Edward Snowden shouldn’t play the coward

If you run, you look like a coward. It may be that you have good reason to be cowardly. It may be that anyone else in your position would run as far and fast as you do. There is nothing wrong with taking the cowardly course, unless like Edward Snowden, you claim to be engaged in civil disobedience.

It is an easy claim to make in theory but hard to live up to in practice. Genuine civil disobedience is one of the toughest forms of protest there is. You decide a law is unjust – which in Snowden’s case means you decide that blanket surveillance by the US authorities affronts rights to privacy. You break the law and then…you must wait for the police to arrest you, and defend your actions in court.

I am sure you can see why civil disobedience is a hard road. First, it can only work in free or half-free societies.