WHAT THE PAPERS SAY: Whistleblower puts Obama in a fix

lePANAMA’S current fixation with alleged government wiretapping is a puff of dust compared to the storm that has erupted in the United States and Britain over the extent to which snoops have infiltrated phone and internet services including Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

Charles Laurence wrote  in The Week, on Monday, June 10 under the heading, Whistle Blower Snowden in a fix: but so is this ruthless President:

EDWARD SNOWDEN, a 29-year-old former CIA technician who had been working for US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was last night identified by The Guardian as the man who leaked the details of the US government's mass snooping into phone records and internet communications.
The newspaper, which broke the story that has created a 'Big Brother' uproar in America and Britain, explained that Snowden had asked to be identified.
His identification is the latest twist in a story that has removed any doubt in the minds of most Americans that, in the era of the War on Terror, there is any substance left in their Fourth Amendment "right to privacy".
Given the fate of Bradley Manning, the US Army corporal now on trial for his life after being identified as the source of secret embassy cables passed to WikiLeaks, the first question is why Snowden should even think of sticking his head above the parapet? As he acknowledges, there is a considerable chance it will be shot off.
A foreign affairs analyst in Washington claimed yesterday to have overheard four men at the capital's Dulles airport talking about an intelligence conference they had been attending, saying that both leaker and reporter should be "disappeared".
"How do you feel about that?" The Guardian asked Snowden.
"The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me," he replied.
The second question is this: how is Obama going to deal with Snowden when his information so strongly suggests that everything the President's critics have been saying about his hypocrisy in dealing with Bush's legacy of the "security state" – domestic spying, torture, rendition, limbo in Guantanamo Bay, lawless killing by drones – is true?
For more than five years now, Obama has got away with talking one policy while following another. Among the most shocking revelations has been that his Justice Department placed blanket taps on 20 telephones at the AP news agency in a bid to catch the government officials who had leaked details of a CIA anti-terror operation in the Yemen.
That was the most aggressive raid on the media since the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Obama's Justice Department has now pursued six prosecutions of government officials for giving information to the press, more than in all seven Presidencies since the Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that journalists were not exempt under the First Amendment from being summoned to give evidence in criminal cases.
Journalists in America are held in even greater contempt than politicians, so Obama could fairly safely gamble on the majority of his countrymen not caring too deeply about that.
But the story from Snowden is altogether different. It was everyone's telephone records from Verizon that were secretly seized and analysed: it is everyone's e-mails and social media connections that are being run through those algorithm programs on National Security Agency computers in the operation called Prism.
In short, it is not just Ahmed and Igor's e-mails that are being tracked, but Tom, Dick and Harry's too.
The government's defence is that this is legal and justifiable in the War on Terror. The content of telephone calls is protected by the Fourth Amendment, the Justice Department argues; all they are doing is counting the number and duration of calls you make, and to whom. If they think you are up to something bad, they will get the proper permits from the courts to listen in.
When he faced the press on Friday, Obama insisted that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls". He also described Prism as a "modest encroachment" on individual privacy which was necessary to protect the nation against terror attacks. "Folks", he said, had to decide whether they wanted to be safe, or private.
The trouble with this argument is now much the same for Obama as it was for Bush: it depends on citizens trusting their government and its spooks. It is the old saw – picked up by William Hague on the other side of the Atlantic yesterday – of "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear".
But more and more Americans are growing reluctant to trust Obama and his team.
That puts Obama in a quandary: if he follows the precedents set so far under his command and pursues Edward Snowden to his probable fate of a lifetime in the windowless hell of a SuperMax prison, he looks more like the ruthless, compromised, secrecy-obsessed chief executive than ever.
But if he backs off, he may be seen to be conceding that Snowden was justified in his claim to have been not betraying his country but exposing the excesses of its government.
Becoming visible, claiming heroic status and hoping for safe asylum was probably the last best chance for Snowden. By proclaiming the dangers – "I could be rendered by the CIA, I could have people come after me" – he is making it harder for Obama's men to get away with the extreme retribution that is becoming their trademark.