Edward Snowden and the Moral Worth of Civil Disobedience
David DeCosse
February 19, 2014
... Snowden’s actions are best explained by situating him within the libertarian tradition of “information freedom” ...
It is important here to note that the ethical issue isn’t so much what the information is about; the issue is that the information is being kept secret at all (as if secrecy is inherently evil) and ought to be freed, especially so people can make decisions. This is a new, Internet version of old-time libertarianism. The assumption is that the privacy of the isolated individual is pitted against the information-amassing, secrecy-obsessed, power-mad state or corporation ...
For King, the duty to negotiate revealed, among other things, a good-faith belief that even the segregationists running the government in cities like Birmingham, Alabama, were fellow human beings with a capacity to learn and be just. If Martin Luther King Jr could seek to negotiate with Bull Connor, Birmingham’s police chief, why couldn’t Edward Snowden transcend the libertarian cynicism toward government officials and try to speak with known NSA critics like Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul?
The second key difference pertains to King’s conviction that all those engaging in civil disobedience must be willing to accept legal punishment for their actions. At bottom, this concern was a way to reaffirm the value of the law in itself. Moreover, submitting to such punishment was also a way to affirm by word and deed the moral good of the political community. By contrast, of course, Snowden now sits in Russia, avoiding such accountability and thus also undermining the value of both the law and the political community. Trapped in libertarian polarities, he remains the lonely, heroic individual squaring off against the vast power of the state ...
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/02/19/david-decosse-edward-snowden-and-the-moral-worth-of-civil-disobedience/22172/
