Editorial: What To Do With Edward Snowden?

Edward Snowden broke the law. There seems to be little, if any, doubt about that. The problem is that his case presents us with the same conundrum faced when Sir Thomas Moore refused to bow to King Henry’s royal will, when abolitionists ignored the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when Rosa Parks refused to take her seat in the back of he bus.

They all broke the law, but justice argued for leniency. Snowden broke the law, but his action brought to light the most massive government intrusion into individual privacy that the United States has ever experienced. The news media has been filled with stories about the National Security Agency surveillance activities he exposed. The agency has seized, and stored in a massive data bank, information about millions, even billions of cell phone calls made in the United States by its own citizens. The agency claims that while it stores this information, it only retrieves and reviews it in cases of national security, but that begs the question.