Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency, obtained access to classified national security documents and leaked the sensitive intelligence contained therein to a British newspaper, The Guardian. He did so in order to expose a “spy” program – discharged by the NSA since 2006 under congressional oversight and legal counsel – with which he philosophically disagreed.
Snowden took a legal oath when he chose to work for the NSA that the information to which he would be made privy would remain classified, but he consciously broke that oath according to the dictates of his personal conscience and despite his sworn loyalty to commit no such act. Snowden’s act epitomizes the unfortunate ignorance on which we base our relationship to our government: his intentions were to cultivate a distrust in and skepticism of even the most basic mechanisms of government, and the most basic answers in life, and disrupt space for loyalty.
Philosopher Josiah Royce wrote that loyalty is “the heart of all virtues, the central duty amongst all the duties.” Loyalty produces a will to believe which imbues with meaning subsequent moral acts and which, when absent in the makeup of citizens, leads to a pernicious cynicism about their relationship to their government.
There is, moreover, according to Royce, a loyalty to the very idea of loyalty which we must demonstrate in order to be virtuous citizens. We must recognize that loyalty is a sort of moral bonding agent, and reserve space for loyalty’s role in gluing together and keeping coherent our most deeply felt virtues and duties. Loyalty is the core of morality in that loyalty gives morality a purpose to serve.
If the cause is good, then, that which destroys our legitimate loyalty to it cannot be. Worse yet, that which destroys our loyalty to the principle of loyalty itself cannot be called good.
Trust in and loyalty to one’s government is good for reasons too vast to mention but in passing here: the mere fact of government’s existence enables our having freedom of worth, in that it enables us to escape a Hobbesian dystopia where the right of my fist doesn’t stop at your face. If we are not loyal to our government, if we do not trust it, the result is a breakdown in the very stuff with which our freedom is entangled.
Snowden’s act not only broke his legal contract with the institution he represented; it undermines the notion that the practice of loyalty itself, the idea of loyalty as a morality- and virtue-builder in citizens, is not necessary to the good life and is, in fact, antithetical to the good relationship between the citizen and his government.
Snowden’s effect on our loyalty to loyalty, as it were – on our will to “aid and furth[er] … loyalty in [our] fellows” – was destructive. He sought to destroy our will to believe in the importance of loyalty’s place.
If, among us, government workers find it permissible to break their oaths of secrecy and loyalty as their personal consciences dictate – oaths they expressly affirmed and correlative obligations they willingly agreed to discharge when they chose to work for the government – and to exploit their security clearances, attendant upon which is an implicit oath to protect the information to which they have been afforded unique access, who is to say what might be revealed, and to whom, and at what cost to us?
The fatal irony is that, for all the abuses of power and public trust Snowden leveled against the NSA for operating its “spy” program, Snowden himself abused a power, with which we entrusted him when we permitted his access to classified information, and for that he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It is true, in the end, that it is for people such as Snowden that we should distrust government. But not for the reasons Snowden or his sympathizers would have us think.
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