Edward Snowden is the name of a high school dropout who has set the civilized world on its collective ear. Snowden, 29, was a contract employee with the NSA, who decided to turn “whistleblower” on an excessive invasion of Americans’ Fourth Amendment Rights by surveillance experts of their own country, by giving classified documents to the Press.

Snowden said he turned over the documents to The Washington Post and the Guardian in order to expose the NSA’s vast surveillance of phone and Internet data.

The former technical assistant at the CIA, who had been working at the NSA as an employee of contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said he became disenchanted with Obama for continuing the surveillance policies of George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded,” Snowden told the Guardian, which published the video interview with him, dated June 6, on its website.

In Washington, several members of Congress and intelligence officials showed little sympathy for Snowden’s argument. The U.S. Justice Department already is in the initial stages of a criminal investigation.

“Anyone responsible for leaking classified information should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

So, is Edward Snowden an American Traitor…or a Hero?

The case for Snowden being a Traitor is quite simple: He leaked classified material to the American Press.

The problem is….that’s too simple an explanation.

By leaking the classified material, he exposed an egregious limiting of Americans’ Freedom by our own government, utilizing a system that was meant to assist in the prevention of Terrorist Acts against our country, not spy on innocent citizens, or to be used as a political tool.

Quite frankly, I have always considered Ron Paul a crazy old man, who, while making some good points about the economy, was a Father Conklin wannabe isolationist concerning America’s Foreign Policy.

His most ardent followers, the Paulnuts, were always pictured in my mind’s eye, as being around 25 years old, living in their Mom’s Basement, spouting conspiracy theories to anyone on the internet who would listen, reminiscent of the character “Warlock” from the movie “Live Free or Die Hard”.

Little did I realize, at the time, that those paranoid nutjobs weren’t so far out in left field, after all.

And, the thing is, surveillance is a lucrative business, in which a whole lot of non-government employees have high-level access to our nation’s secrets.

A 2010 Washington Post report found “close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors.”

Some 5 million people hold a government security clearance, according to a 2012 report by the Director of National Intelligence. About 1.4 million people have top-secret clearance, and half of those are the employees of private businesses.

Some 480,000 contractors held top-secret credentials as of last year, and 2,000 companies supply contractors to the intelligence agencies.

Among the largest of those companies is Booz Allen Hamilton, a privately owned consulting company located in Virginia.

The company has deep roots and many connections to the intelligence community.

The current director of national intelligence James Clapper is a former Booz Allen executive. The company’s current vice chairman Mike McConnell, was the DNI in the George W Bush administration.

According to the Washington Post, as of 2010, the company contracted more than 23,000 people to the government to do intelligence work at 23 agencies in 15 areas of expertise including technological intelligence, intelligence analysis, and counter intelligence.

The company is estimated to be worth $5 billion annually.

Edward Snowden, a former Booz Allen employee himself, may not be the last “whistleblower” to come forward.

So, the question remains…Traitor or Hero?

Does the urge to let American citizens know that their everyday lives are no longer solely their own business, trump loyalty to your job and any confidentiality agreement you may have signed while on that job?

Rush Limbaugh remarked on his radio program yesterday, that…

…This country is being run by people who do not appreciate the way it was founded. They do not appreciate the Constitution as written, and they are in the process of implementing and behaving as they wish the Constitution existed. They wish a Constitution existed which invests in government all power. They want all power. And they’re in the process of behaving as though they have it.

Nobody’s really pushing back to stop it. And that’s what all of these data mining scandals really focus on. We’re looking now at this Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old young man who has gone public with the PRISM program. And the real danger here — and look, John Bolton is out. Snerdley’s livid at this guy. A lot of people are. John Bolton is out saying, “This guy is a traitor and he needs to be charged and tried as a traitor.” And there are some people that think that if we’d have dealt with Bradley Manning when he gave up all those documents to Julian Assange, that this wouldn’t have happened.

Other people are sympathetic because this guy admitted he had all kinds of high hopes for Obama to stop this stuff, and Obama’s only exacerbated it and made it worse, which is one of the reasons he’s stated that he’s come forward. The real danger to me, though, is not one or two rogue employees at the IRS or the NSA or the CIA. The real danger is having a rogue administration. And we do, I think. This is the primary challenge that we face.

…I  don’t want to nitpick here, but he really didn’t whistle blow.  He should have —  technically — it’s complicated, but he — he’s actually didn’t engage in whistleblowing.  Now, the LA Times is saying that Edward Snowden is gone from his Hong Kong hotel, whereabouts unknown.  How anybody knows that, I don’t know.  I mean, how do you know he’s gone if you don’t know where he is?

But look at what we’re talking about here.  You just agreed, “Oh, the likelihood, yeah, he’s dead, somebody’s gonna kill him.”  We’re talking about our country?  Are we talking about our government?  Listen to this.  Listen.  How acceptable it is.  That’s right.  We can kill American, all we gotta do is find this guy with a drone, and “poof,” as Lanny Davis says, “poof,” he’s gone.  If we got a drone anywhere near where the dude is, Obama’s got his finger on the trigger, they keep telling us that.  I’ll bet you if they find this guy, we’ll know where Obama is every second of the day as they’re tracking him.  Be totally unlike Benghazi.

So…it’s complicated.  

I love my country. I hate this Administration. 

Snowden is being bankrolled by somebody, there’s no doubt about that. But, self serving or not, if he had not come forward, we would not know how badly Obama has expanded the surveillance on American citizens begun by passage of the Patriot Act. 

On the other hand, he has leaked our country’s secrets, causing a national conversation on the wisdom of allowing our government leaders to limit our freedom “to ensure our safety”.

And, that’s a national conservation this country must have.

A Traitor? He’s not Bradley Manning, that’s for sure.  A Hero? Possibly. This story is far from over.

And, our National Conversation is just beginning.

Until He Comes,

KJ