Securing our liberty Commonweal. 140.12 (July 12, 2013): p5. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Commonweal Foundation http://www.cweal.org/ Listen Full Text:  Edward J. Snowden, the thirty-year-old former National Security Agency contractor who handed over a treasure trove of classified documents about U.S. government surveillance to the Washington Post and Britain's Guardian, is a hero to some and a traitor to others. He claims to have acted out of a sense of outrage over the NSA's indiscriminate collection of the phone and internet records of Americans, decrying the danger such intrusive government oversight poses to democracy and privacy. Snowden subsequently fled to Hong Kong, and from there to Moscow. His eventual destination appears to be Ecuador, Cuba, or Venezuela. Snowden's efforts to elude U.S. authorities cast an ambiguous light on his motives; the countries where he has sought refuge are not known for upholding the sort of democratic values he claims to be defending. While demanding accountability from the U.S. government, he appears to be seeking immunity for his own actions. Snowden's purposes and fate, however, should be of secondary concern. However misguided his actions may have been, they have reopened a much-needed debate about the reach and authority of what is often called the National Security State. While defending the NSA programs, even President Barack Obama seems to welcome that debate. "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama noted when asked about Snowden's leaks. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society. ... There are trade-offs involved." Administration officials and members of Congress say the government's extensive surveillance programs are crucial to preventing terrorist attacks, and that Snowden has done real damage to efforts to keep Americans safe. Because almost all the relevant information remains classified, it is difficult to assess that claim. NSA officials have now promised to make public details of some of the dozens of terrorist plots they say the massive data-collection effort, called Prism, has helped thwart. That sort of disclosure is long overdue. Although Prism was approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and is monitored by the intelligence committees of Congress, many Americans were shocked to learn that the government now stores their phone and internet records for possible use in future investigations. While the government is prohibited from listening to the tracked calls, it uses sophisticated algorithms to trace calling patterns. If a series of related calls seems suspicious, the NSA or FBI then gets a warrant from the FISA court to investigate further. No abuse of those procedures has come to light. Still, the mere existence of such records in the government's hands, information that might easily be exploited for political purposes, should concern every American. It is axiomatic that fighting clande.

1. Securing our liberty
Commonweal. 140.12 (July 12, 2013): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Commonweal Foundation
http://www.cweal.org/
Listen
Full Text:
Edward J. Snowden, the thirty-year-old former National
Security Agency contractor who handed over a treasure trove of
classified documents about U.S. government surveillance to the
Washington Post and Britain's Guardian, is a hero to some and a
traitor to others. He claims to have acted out of a sense of
outrage over the NSA's indiscriminate collection of the phone
and internet records of Americans, decrying the danger such
intrusive government oversight poses to democracy and privacy.
Snowden subsequently fled to Hong Kong, and from there to
Moscow. His eventual destination appears to be Ecuador, Cuba,
or Venezuela.
Snowden's efforts to elude U.S. authorities cast an ambiguous
light on his motives; the countries where he has sought refuge
are not known for upholding the sort of democratic values he
claims to be defending. While demanding accountability from
the U.S. government, he appears to be seeking immunity for his
own actions. Snowden's purposes and fate, however, should be
of secondary concern. However misguided his actions may have
been, they have reopened a much-needed debate about the reach
and authority of what is often called the National Security
State. While defending the NSA programs, even President
Barack Obama seems to welcome that debate. "You can't have
100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and
zero inconvenience," Obama noted when asked about Snowden's
leaks. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society.
... There are trade-offs involved."
Administration officials and members of Congress say the
government's extensive surveillance programs are crucial to

2. preventing terrorist attacks, and that Snowden has done real
damage to efforts to keep Americans safe. Because almost all
the relevant information remains classified, it is difficult to
assess that claim. NSA officials have now promised to make
public details of some of the dozens of terrorist plots they say
the massive data-collection effort, called Prism, has helped
thwart. That sort of disclosure is long overdue. Although Prism
was approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court
and is monitored by the intelligence committees of Congress,
many Americans were shocked to learn that the government now
stores their phone and internet records for possible use in future
investigations. While the government is prohibited from
listening to the tracked calls, it uses sophisticated algorithms to
trace calling patterns. If a series of related calls seems
suspicious, the NSA or FBI then gets a warrant from the FISA
court to investigate further. No abuse of those procedures has
come to light. Still, the mere existence of such records in the
government's hands, information that might easily be exploited
for political purposes, should concern every American.
It is axiomatic that fighting clandestine terrorist groups requires
clandestine methods. Sources and allies must be protected; in
preemptive actions the element of surprise must be preserved.
Secrets about ongoing investigations cannot be compromised
without jeopardizing counterterrorism efforts. It is harder to
justify keeping such details secret after the fact. Judgments
about the trade-offs between privacy and safety cannot be made
unless the American people know what the government has done
in our name. Even if everything the government does to combat
terrorism is technically legal, not everything legal is prudent,
wise, or morally justified.
As a nation, we rely on a system of checks and balances to
prevent an excessive concentration of state power. Those checks
and balances are strained to the breaking point during times of
war, and especially during a war as ill-defined and open-ended
as the fight against terrorism. Congress is notoriously
pusillanimous when it comes to national-security issues. The

3. courts, meanwhile, are loath to intervene, preferring to leave the
conduct of "war" to the other two branches. The executive
rarely passes up an opportunity to expand its war-making
powers. The result is the steady accumulation of influence by
the nation's security agencies. As political philosopher and
former Clinton administration official William A. Galston
recently observed, "It may be true that as currently staffed and
administered, the new institutions of surveillance do not
threaten our liberties. It is also true that in the wrong hands,
they would make it much easier to do so."
Devising checks and balances that will reduce that threat should
be a goal that unites all Americans. Given the complexity of the
issues, perhaps a first step would be to convene a truly credible
bipartisan study commission. Bring together representatives
from the legislative, executive, judicial, military, and security
branches, as well as members of the fourth estate. The
commission's mandate should be to inform the American people
about the hard choices we face. The trade-offs between liberty
and security should not remain a secret any longer.
June 25, 2013
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Securing our liberty." Commonweal, vol. 140, no. 12, 2013, p.
5. Academic
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=oran95
108&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338120396&it=r&asid=9e2cb301e1
f5d09dfad265ac7a1a5ddb. Accessed 15 Nov. 2016.
2nd Article
Internet governance overview: how Snowden didn't really
change anything after all
David Satola and Michael J. Kelly
Business Law Today. (Nov. 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Bar Association

4. http://www.abanet.org/buslaw/blt/
Listen
Full Text:
A lot has happened in the world of Internet governance this
year, starting with revelations by Eric Snowden of the NSA's
extensive surveillance program. That sent a shock wave through
the Internet world, especially for those arguing in favor of not
regulating the Internet (i.e., those in favor of a "multi-
stakeholder" framework for Internet governance). Then in
March of this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce's
National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA)
announced it was starting a process to consider transitioning
oversight of some technical functions, like Internet numbering
resources, protocol assignments, and management of domain
names, performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
(IANA), away from IANA over to the "multi-stakeholder
community." So although by any measure, it's been a big year
for multi-stakeholderism in Internet governance, what does it all
mean?
By way of explanation, multi-stakeholderism refers to the range
of actors involved in running, administering, and governing the
Internet. It came into popular usage in 2005 as a result of the
UN's World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) which
confirmed, inter alia, that "... management of the Internet
encompasses both technical and public policy issues and should
involve all stakeholders." As described in the WSIS Agenda, the
groups of stakeholders with an interest in Internet governance
include governments, the private sector, civil society,
intergovernmental and international organizations--viz. the
public sector, the private sector, NGOs, academia, the technical
community, etc. The multi-stakeholder approach to Internet
governance is an accurate reflection of the various actors who
together form the loose de facto framework for Internet
governance. For example, some of these stakeholders include
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is not even a
formal entity, but which is in charge of the protocols on which

5. the Internet runs. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that performs technical
functions on the Internet (like running root servers --the
computers that control traffic on the Internet, and domain name
administration (i.e., .com, .org, .gov), is a California not-for-
profit corporation. The list goes on.
But the whole notion of multi-stakeholderism and the flexible
Internet governance vision it embraces has been under threat. A
growing group of countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, and
China would prefer that governance of the Internet be
centralized and controlled through an inter-governmental (i.e.,
state-centric) body, such as the UN, the ITU (International
Telecommunication Union), or some other, new international
organization. This alternative model of Internet governance
based on tighter state control is known as multinationalism.
While the community of nations supporting multi-
stakeholderism comprise mainly Western, wealthier,
technologically advanced countries from the developed world,
those countries supporting the multinational (i.e., state-centric)
approach are mainly developing countries, or countries from the
"South" that will use this fight to generally push back against
what they perceive as yet another example of Western power
dominating an area of international policy. Like the cold war,
this tension over multi-stakeholderism had been chugging along
for years with no real change to the fairly well-entrenched
positions, pro and con.
Then along came Mr. Snowden.
Without getting in to the substance of his revelations, suffice it
to say that, in the perception of much of the world, companies
that offer services on the Internet that were implicated by the
Snowdon revelations (Verizon, Google, Facebook, etc.) were all
lumped together with the Internet itself, and for a moment in
time, NSA surveillance and the Internet were seen as the same.
Accordingly, existing positions for and against a multi-
stakeholder Internet governance model became even more
polarized. In this context, it seemed a third path might be taken

6. when Brazil suggested a high-level conference, called
"NetMundial," to address management of the Internet in light of
Snowden's NSA surveillance revelations. Trust in the Internet
had been undermined. Implicitly, trust in the multi-stakeholder
model, and especially in the United States, which through NTIA
still exercised a degree of control over the "IANA functions,"
was also undermined.
However, what began as a challenge to the multi-stakeholder
model was at the same time a disappointment to those
advocating a more state-centric approach and a relief to those
supporting the multi-stakeholder approach. In one of the official
documents from "NetMundial," the conference endorsed an
"open and distributed" Internet architecture as well as Internet
governance principles including, "a democratic, multi-
stakeholder process [...], ensuring the meaningful and
accountable participation of all stakeholders, including
governments, the private sector, civil society, the technical
community, the academic community and users," and open
participative and consensus driven governance. This is in some
ways a restatement of the WSIS principles and the basic premise
of multi-stakeholderism.
The outcome of the NetMundial process, hoped by some to be a
Bolshevik-style contre-pointe response to evangelical
proponents of multi-stakeholderism, not only largely conformed
to existing multi-stakeholder catechism, but was coopted by the
"mainstream." Both ICANN and the World Economic Forum
(WEF) adopted the mantel of implementing follow up actions
from NetMundial including promoting "human rights and shared
values." This human rights theme will occur again in the
upcoming discussion of reforms affecting ICANN.
A month before the NetMundial conference issued its pabulum
findings, the NTIA announced a process to consider
relinquishing its oversight over some technical functions
performed by IANA to the multi-stakeholder community--in
shorthand, the IANA transition. IANA, effectively a subsidiary
of ICANN, traditionally performed certain technical functions

7. essential for the smooth and secure running of the Internet. As
mentioned above, these include control of the Internet Protocol
addressing system (i.e., numbering resources, including IPv4
and IPv6), managing IP protocols, and managing the rootzone
database for domain names (domain name management). NTIA
has had oversight over these functions via a series of
agreements with ICANN in 1998 under a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU). The MoU went through several iterations
and morphed into what was then called the Joint Project
Agreement (JPA), which itself underwent one amendment. In
2009, the JPA was replaced with a document called the
Affirmation of Commitments. Over time, in each iteration of the
agreement between NTIA and ICANN, NTIA has loosened its
oversight over the performance of these IANA functions by
ICANN. Consequently, this latest move by NTIA can be seen as
part of a continuous evolution away from NTIA's control and
oversight over the IANA functions.
The IANA transition process is just that --a process, albeit a
process that is conditioned on satisfying NTIA that there will be
a suitable arrangement in place to ensure that the multi-
stakeholder community will take over NTIA's role. That said,
the process is scheduled for completion by September 2015.
This process consists largely of various consultations and
reviews. The first is a "community outreach," followed by a
"community dialogue input" to a steering Ggroup (SG) that has
been established by ICANN, which is itself supposed to be
multi-stakeholder in character. The SG will produce a proposal
for the transition that will be subject to a public comment
period. These comments will be reviewed by the SG and then to
the ICANN board and finally to NTIA for approval.
The take away is this: nothing has changed --yet. But the
dynamics this year have unleashed forces further entrenching
already polarized positions on essential matters of Internet
governance. Mr. Snowden's revelations fanned the flames of
those promoting a multilateral, state-centric approach to
Internet governance, confirming suspicions about Western

8. power and multi-stakeholderism, but ultimately failed to shift
Internet governance toward a new model. The IANA transition
has been a long time coming and will only shift technical
functions to new organizations, but within the current Internet
governance model. Thus, the durability of multi-stakeholderism
persists--for now.
David Satola and Michael J. Kelly are co-chairs of the Internet
Governance Task Force, Cyberspace Law Committee, ABA
Business Law Section.
Satola, David^Kelly, Michael J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Satola, David, and Michael J. Kelly. "Internet governance
overview: how Snowden didn't really change anything after
all." Business Law Today, Nov. 2014. Academic
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=oran95
108&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA401777541&it=r&asid=0c495a388a
d2acdcf12ca712da73dd63. Accessed 15 Nov. 2016.
This assignment provides you with an opportunity to read an
article and then to share your thoughts about the article by
critiquing the details, including the decisions made.
In order to access the resource below, you must first log into
the my CSU Student Portal and access the Academic OneFile
database within the CSU Online Library
This article includes details and assertions about the ethical
choices/decisions made by Edward J. Snowden, a former
National Security Agency (NSA) contractor.
*Here is the reference citation for the article: Securing our
liberty. (2013). Commonweal, 140(12), 5.
After reading the article, draft a two-page response by
discussing the U.S. government’s decision to acquire phone and
internet data without disclosing its intentions to citizens.
For this assignment, consider the NSA as an organization (i.e.,
business) and Snowden as a manager. How have the decisions of
this event impacted the fairness of the U.S. government, its

9. citizens, and Snowden? How did ethics, perhaps, influence
Snowden’s decision to leak information? In this event, what is
the greater good and also the consequences/sacrifices of that
greater good? Based on the details of this event, what can we
learn about making important decisions as a leader and
manager?
This event was covered by several news and media
organizations, so there should be plenty of articles in the
library. Conduct a bit more research in the online library related
to this event involving Edward Snowden and the U.S.
government—see what else you can discover about the event to
determine an appropriate punishment, if any, for Snowden’s
conduct.
Include at least one additional source from the library in your
response.
The purpose of this assignment is for you to think critically
about managers (and other leaders) making important decisions,
and the process managers use to make important decisions.
Consider how important it is to collect all of the facts before
making an important decision, such as those involving fairness
and ethics.
Use APA Style to format your response.