A “friction” takes form when a person vows loyalty to both the U.S. Constitution and to the federal government, Edward Snowden wrote on Tuesday, adding that he continued to believe he had chosen the right path.
“When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy,” the former NSA contractor wrote in a piece published on The Intercept. “You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.”
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The comments came as part of a foreword for a book released on Tuesday called The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. The book contains leaked classified documents that detail more than a decade of drone usage by the United States.
Snowden also argued that there is a double standard when it comes to leaking classified information. “Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern,” Snowden said. “Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor.”
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Snowden, like Petraeus, faces charges of exposing classified information under the Espionage Act. Some officials, such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, have advocated seeking the death penalty for Snowden, though the Justice Department has said it would not seek to do so.
Snowden notably omitted any reference to Hillary Clinton, who is under investigation by the FBI for violating the same law. He has, in contrast, made several references to the former secretary of state’s case in comments on Twitter.
He concluded with a call for more whistleblowers to emerge.
“The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they’re willing to risk their lives and their freedom,” Snowden said. “They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen. And there are more of us than there are of them.”
