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When former spy Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the federal  government is spying on most Americans, most Americans were surprised and  unhappy. But half of official Washington yawned before it roared. Somehow the  people in the government had a pretty good idea of what government spies are  doing, and they more or less approve of it – but not all of them.

Politicians as diverse as Republican Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Sen.  Dianne Feinstein called Snowden a traitor. So did former Vice President Dick  Cheney, and President Obama said that for once Cheney’s words were music to his  ears. On the other hand, former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Republican Sen.  Rand Paul, my Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly and I have all referred to  Snowden as a hero.

The NSA is America’s domestic spying apparatus. Its budget is secret. It will  soon occupy the largest federal building on the planet. It often hires outside  contractors to do much of its work. One of those contractors is Booz Allen  Hamilton. Booz Allen’s co-chair is former Adm. John M. McConnell, who once  headed the NSA. When Snowden began his work for Booz Allen, he took two oaths.  The first oath was to keep secret the classified materials to which he would be  exposed in his work as a spy; the second oath was to uphold the  Constitution.

Shortly after Snowden began his work with the NSA, he came to the realization  that he could not comply with both oaths. He realized that by keeping secret  what he learned, he was keeping the American public in the dark about what its  government is doing outside the Constitution in order to control the public.

What is it doing?

The government persuaded a federal judge with a perverse understanding of the  values and history and language of the Constitution to sign a series of orders  directing the largest telephone company in the U.S. and the largest Internet  providers in the world to make available to the government’s prying eyes all  sorts of information about nearly all of us, thus allowing the feds to monitor  our use of land line and wireless phones, as well as our use of emails and  texts. The numbers are staggering. Verizon has greater than 113,000,000 U.S.  customers who generate or receive more than 1 billion phone calls every day.  Americans text and email one another using the services of Microsoft, Google,  Yahoo, Facebook and others many billions of times every day.

Judge  Napolitano’s brand new book explains how the government is taking your  constitutional freedoms and how you can fight back: “The Freedom Answer  Book”

The judge’s order was profoundly unconstitutional, as is the section of the  Patriot Act that authorized it. The Constitution requires that the government  demonstrate to all judges being asked to sign search warrants specific evidence  of criminal behavior contained in the things to be seized. And it requires that  the warrants themselves particularly describe the places to be searched or the  persons or things to be seized.

In this case, the things being seized consist of digital data about nearly  everyone in America, which in the hands of a skilled spy can be used to monitor  our physical movements and communications and, according to former CIA Director  David Petraeus, to predict them. The Patriot Act facilitates these dragnets by  unconstitutionally reducing the standard for the issuance of search warrants.  The president, who refuses to deny that his spies possess the content of  our communications, claims they are not listening to it or reading it.

Who would believe President Obama?

One of the spies who knew the power he and his fellow spies had and who had  access to the innermost thoughts of hundreds of millions of us – and who  disbelieved the president – was Edward Snowden. Snowden realized the  unconstitutional nature of what the government was doing and concluded that he  could not be faithful to both of his oaths. One of those oaths – to retain  secrets – is grounded in a federal statute that requires secrecy and punishes  the exposure of secrets. The other oath is grounded in the Constitution, which  is the supreme law of the land and protects the natural right to be left alone  and does not punish the governmental violation of that right.

When confronted with the conflicting oaths, Snowden opted for the higher  good: fidelity to the supreme law of the land. Hence, in order to protect the  privacy of us all, Snowden violated the lesser oath and upheld the greater one.  He could not serve two masters when the lesser of the two (fidelity to the  government’s laws) facilitated a corruption of the greater of the two (the  primacy to the Constitution).

He’s a traitor, the establishment roared. He’s a high school dropout. He left  the Army. He admits to having lots of sex with his girlfriend. He fled to Hong  Kong.

Who cares?

He understands, as Ronald Reagan did, that if we don’t control the  government, the government will control us. That’s why the Washington  establishment yawned when we learned what it knew and now roars because Snowden  challenged it. Those in power want to stay there and will misuse the  Constitution to do so for as long as they can get away with it, no matter to  which political party they belong. Any government that secretly spies on nearly  all the population is aiming to control the population.

Snowden knew that this massive violation of the constitutionally guaranteed  rights of nearly every American, orchestrated and operated in secrecy, is  corrupting the Constitution and empowering the corruptors. It was that  understanding plus a willingness to face down those in power who lack fidelity  to the Constitution and who can do him harm that constituted the behavior of a  hero.

Is he flawed?

The only hero who was not flawed was nailed to a tree 2,000 years ago because  those He came into the world to save rejected Him.