Edward Snowden Violating Individual Rights

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The interpretation of power described in laws, and the right and wrongs of these laws are different in the eyes of many people. One of the examples of this is our privacy rights under the Constitution, which took a major spin after the events of 911. The government, in order to prevent those terrible events from occurring again, created new laws and programs to monitor our activity and content. There is a moral debate on whether these programs are violating our rights. Some people even act on trying to create awareness to this wrongs of these programs, Edward Snowden is one of them. On June 5, 2013 The Guardian reported a case about a top secret program issued by U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). The order was allowing …show more content…
They claim themselves whistleblowers and defend their actions as whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is publicly exposing what they believed to be wrongdoing in the U.S. government and military with the hope of stopping it (Pg 5). GAP (Government Accountability Project) is a national whistleblower protection and advocacy organization which noted that Snowden met the legal test required to be considered a whistleblower. They claim “what he has revealed evidences illegality of the highest order with a number of federal laws being blatantly violated” (Pg 6). However, because he was a national security employee he was not protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 which applied to most federal workers. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 is a law that protects federal government employees in the U.S. from retaliatory action for voluntarily disclosing information about dishonest or illegal activities occurring a government organization. Instead he was subject to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), which only allowed national security whistleblowers to release classified information to either the inspector of general of a federal agency or a member of a congressional intelligence committee (Pg 6). Snowden went public though, allowing his actions to possibly be a violation of the federal Espionage Act. Reporter Greenwald states that even Snowden would concede that “his actions constitute some sort of breach of the law” (Pg 6). Greenwald notes “Snowden made his choice based on basic theories of civil disobedience.” Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government. It is a symbolic violation of the law rather than a rejection of the system as a
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