I personally do, he actually risked his life to release information about the government spying on people. And there are for sure more advanced ways now. Even your phone is listening.
Yes. Unequivocally.
Was going to write these exact words.
Damn right he is. He risks his safety and his life (and still does) to make sure we all know more about how the feds are spying on their own citizens.
He’s a true hero of the American People, that one, make no mistake.
And Europeans, even though many don’t know him, he’s shown how much the US spies on us too.
I think he blew up his life to reveal something the general public probably should be aware of, but ultimately didn’t care about.
Idk if it was heroic, but it certainly was interesting how he released the info slowly to get catch the government in numerous lies attempting to downplay the truth of the matter. One of the Obama administration’s biggest blights.
Guy gave up his life to show Americans (and the world) the truth, and we as a society just ignored him.
ignored him.
No we hunted him and he had to hide in Russia.
Yes. You’re a bootlicker if you say otherwise
Exactly. I think FEDS are in here now. One dude was saying he isn’t a hero and a criminal, lol.
What’s the point of asking for opinions if this is what you think of opinions different than yours.
well the timeline we live in has pushed many to spaces where there is a common understanding of the nature of our state. Red flags and normie takes. We don’t all agree on everything but more than not. Welcome to the fedi. Welcome to the fringes. Or the shad ball of deplorables.
Confirmation
Removed by mod
Anonymous_Leaker == SBD - Silent but deadly 🤣
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
A real name with a general location can do wonders.
A 2 day old account with that name immediately vague-threatening anyone who answers incorrectly to an opinion question?
The vibe is off
Nothing was threatening, that’s slander. Perhaps, it was misunderstood. I was just giving tips on what not to do. How about a fresh start?
People should own their own shame they create based on their ability to compehend their actions… It should motivate their change anything else is kinky. You should not accept shame like a nasty little gift. criminal, was ist das? well sheet I am a criminal too… who isn’t? Straight Thuggin
Lol, gang gang.
I would argue that praising soldiers for their bravery and calling them heroes is a bootlicker thing to do.
He told the truth about the US spying on it’s citizens. I got nothing respect for him.
No he provided evidence. There were people around the globe who knew about the nsa before Edward Snowden and told the truth. There were articles and videos back in 2008 about the nsa backdoor into windows. The only main difference is he, “proved it.” like you know how someone goes, “yeah! well prove it!!!” He did.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Yes, 100 percent. The fact that he’s in exile in Russia is because he cannot get a fair trial in the US. He was never a Russian asset, he’s a whistleblower being unfairly persecuted
If he was a russian asset he’d be president today
Or the head of intelligence
Seeing how little we actually did, I often wonder if he regrets coming forward.
Everybody, who puts morals or ethics in front of their own, personal gain, is by default a hero in today’s context. That’s the only weapon we have against authoritarian regimes, capitalism and oligarchy. A weapon, that can only be used once per capita. But don’t be fooled—we are all.
Yes, he’s a hero And he shouldn’t be punished for calling out the he found. Hope he’s having a great day
What Snowden did was objectively good, and he did so at great personal cost, but you should be cautious about making any living person your hero. His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else, and it’s very possible he will disappoint you in the future. Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else. The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.
His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else
Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn’t slowing anyone down.
Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else.
Glenn was always a libertarian crank. But after he got ousted from The Guardian, his economic needs superseded his politics. I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he’d be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.
The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.
I don’t think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank. But I also don’t know of what became of Snowden, outside “he fled to Russia after Hong Kong wouldn’t hide him”.
I might suggest that Snowden was only able to leak what he did because he climbed up the ranks through Booze-Allen to begin with. And there you’ve got an inherent problem with whistleblowers - either coming or going, they must have done something you don’t like.
But I’d say his turn of conscious and his work ethic and professionalism in how the information was aggregated, leaked, and confirmed makes him a role model for anyone else who aspires to turn coat against a fascist regime. Whatever you think of the individuals, you still do need Role Models in order to inform how you might achieve similar results. That means studying other people - studying history at the individualist level - and asking how they did what they did. Ideally, you’re studying people you admire because you want to be more like them. Realistically, you’re going to study people and see their warts. And that might shape what you think about their motivations and whether your own motivations lead you the same way.
Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn’t slowing anyone down.
I mean, I would say you shouldn’t make him your hero either. Even if you think what he did was heroic, lone gunman assassins usually don’t turn out to be very stable, well adjusted people. Hell, Ted Kacynski has some good points about post-Industrial life, but that doesn’t mean he should be your hero.
I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he’d be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.
Very possible, and nearly as disappointing. My point isn’t that he changed or became worse, just that I projected more of my ideals onto him than he actually shared.
I don’t think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank.
To be clear, I’m not. I’m saying that he has some views and beliefs that may lead him to disappoint you in the future. He mostly doesn’t comment much on politics outside of the surveillance state, but he has described himself as a libertarian, and said that he believes social security is a scam that needs to die. It seems clear that he is anti-authoritarian, but it’s very possible that, if he ever became more vocal about American politics, you’d learn a lot about him that would disappoint you.
There are a lot of comments here saying “it’s tragic because no-one cared”, but that is misleading as there is now a strong privacy movement.
I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.
Yes we’re all fighting a rearguard retreat, but without Snowden’s sacrifice there would be no rearguard and there would be abject surrender rather than retreat, and we’d all live under eastern-style surveillance states without ever knowing.
I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.
You think there’s much opposition to laws and decisions that erode privacy? In the US in particular privacy has been eroding at an increasing rate year after year.
That’s exactly what the comment you’re responding to is saying, with the additional observation that there would be even less resistance without the Snowden leaks.
And what I’m saying is that there isn’t any evidence that the Snowden leaks resulted in people caring about their privacy.
I am an American who cares about privacy largely because of Snowden. His book was very eye opening, and a great read. So that’s at least 1 person
Where you fighting that fight because everybody who seems to care is also removing themselves from all social media. They keep saying they’re doing things locally like …
Meeting in coffee shops?
Like weirdly I’ve had this phrase said to me multiple times and it’s so silly. Hold on guys I’m going to release a new movie I spent years making. I refuse to use the space with millions of people cause I don’t like who created it. I’m going to stand around Starbucks and tell people about it. Find me 40 years to build up a cult following
Finally we had a guy truthfully hollering that the sky was falling and, at the end of the day, no-one gave a shit.
Yes, but…
He was a definite hero in releasing what he discovered. He blew the whistle on things that the government was doing that it had no right to do, and that people had a right to know about. He risked his life and freedom to do it, and is paying for that by having to live in exile in Russia.
The “but” is that at times he has speculated on things that he doesn’t have any direct knowledge of.
For example, what he revealed in the PRISM leaks is that the US was tapping into submarine cables owned by companies like Google and getting the data that was going between various Google datacenters unencrypted.
That showed up in the PRISM leaks as this slide:
Snowden claimed that Google was cooperating with the NSA, when that slide shows what was really happening. The NSA learned how Google’s architecture worked, found a vulnerability, and exploited it without Google’s knowledge. Google reacted to the PRISM revelations by putting in a huge effort to encrypt data everywhere, in transit and at rest.
Until then they had thought that the data was safe. The places inside the Google network where the data was unencrypted were protected by significant physical security. They didn’t think anybody could get in, at least not get in undetected. But, their threat model didn’t include the US government treating them the way they’d treat an enemy country.
Google did “cooperate” with the US government, in that when it received a legal order for someone’s data they complied with that legal order. They even set up systems to make that process seamless. Things like the FISA court were a bit of a joke, so it was really easy for the government to come up with a legal order that Google release the data. But, Google still did require that the government go through the motions of getting a court to sign off on the orders. I think that’s why they were so surprised that the government didn’t think that was enough and had tapped into their backbone traffic.
If you look at what actual full cooperation with the government looks like, look at the revelations of Mark Klein. He was also a heroic whistleblower. What he showed was that AT&T set aside a special room in one of their facilities where AT&T would copy all the Internet traffic hitting their network so that the NSA could sift through it as they wished. There was no need for a diagram of where AT&T added or removed encryption because AT&T was just handing it to them unencrypted.
So, yeah. He is a hero for what he did. But, he was irresponsible for mixing the things he knew for a fact with his own personal speculation on them, because some of his speculations were wrong.
Enough of his speculations were right to make it worthwhile. The other option was to let the NSA control the narrative on how the data was collected and used.
Better to have them vehemently deny his errors than have them deny it all and have to prove the true ones.
He is the biggest American hero this century, bar none.
Why not just stick to the facts? The facts were damning enough.
By speculating on things and getting them wrong, he opened the door to them saying he was wrong about everything.
No, the other option was to not speculate.
His demand to return to the US and give himself in was if he got a public (non military) trial.
The government’s offer under Obama was that the only guarantee they would provide was that he wouldn’t be subject to torture.
Even if he had negligible effect on state level surveillance, the documents he shared provided some insanely valuable perspective into the capability and power of nation states in the cybersecurity space.
Anything the NSA is or was doing can also be applied to other major countries like China or Russia, and the capability + compute power has only grown in size since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
EDIT: Also in true American foreign interest memery, the top two most heavily surveilled states are Iran and Pakistan.
The USA has stretched ‘technically not torture’ too far for that to be comforting.
