worked with to bring us the news from Manning’s leaked documents were quick to throw him under the bus once they were finished profiting from his document cache. One only need to read the 8,000-word screed that then-New York Times editor Bill Keller published as a means of distancing himself and the “paper of record” from, as he puts it, a smelly, rogue Assange. Not only does he reduce Assange to a “source,” Keller even goes so far as to out Chelsea Manning as the likely culprit for the leak, thus violating the core principles of journalistic ethics. Such inept, negligent, and self-serving behavior on the part of Keller and others who benefited from Assange’s work only to turn their backs on him is completely absent from Snowden’s account. The second problem with Snowden’s account is that he completely disregards the principles that inform WikiLeaks’ publication practices. Assange generally opposes redacting documents for two reasons. On the one hand, Assange views redaction as a form of censorship, “a rather dangerous compromise” and “a very, very dangerous slippery slope.” He observes that corporate news media frequently redact documents not to minimize harm but to either protect people in power from embarrassing revelations or protect themselves from government backlash. In Assange’s view, such self-censorship is the main problem with contemporary news media, and he does not want WikiLeaks to go down that path. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
Whew -- complicated. Care to summarize?
#2. To: NeoconsNailed (#1)
Snowden has distanced himself from Assange, perhaps because he wants to return to the US. (Some claim that Snowden and Greenwald are CIA assets.)
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