The Snowden and Putin Show

When Edward Snowden’s leaks about alleged NSA and GCHQ were first released, the rogue contractor found a wide range of defenders. From sections of the left and right, the revelations were seized upon as a demonstration that security surveillance had become a dark force of oppression. ‘The national security apparatus is a cover for reading our private emails’, ran the general line.

Yet, like Julian Assange before him, as time has gone on and as Snowden’s supporters have learnt more about him, some of that initial support has begun to slip away. His strange migration from Hong Kong to Moscow airport, and then to temporary asylum in Russia, certainly caused some questions to surface. Meanwhile, some of us continued to maintain that whatever the occasional overreaches of the various intelligence agencies, and doubtless though it was that there are aspects of every government department that could do with reform, the answer to the challenges was never full-scale sabotage of the UK-US worldwide lead in communications intelligence. Snowden set back the US-UK advantage, and massively enabled challengers of the West in one fell hack.

And now Snowden himself has cropped up again. The timing could hardly be worse for him, or better for his new protectors, for Vladimir Putin’s hunger for further portions of other peoples’ territory continues apace. Not content with Crimea, there is now a potentially catastrophic stand-off occurring as Russian troops amass and skirmish on Ukraine’s borders. With the world starting to realise what type of man Vladimir Putin is, what a strange time for Edward Snowden to crop back up and offer the President support via a soft underarm lob.

Earlier this week on the Kremlin’s worldwide propaganda channel, Russia Today, Putin performed a Questions and Answers session. And one of the questioners, by video-link, was from none other than Edward Snowden. “Does Russia intercept, store, or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?” Snowden asked his protector, “and do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance?”

This question was handled deftly by Mr. Putin; “Mr. Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy, I used to be working for an intelligence service; we are going to talk one professional language”, Putin replied through a translator, to laughter and clapping from his live audience. “Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law. You have to get court permission to stalk a particular person. We don’t have mass system of such interception. And according to our law it cannot exist… Our special services, thank God, are strictly controlled by the society and the law, and are regulated by the law.” And so he went, on and on.

Although plenty of people in the West seem not to realise this, we are in an information war and a values war at the moment – one in which Crimea and Ukraine are, simply, one front. Showing a continual ability to shoot ourselves in the foot, it is a war in which the Putins of this era might yet win. Ordinarily you would have thought that in a battle between the democracies and the KGB thug, the latter would never stand a chance in the court of public opinion. Wrong. Assisted by the latest manifestation of the useful idiot, and with the public unaware of who protects their way of life or why, totalitarians like Putin probably have a better shot at a decent hearing today than at any time in decades.