The town of Crofton, Maryland has been in the news lately mainly because National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden grew up there so the media is making a big deal over that fact. I think the media is using the wrong angle in its reporting on Snowden by focusing on where he grew up instead of the issues raised by his whistleblowing on the existence on a program that could potentially adversely affect the civil rights of every American.
I'm very familiar with Crofton. I have a few relatives who live in nearby Gambrills. My mother has spent many stints at the rehab center there over the past few years. I currently commute to Crofton on a weekly basis to attend meetings for people who are separated or divorced.
One of my first jobs was located in Crofton. I spent the summer before I transferred to the University of Maryland at College Park working as a telephone interviewer for a company known as Central Telephone Interviewing Systems. I dealt with dialing the numbers of households—this was in the days before robocalls—conducting surveys while dealing with frequent hangups and annoyed people who didn't like that we interrupted dinner or something else they were doing at that time. If that wasn't bad enough, I had a boss, appropriately named Ms. Roach, who used to bully subordinates and everytime I worked there she would threaten to fire everyone on staff. Ms. Roach was definitely a nasty piece of work and I was so relieved when I was able to quit that job.
For the record, I have never met Edward Snowden nor have I ever met anyone who is related to him or even knows him. I know one person who is currently employed with the NSA but I'm not going to elaborate any further because I don't want to write anything that could get her into trouble with her bosses. The NSA is such a notoriously paranoid secretive organization that many locals joke that the NSA really stands for No Such Agency.
Yes, it's true that Crofton is located near the NSA and Fort Meade. But I can tell you that it's not exactly a hotbed of radicalism. (That distinction belongs to Takoma Park, the town that declared itself a nuclear-free zone back in the 1980's. LOL!) It's a suburban town full of nice homes, sidewalks, and tree-lined streets. As I was driving to the church where my support group meets last evening, I saw plenty of people taking advantage of the break in yesterday's stormy weather and the increased hours in sunlight to walk and jog around the neighborhood.
Route 3 is the main highway along Crofton and it includes a few locally owned restaurants like the Big Fish Grill and the Irish Channel. There are quite a few shopping centers that are filled mainly with big box retailers and chain stores like Five Below, Wegman's, Target, K-Mart, and Shopper's Food Warehouse. Even though Crofton is an upscale neighborhood, there's a Goodwill thrift shop located there that draws plenty of shoppers. (Most of the shoppers I saw there are elderly. I suspect that they are retired residents on fixed incomes.) Crofton is racially diverse. I've seen whites, African Americans, and Asian Americans walk around the shopping centers. I don't hear many Spanish speakers, unlike where I live, but I'm sure that'll eventually change as more Latinos move further into the suburbs and exburbs.
In short, Crofton is just an average surburban town in the Baltimore-Washington, DC area. Edward Snowden could've grown up anywhere in the United States and he still would've ended up outing himself as the whistleblower who alerted The Guardian newspaper about the existence of the NSA's PRISM program, which is causing lots of controversy. It's just crazy for the media to be poking around Crofton looking for clues on what made Snowden tick just because he attended elementary school and middle school in that town. (He attended Arundel High school in nearby Gambrills but he dropped out after the 10th grade.) Had Snowden been accused of holding up liquor stores or being a serial killer, the media would not be going to Crofton interviewing his old elementary school classmates on what they remember about him.
What's worse is that instead of the media focusing on the town where Edward Snowden grew up, they should talk about the issues as arising from the revelation of the existence of the PRISM program. Sure this emphasis on Edward Snowden's days in Crofton provides fodder as jokes for The Daily Show but it provides a total disservice to the level of informed discourse in American society. Hardly anyone in the mainstream media is debating on whether PRISM violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and we need that debate because the civil rights of all Americans could potentially be in jeopardy.
In addition, it's been revealed that the reach of NSA's PRISM program has even extended to nations in the European Union. Many of those affected nations are aleardy U.S. allies and this could adversely affect future U.S. relations with those nations. Yet the mainstream media cares more about the fact that Edward Snowden grew up in Crofton, Maryland than on this newest revelation.