I for one have changed my opinion of Edward Snowden over the years, especially over the last three.
In fact I’m pretty sure I stated here on this board that I thought he was a traitor and should suffer for it (and I know I wrote it somewhere). I was wrong. I have read more about him and about what he says and thinks, and, yes, I also saw Citizenfour. As I say, I was wrong - he is brave, brilliant, and I hope not broken, now or ever.
And this is not a ‘Trump thing’. No matter which party or person happens to be in power, Snowden’s concerns and actions transcend it. I know he’s alerted me to the profound potential for modern communications surveillance, even by an ostensibly benevolent state, to disrupt and possibly reverse everything I hold dear. Reading about the Uighurs reminds me of the importance of his message.
I admire him. I think he has made a huge personal sacrifice for the proverbial ‘something he believes in’, and I believe his motives were true and his actions heroic.
ETA: Well, maybe it is a bit of Trump thing, or the potential of someone like him or, god forbid, worse.
I always considered him a hero of sorts, everyone knows the government spies on us, but I don’t think most people understood the true scope of their surveillance and meta data and such they are collecting every second of the day. The government should be watched and controlled by the people and held to account not the other way around.
I always felt that what Pfc Manning did was completely different, she swore and oath to the U.S. Army, though I’m not sure if what she did actually caused any real damage to actual people or just embarrassed the Army. Regardless she served her time and Obama commuted her sentence so it’s a moot point now anyway. I’ve always kind of wondered what would happen now if Snowden returned to the U.S. and also what allowed him to stay in Russia, did he have to sell out the U.S. Government secrets to remain there? If so that would obviously change my opinion of the guy.
My understanding is that Russia considers Snowden a substantial propaganda coup–showing the U.S. is not morally superior to Russia. For him to stay there the fundamental requirement was to not criticize the Russian government. I don’t think Russia got any secrets with the possible exception of the the ones he gave to Western journalists–of which probably not all have been published.
Manning and Snowden are heroes. Everyone always thinks that “state secrets” means things like battle plans, troop movements, weapons vulnerabilities, locations and identities of undercover espionage agents, things like that, which will get innocent Americans killed if they aren’t kept secret. But in reality the vast majority is about atrocities being committed, along with wasteful spending and other fuck ups that will cause government officials to fear for their jobs if the public knew about them.
The former type of secret: Yeah, you’re scum if you publish it. The latter: every American with access to those “secrets” has a duty to spread them far and wide. Unfortunately, very few of them actually do, because they fear the exact consequences we’ve seen in whistleblower after whistleblower the past few decades. Snowden and Manning knew the consequences, and did their duty anyway. If only we had a few million more government employees like them.
A part of me wonders who made him, of all people, the chosen one to leak highly classified secrets? There are probably tens, even hundreds of thousands of people with access to classified material. He gave his word that he would protect the secrets of the US government, and he betrayed the trust of his colleagues. He absolutely did.
At the same time, it’s clear that he exposed the fact that our government was lying to us about the degree to which ordinary people were being swept up into the web of data. If you’ve listened to him in interviews, it’s clear that one of his concerns was the imbalance between the government’s ability to operate in secrecy while having very broad powers to conduct surveillance on individuals with little recourse.
I guess I disagree with his conduct, but I understand the reasoning behind and share some of his concerns.
I supported what he did but I wish he had gone to a neutral country. My understanding is that Russia has all his documents. Not sure if thats true, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Also some of his documents were classified. Like info on US & Israel being behind Stuxnet.
I’m not sure there were many others who shared his unique positioning. By virtue of his skills and reputation, he basically had carte blanche access to a shitload of actively deployed programs. And, because his job involved frequent ‘business’-associated travel, wherever he showed up, or left, he attracted no attention. Plus he was connected to smart people he could trust.
Yeah, Snowden did the right thing at a great personal cost.
It’s a classic case of conflating one’s country with one’s government. It is more than possible to love one’s country while having to fight against one’s government. The country is the people and the culture thereof. The government is, in theory, the end result of that.
In Snowden’s case we see a situation where the government is not representing the culture and ideals of the country. Such should always be exposed and the exposed subject to punishment. To think otherwise is to allow government to become a self-perpetuating force that is above the law, the people and the ideals under which it was founded.
The John Oliver interview is very much worth a look. I invite anyone with a strong opinion of Snowden to watch the whole thing and see if that opinion changes.
A pardon? For betraying his country, putting innocent lives at risk, critically jeopardizing our nation’s security apparatus, stabbing his co-workers in the back, and fleeing to an enemy power to live rent-free as a propaganda tool?
What’s next - Chelsea Manning for SecDef?
What personal cost? If he wanted to put his money where his mouth is, he’d have turned himself in to face charges before a jury of his peers.
Not in a country where the government is the people.
What American “culture and ideals” are being violated by the government monitoring data to catch lawbreakers?
C’mon, man. At least try. Do you genuinely believe that the ‘government is the people’ at this point? Government is a self-perpetuating series of personal and group interests with little time for ‘people’. I’d say you need to re-examine your postulates.
That would be fine, so long as you don’t believe in things written in the constitution and trust government to never exceed its mandate. That’s a leap too far for me when the numbers already indicate that the government’s surveillance exceeded 90% those not involved in or in any way connected to potential hostile targets.
The government as an institution is stronger and more meaningful than the petty agendae of the individuals currently mismanaging it.
The Constitution is a good but fundamentally flawed document in many ways and could do with some updates.
If you’re not one of the people the government is looking for, then there’s no need for you to be afraid of them seeing your metadata. You’re far too uninteresting to them, and honestly, Google knows more about you than they do.
Do you think he’s living a better life now, in exile in Russia, the he was when he was living in Hawaii, being paid extraordinary amounts of money to help spy on American citizens?