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would not be on Snowden’s side of the divide (and the Snowden breach ended the career of many of them, including General Alexander.)
But political leaders in both parties could also be found on the anti-Snowden side of the divide. “T don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower.” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D. - Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after she was briefed on Snowden's theft of documents. "I think it’s an act of treason." Rep. Mike Rogers, (R.-Mich.), her counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the NBC program, “Meet the Press,” that Snowden might be working for a foreign intelligence service. And a former prominent member of President Obama's cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation. These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence from these Congressional leaders showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal convictions, not matter how misguided they may have been.
On this side of the divide, Snowden's critics regard the whistle blowing narrative as at best incomplete, and at worst fodder for the naive. They point out that the FISA document that gave him credentials as a whistle-blower was only issued in the last week of April 2013, which was three months after he first contacted Greenwald and almost 9 months after he began illegally copying secret documents. They further believe that the evidence contradicts Snowden’s claims that he stole only documents that exposed NSA transgression into domestic surveillance, that he turned over all the stolen documents to journalists, and that he was forced to remain in Moscow by the actions of the US government. They believe that all three of these claims, which are at the conceptual basis of the whistle blowing story, are false. They also find that the unprecedented size and complexity of the penetration of NSA files, compromising hundreds of thousands of secret documents pertaining to US operations against adversary nations, according to the NSA’s and Pentagon estimates, does not afford an innocent explanation for the volume of files he took.
The deep split in how Snowden is perceived brings to mind the famous drawing of a duck
-rabbit cartoon first published in 1900 in the book Fact and Fable in Psychology. The figure is perceived either as a duck or as a rabbit but it cannot be seen as both simultaneously. Whether a person sees a rabbit or duck in this test may depend on the information available to that person. For example, if the person has never seen an image of a rabbit before, he will see almost certainly see a duck; and vice versa.
Similarly, what may account for the sharp divide between the Snowden and anti-Snowden camps is a disparity in the available information. The pro-Snowden camp's view is largely informed by Snowden himself. It prefers to believe his words over his actions.
In the anti-Snowden camp are administration officials and the members of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees who have been at least partially briefed on the continuing investigations of the Snowden affair. The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, were briefed by David Leatherwood, the director of operations of the Defense
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