God damn, I could just feel the writer stretching to make the parallels work...that last attempt at poetry in the last line, "Then, along came Mr. Snowden". A code breaker who wrote a book to make money during the Great Deprssion is what made Snowden inevitable? And no one of worth came after Yardley to expose the NSA, not James Bamford nor Bill Binney?

If there was anyone who made Snowden inevitable, it was whoever was doing sysops.

what's ironic is that (as far as I remember my history) Yardley went public because he was angry that the USG shut down the Black Chamber, putting Yardley out of a job. Incidentally, that shutdown was effected by Secretary of State Stimson (the same Stimson that later re-directed the targeting of the a-bomb from Kyoto to Hiroshima and lied about the military nature of Hiroshima, entirely because he had honeymooned in Kyoto) who received some of the Black Chambers reporting and replied with "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

The past of the Black Chamber and the present have some parallels (down to the same telecom company being complicit - AT&T) but the motivations of Yardley were opposite those of the present - he wanted the government to keep breaking codes! After becoming essentially persona non grata in the US, he traveled to China to break Japanese codes and then later traveled to Canada to break Nazi codes (until the US discovered his involvement, and threatened to cut the Canadians out of the signals intelligence loop unless they fired him).

If you're looking for a friend of transparency in Yardley, you're not going to find one. His disclosure was a political ploy.

Surely the implied point is that Yardley ”made Edward Snowden inevitable” by founding the totemic precursor (Black Chamber) of the institution that Snowden worked for and to whose practices he eventually objected so visibly.

Beyond the somewhat ‘clickbaitish’ title and blind casting-around for parallels and analogies I found it to be a rather interesting insight into the history of code-breaking in the US.

I'm also confused about whether the connection between the two is more meant to be "both Yardley and Snowden told the public about signals intelligence activities because they thought the government was doing the wrong thing" or "because Yardley was so indirectly successful at making the U.S. government aggressively spy on communications, it was inevitable that people working in that field would some day be disturbed and frightened by the scope of surveillance". (Or both?)

Yeah I read through his Wikipedia page...granted, it was before I had coffee, but I didn't see anything where it was said he did it out of conscience. The Wikipedia entry claims he couldn't get a job in U.S. government so he ended up working for the Canadians.

I felt as if the article was trying to make it sound like it's unfair that Yardley is in the NSA hall of heroes while Snowden is in exile. First of all, Yardley was inducted decades after his death; we don't know how things will change with Snowden.

Second, Yardley actually contributed to "the cause"...that is, codebreaking for World War II...in fact, according to the OP, he led it. The problem was when he decided to write a book for it to make some money. And of course, he did it during a time when giving up cryptography secrets was not seen as treasonous (was it still too new?), which is a big factor.

Yardley was active during World War I (aka ”The Great War” before we had to number them), not World War II — a minor typo I'm sure but relevant for the comprehension of the comments by a cursory reader.