What's the Difference Between Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg?
How we answer may say more about us than it does about either of them.
Garance Franke-Ruta
Jun 15 2013, 9:21 AM ET
... Ellsberg was .. deeply embedded in not just the Washington establishment but the national elite, having attended Michigan's prestigious Cranbrook School (Mitt Romney's high school, you may recall from campaign 2012), Harvard University, Cambridge University, a Marine Officers training program (followed by three years in the military in command positions), and was later a fellow at the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows, as well as the recipient of a Ph.D. in economics from the university. At the Pentagon, he helped draft plans for the conduct of the Vietnam War, which he would later see up close working out of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and worked on the Pentagon study of the history of the conflict in Vietnam published by the Times as the Pentagon Papers ...
Ellsberg's actions came at a time when there was a robust social movement demanding change in the exact direction his revelations suggested U.S. policy go -- out of Vietnam. Without the anti-Vietnam War movement, it's arguable he would not have been as important a historical figure, or as daring ...
Ellsberg was seeking to stop a policy that was leading to American deaths during an era in which young men were drafted into combat, which is to say, subjected to a policy that theoretically made them all at risk of being killed. Snowden is warning against a possible future evil -- what he called "turn-key tyranny." That's a lot harder for people to get agitated about, because it is less direct and tangible, less physically threatening ...
... Most people already know that their information shared online is shared -- not in their control, not private. Their friends and neighbors control their images, people who object to how they behave may blog about them, there is a boom in private surveillance technologies used by spouses who suspect infidelity. The only reason there is private information for the government to ask for is because we have volunteered it already to corporate third parties.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-nsa-leaks-and-the-pentagon-papers-whats-the-difference-between-edward-snowden-and-daniel-ellsberg/276741/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sorry folks...this old vet can't get past that one issue. 
My mistake
