Edward Snowden and the Dreyfus Affair

[WilliamPitt]

So Edward Snowden absconds with the "crown jewels" of the NSA and begins leaking portions of his cache to the Guardian in order to let people know about the depth and breadth of surveillance overreach in America.

He is vilified by some, championed by others...but in the fullness of time, it is generally agreed upon that we needed very much to know what Snowden was trying to tell us. The president's own NSA review panel, by announcing today that serious and substantive changes need to be made, has simultaneously agreed with and absolved Edward Snowden.

Mark Twain once said that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In Edward Snowden, I see the outlines of a similar affair involving a French soldier named Alfred Dryfus, who became the fulcrum of far larger forces within French society.

Historian Katrin Schultheiss: "The enduring significance of the Dreyfus Affair as a subject of historical inquiry lies in its manifest embodiment of multiple narratives and multiple strands of historical causality. It shows how longstanding beliefs and tensions can be transformed by particular circumstances and by particular individuals into a juggernaut that alters the political and cultural landscape for decades. In the interest of increasing our understanding of both past and present, the complexities of that transformation should be recognized and analyzed rather than packaged for moral or political usefulness."

Thoughts?

For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair

[frazzled]

1. Dreyfus did not do anything: someone else did it

It was a plot against him to accuse him of what someone else had done—namely, selling secrets to the Germans. And he was tried in a court-martial, wrongly found guilty, and unjustly sentenced to life imprisonment on an island.

The Dreyfus and Snowden affairs have nothing, zero, in common. Dreyfus never took or sold any state secrets, so I don't know how you can even compare these events. The controversy over Dreyfus was that he was unjustly accused, and because anti-Semitic sentiments in France allowed him to be blamed for the spying event.

Please read the book Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, by Louis Begley (Yale University Press).

Jeebus, historical comparisons are usually wrong, but at least they should have a shred of historical facticity attached to them.

[WilliamPitt]

2. For me,

it isn't a one-to-one comparison between Snowden and Dreyfus, but more about the forces unleashed within their respective societies over the affairs surrounding them.

...and I think its fair to say that Snowden has been unjustly accused of a few things, and now even the White House is saying things at the NSA has to change.

[frazzled]

3. I'm not asking for one-to-one

But the proverbial "apples and oranges" would be closer than this comparison. There is really nothing at all that connects these two historical cases. If the question in the Dreyfus case had been whether Dreyfus had been justified in stealing the state secrets, maybe there would be some sort of analogy to be drawn. But that was not the case at all. The controversy was entirely about a "wrong man" situation, and the anti-Semitism that led to it. It was not about the actual secrets that were revealed to the Germans.

As another thread today discusses, it's possible to be opposed both to the kind of large-scale mass theft of documents that Snowden undertook (which is not in question; only his motivation) and, at the same time, to be against the large-scale unfettered collection of data the NSA employs.

[randome]

4. Leaking classified documents about foreign communications adds nothing to the conversation.

Other than the fact that Ed Snowden wants to direct foreign policy for us.

Giving classified information to corporate media organizations -that have even LESS security than the NSA- contributes nothing.

The metadata collection has been going on since 2006 and everyone was quite happy with forgetting about it until Snowden yelled 'Fire!'
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