'No Drama' Obama Shrugs Off Snowden Questions

Dismissing Edward Snowden as a "29-year-old hacker", President Obama tries to downplay America’s failure to bring him to justice.


Mr Obama said the US will not scramble military jets to intercept Snowden



Dominic Waghorn
US Correspondent
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No drama Obama is back. After all the sound and fury spewed by his administration on Edward Snowden, the president is now shrugging off questions about him.


Dismissing Snowden as a "29-year-old hacker" during a visit to Africa, Obama tried to downplay America’s failure to bring him to justice.


He also said the US will not be scrambling military jets to recover the rogue agent, as if anyone had suggested they might.


There are good diplomatic reasons for the president to try and lower the temperature of already strained relations with Russia threatened by the Snowden affair.
But Obama's words are problematic.


Not least because they beg the question of how this young computer "hacker" got a job working in the US government, along with hundreds of thousands of private contractors like him, and gained access to America’s secrets.


It is convenient for the Obama administration that the story has become about one man and his flight from justice.


US officials are trying to pin the traitor label on Snowden and it seems to be sticking.


By going on the run through a region of China, albeit semi-autonomous, and now Russia, Snowden has presented himself as a fugitive.


For now the story is less about how the administration created mass surveillance programmes in secret and entrusted them to hundreds of thousands of private contractors.


Nor about how those private intelligence companies appeared to have operated flawed recruitment procedures and slack security systems, allowing a young man with no high school diploma to work with top secret clearance, download classified information onto a USB key and then get away.


But those awkward questions remain and it is not as if it has not happened before.


Bradley Manning should have been warning enough about the dangers of young computer experts with access to huge amounts of secrets.


Manning downloaded diplomatic and military secrets before handing them on to Wikileaks.


Snowden has exposed how people like him, with less honourable intentions, could in future run away with ordinary people's secrets.


Phone records that can reveal enormous amounts about our lives as well as online activity are harvested en masse in secret mass surveillance programmes.


US officials say there are safeguards in place preventing agents and private contractors abusing their positions. But one of them also lied to Congress about the existence of mass surveillance programmes.


Americans will want more reassurance that rogue private contractors and other computer "hackers" like Snowden will not be using their top secret clearance to harvest our data for commercial gain or other nefarious ends.