Edward Snowden Can Keep A Secret

The recently sheltered, and alleged leaker, Edward Snowden is good at keeping secrets. Just not secrets about national security.

According to news sources (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2341691/Edward-Snowdens-girlfriend-Lindsay-Mills-feels-betrayed-world-caved-in.html), Snowden never told his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, 28, that he planned to leak pages of classified documents, jeopardizing US national security and adding strain to US relations with other countries, notably Russia, where Snowden was granted a year of asylum.

Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

NBC news has reported that Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said that his client misses Mills, and in an article by UK publication the Daily Mail online Snowden kept her in the dark in order to protect her. Snowden and Mills lived in Hawaii and were dating for four or five years before Snowden suddenly fled to Hong Kong to leak the secrets. Friends close to the couple, some who did not want to be named, said that they were set to get engaged. And recently when talking to the media, Mills' father, Jonathan Mills, said that his daughter was heartbroken and "barely holding on" after Snowden left her without warning.

Arguably, one of the biggest leaks in US history comes down to loyalty. Snowden loved his girlfriend and wanted to protect her, so he kept a secret from her: he did not place her in harms way (if there would be repercussion on her from his leakage). Snowden has the ability to be loyal to Mills. But arguably, not to the NSA or USA, at least not during his three months as a CIA contractor.

But by revealing the US surveillance strategies -- the leaks allegedly revealed the depth of the National Security Agency's (NSA) 'spying' on communications transmitted between countries through their emails and phone calls -- isn't Snowden in effect putting his girlfriend in jeopardy? She is an American. And the government, simply put, is monitoring communications to protect its citizens.

Jonathan Mills said that Snowden was a man who "has strong convictions about right and wrong" and that "he must have found something disturbing him enough that he would go this far." What Snowden leaked was information regarding NSA operations called PRISM: collections of data from U.S. phone call records to search for possible links to terrorists abroad and surveillance of online communications to and from foreign targets to detect suspicious behavior. What was shocking about what he leaked was perhaps how much personal information the government has access to about us.

Lindsay Mills and Edward Snowden (by\telegraph.co.uk/Inside Edition)

But, doesn't the average American citizen already know that the government is, in a sense, 'watching us.' Is there really such thing as privacy in any country and how should that right evaporate if we are being protected? Legally, once issues of national security are involved, the government has standing to take protective action to do anything and everything it can to keep the country safe. It's not the prettiest thing in the world but, why risk not keeping us safe just so that an NSA agent in Virginia will not know what kind of clothing you buy -- although, I agree that they really do not need to know everything that we do.

So, Snowden was more loyal to his convictions (aka himself) than he was to Mills. After all, Mills is in 'the news cycle'; naked from any real protection.

What do you think?