I’m just going to believe the majority of the reported profiles of Eddie Snowden, that he was one smart cookie.  I’m going to assume that his job required some pretty thorough background checks, some sort of psych evaluation and some years of loyal experience to achieve the level of clearance he is said to have had.  Perhaps he was even committed to his job, rather than just using it as a source of income until he could sell the screenplay he’d been working on, (like so many of the rest of us), until his moral compass steered him into an International clusterfuck.

Here’s where none of this makes any sense to me.  Snowden, the analyst spook, whose job it was to look for dangerous anomalies in the phone calls, emails, texts and tweets of, well, of everybody on the planet, suddenly decides that the end no longer justifies the means and announces to the world that we’re all being watched, tracked and listened to.  Show of hands of those who didn’t think that’s been the case for a long time now, (I can’t see your hands, but I bet there aren’t very many).  Ed must have thought this through, for a few minutes anyway, because he had that cool exit strategy that whisked him off to Hong Kong and then his deluxe accommodations at the Sheremetyevo Airport.  And…let me see if I’ve got this part straight…he’s been granted asylum in Russia because his dastardly former employer, the US of A, was trampling on the rights of its citizens, and he just couldn’t take it anymore.  I just spent the better part of an hour with an abacus, a slide rule and my still functioning Texas Instruments Scientific Calculator Watch, and none of this computes.

President Obama, perpetually caught between a rock and another rock, has been waffling away on the Snowden debacle since the news broke, implying his admiration for anyone who would be bold enough to speak out against injustice, but cautioning against crossing the fine line between moral responsibility and a sworn oath of trust.

Personally, I think the Big Brother thing could get out of hand and anyone who blogs about it could be looking at an open-ended internment at an unpleasant work camp.  But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here…yet.  And, if it does turn Orwellian, well hey, work’s work.

As for Snowden, let him eat borscht!