Scapegoating Snowden is 'Irrational' and Very Troubling, Advocates Warn

As politicians and security officials rush to shift the blame—with the mainstream media following suit —for Friday’s Paris attacks onto NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, a chorus of voices is warning that, in addition to being “unbelievably irrational,” these claims are also very, very dangerous for civil liberties.

The dust hardly settled in Paris before former CIA director James Woosley said that Snowden had “blood on his hands.”

And Monday, current CIA director John Brennan told a Center for Strategic & International Studies forum that the power of spy agencies to detect such a threat were undermined by new surveillance restrictions in the wake of recent leaks. In nearly the same breath, Brennan also called for increased security to help thwart other attacks currently “in the pipeline.”

Brennan said that the attackers had “gone to school” to learn complex encryption to evade potential dragnets, presumably referring to those exposed through Snowden’s disclosures. He also said that “a number of unauthorized disclosures” led to “a lot of handwringing over the government’s” expansive surveillance powers.

Privacy advocates were quick to debunk those claims.

“Think about how many large-scale terrorist attacks have been successfully perpetrated well before anyone ever heard the name Edward Snowden,” journalist Glenn Greenwald, who reported on many of Snowden’s disclosures and has close ties to the whistleblower, told HuffPost Live on Monday, repeating a number of key points he made in the wake of the attack.

Greenwald reasoned that those shifting the blame to Snowden are the same people who “receive billions and billions of dollars every year in American taxpayer money and have been vested with enormous radical authorities … and they have only one mission, and their mission is to find terror plots.”