Civil Disobedience and Punishment: (Mis)reading Justification and Strategy from SNCC to Snowden

For several weeks following the publication in the British newspaper the Guardian of a three-part expose on the U.S. National Security Administration’s domestic surveillance programs, a curious and rather heated debate circulated around the Internet about whether or not we could consider the actions of Edward Snowden—his leaking of classified documents—civil disobedience or not. Snowden, at the time an employee at the technology security consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, gathered documents and information on a range of Internet surveillance and metadata collection programs with the intention of leaking them to the press. Contacting first the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and then filmmaker Laura Poitras, Snowden provided them thousands of documents through the spring of 2013, an overview of which was first published later in May. By then, Snowden had left his position in Hawaii for Hong Kong. As details of the leak became public throughout summer 2013, the Obama Administration was quick to condemn Snowden, claiming serious damage and risk to national security. Then, on June 14, 2013 federal prosecutors officially charged him with theft of government property and violations of the 1917 Espionage Act. There were others, however, who questioned whether the leak really constituted a threat, and as of two recent federal court rulings, the constitutionality of the NSA programs remains unclear and disputed.