Daniel Ellsberg Calls Edward Snoden A 'Hero'

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By publicly identifying himself as the leaker behind last week's NSA revelations, Edward Snowden has secured his place in media and political history.

ABC News called the leak "one of the greatest national security leaks in recent American history," and in publishing his identity, the Guardian compared Snowden, a 29-year-old contractor with the NSA, to Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous leaker in history. It was almost exactly 42 years earlier, on June 13th, 1971, that the first batch of the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times.

Like Ellsberg, Snowden's leaks have led to a public response from the president of the United States. Moreover, he is all but certain to face the same criminal prosecution that Ellsberg faced, and that Bradley Manning, the other candidate for "most famous leaker" status, is currently facing.

Like Snowden, Ellsberg was an insider, a man who worked for the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon before deciding that he could no longer tolerate what he saw as the lies of the American government in Vietnam, and used the media to get his message out.

"I spent years keeping my mouth shut as presidents lied to us and kept these secrets," Ellsberg told "Democracy Now" in 2010. "I shouldn’t have done that. And that’s why I admire someone even who’s accused, like Bradley Manning ... of actually risking their own personal freedom in order to tell the truth. I think they’re being better citizens and showing their patriotism in a better way than when they keep their mouths shut."

Snowden had similar things to say in his interview with the Guardian:

"I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

Trevor Timm, a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tweeted Ellsberg's reaction to the news about Snowden on Sunday:

I was just with Dan Ellsberg as he learned out about Edward Snowden. He called Snowden a hero, said he's been waiting for him for 40 years.

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) June 9, 2013

Ellsberg is regarded mostly as a noble figure these days; it remains to be seen how Snowden will be viewed. A BuzzFeed analysis on Sunday found that those calling him a "hero" outnumbered those calling him a "traitor" by 30 to 1 on Twitter, but that is hardly a representative sample of the country at large.

By Monday, several more details had emerged about Snowden's life and his dealings with the media. Most intriguing was a piece by the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, which detailed the contact between himself and Snowden. (Gellman would go on to publish his own story about the PRISM program, which accessed data from Internet companies.)

Snowden, Gellman wrote, called himself "Verax," the Latin word for "truth-teller," in their communications. The two made direct contact on May 16th; Gellman described Snowden as someone who was "capable of melodrama but wrote with some eloquence about his beliefs."

Talks hit a snag when Gellman refused to agree to Snowden's demand that the Post publish the full text of the PowerPoint document that detailed the PRISM plan:

I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.)

Snowden replied succinctly, “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral.” Shortly afterward he made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian.

Greenwald denied this timeline of events, tweeting on Sunday night:

Bart Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me - when, how and why - are all false.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 10, 2013

However the story unfolded, and however it unfolds, Snowden has in all likelihood added his name to a select group of leakers who became nearly as famous as the secrets they revealed.