14 DAY TRIAL // General Michael Hayden has recently given an interview, in which he talks about the Snowden case, among many other things. Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director, has some strong opinions regarding Snowden, but nothing really surprising keeping in mind what his position was.
He claims that Snowden’s leaks have the potential to be the single most destructive leak of American security information in history, Australian Financial Review reports.
“Snowden is attempting to reveal the underlying architecture of the US intelligence gathering network. We’ve lost cups of water before. We’ve lost buckets of water. Yet this is a guy who is exposing the very plumbing that pipes the information. He’s exposing the methods through which we access information,” Hayden states.
Furthermore, he doesn’t consider Snowden to be a hero, while the word “traitor” has a narrowly defined legal meaning that Snowden may not quite meet.
“I personally think Snowden is a very troubled, narcissistic young man who has done a very, very bad thing,” the former NSA director says.
However, he concedes Snowden didn’t spy for money or power, but because of his “ideological embrace of transparency as a virtue.”
While the NSA is currently working to overhaul its entire security in an effort to prevent such leaks in the future, Hayden believes there are high chances for this type of situation to happen again.
“We need to recruit from Edward Snowden’s generation. The problem is that this is a generation of people whose views on secrecy, privacy, transparency and government accountability are a bit different from the folks supervising them, and certainly different from my generation,” Hayden states.
The former CIA and NSA director has another bone to pick, aside from Snowden’s generation and its moral principles, namely how the media has been covering the story.
Hayden thinks news networks have mangled this story badly and Americans don’t quite understand what it is their government is or is not doing.
The issue with this statement, however, is that the US authorities have been tripping in their statements and haven’t really volunteered to shed a light on the entire situation.