The Guardian (interview with Greenwald, and interview with the public online), the South China Morning Post, and what else?
Hardy har har. But honestly, how does one reconcile the statement that it’s easy to get to Iceland with the evidence that Snowden would have preferred to go Iceland yet did not end up in Iceland? Is he just utterly incompetent? [That remains a possibility, sure. I suspect he looked into the matter quite a bit, though…]
As I entered this thread saying: If heroes don’t flee, and heroes stand up and face the music, is George Washington definitionally not a hero because he didn’t turn himself in to the British?
Who cares? He’s not a hero if he flees to Hong Kong and he’s not a hero if he flees to Iceland.
No one is asking him to turn himself in. Washington took up arms and fought. If this guy thought he should do that, then he shouldn’t have fled. Part of the whole civil disobedience thing is “I dare you to arrest me”.
For those who say Snowden should have gone through “the proper channels” to share his information, three former NSA whistleblowers who did just that feel their experience indicates he made the better decision (link).
It doesn’t really matter as far as what I’m concerned with in this thread goes, because I’m more concerned with the arguments people are offering of the form “Snowden would be good if he stayed and took his punishment, but instead he’s bad because …”. It’s certainly possible you could disagree with these three’s views on whistleblowing just as much as you disagree with Snowden’s leak in the first place. But it’s interesting, nonetheless.
A hero is a person who takes big risks in order to make things better for others. Like that Charles Something guy in Cincinnati who helped the kidnapped women escape from the Castro brothers. He didn’t know if a guy was lurking in there with a revolver ready to shoot him. But he helped them get out when the one captive cried out for help. He used to beat his wife. But he was a hero that day, no doubt about it.
In a similar way, Snowden took even greater risks to let Americans know about the NSA spying program. Now he’s holed up in a Moscow airport and god knows what his future will be, but it sure doesn’t look good right now. Snowden is a hero.
What exactly does “He shouldn’t flee” amount to, then? It very much sounds like a number of people are asking him to turn himself in, his actions not being legitimized otherwise.
So you’d be happier if Snowden violently resisted the American police when they came to arrest him? A la Washington…
If you think Snowden’s a bad guy and shouldn’t have leaked things, that’s fine. I just don’t understand the argument “His disobedience is fine; it is proper to disobey an unjust law. But one must then obey on the second level the law that says you will be punished for failing to obey the unjust law. Unless you go to a third level of resisting that law violently; then it can be alright…”
There’s no rule that the only proper way to protest an unjust law is to go the Thoreau route of sitting in a jail cell, just because some people have used it effectively. You can postulate such a rule if you like, but I don’t see why I should accord that rule any respect. Though Thoreau sat in that jail cell, he still refused to pay the taxes they wanted from him. Well, fine, but why is it ok to dodge the taxman, and not ok to dodge the jailman?
It sounds an awful lot like you think disobedience followed by dutifully submitting to imprisonment is more legitimate than disobedience not followed by dutifully submitting to imprisonment.
Perhaps you think “hero” status and legitimacy are completely orthogonal issues, such that you are only saying “His hero status would be affected by whether he stuck around to go to jail, but the legitimacy of his disobedience would not”?
You suggested a key difference between Washington and Snowden was that Washington took up arms. You are right that I drew from this an inference that was too strong. I apologize.
I actually suspect the reason you condone Washington’s actions and now Snowden is simply because you believe in Washington’s cause and not in Snowden’s cause. That’s fine. But I wish everyone would admit that’s what it boils down to, instead of claiming it’s about the rules of how to carry out legitimate protest, with a nonsensical account of how this must be done.
The comparison with Washington doesn’t make sense because Washington’s goal was to form an independent country. Unless Britain agreed, that necessitated taking up arms. Snowdon isn’t trying to declare independence. He just wants to expose, and change, certain aspects of the law.
The more obvious comparison is Ellsberg. So, where did Ellsberg flee to? He didn’t. In fact, if you follow the event (from wikipedia)s:
For starters, he could refuse to hide behind their skirts because he’s too much of a coward to face the US. “Oh, let me hide behind this criminal and I don’t have to say anything because you know he’s a criminal but I’m going to hide here anyway! I’m a hero!”
Better for who? According to who? I won’t claim my life has changed significantly either way from day-to-day but I’d say that, on balance, Snowden made my life worse by compromising the US’s ability to collect intelligence than any benefit I got from worrying about “metadata” about my phone calls.
So Snowden completely failed to make my life better, actually made it worse and is hiding out from any punishment.
I personally would call somebody a hero (or at least credit them for heroic character) if they sincerely (we can throw in “and reasonably”) believed their action was for the benefit of others. Do you think Snowden fits that bill?
As for whether his action actually benefited others, I am wondering how you measure the effect on your life of the gov’ts ability to collect intelligence and of your knowledge of the collection of metadata. I am also wondering how you are measuring the effect of Snowden’s action on the government’s ability to collect intelligence.
I have no idea. I really don’t even care. If someone hurts me “for my own good”, I’m not exceptionally inclined to give him the “hero” mantle. Especially if he can’t make an acceptable (to me, since I was hurt) case for why hurting me was for my own good.
Simple: I don’t give a shit about my phone call metadata. I do give a shit about US national security. So any move that damages the US’s ability to engage in national security affects me more than any move affecting my phone call metadata. His actions gave me zero benefit and harmed the intelligence programs of the nation where I live. There’s no reason for me to argue “how much” he hurt them, he still hurt them more than he benefited me and thus he is not deserving of a “hero” title.
That’s a good point. While I’m not too crazy about the government collecting metadata, what level of harm does that rise to? Again, going to the Pentagon Papers analogy, this is no Vietnam War, where ~50,000 Americans and untold number of Vietnamese were killed.
Now, that is not to say that nothing short of a Vietnam War situation can be considered for “hero” status, but this is far, far below that.
Okay, thanks for that Jophiel. It looks like between you and Evil, the debate isn’t so much over Snowden’s heroism or lack of it, but rather over whether Snowden benefited you or not. This is not to say that if Evil proved there was a benefit, then he’d thereby prove Snowden a hero. Instead I’m just saying it looks like before you guys can sensibly discuss together the heroism question, you have to hash out whether he benefited you or not. If you can’t agree about that, there’s no point trying to argue about Snowden’s heroism.
ETA: Looks like this is true for the pair {John Mace, Evil Captor} as well.