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.
I think about where we’d be without him, and I think about where we are.
Oddly enough, it’s the same place.
Damn right he is. He risked 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.
Of course not. He’s a criminal. What did leaking that data do to improve the lives of Americans? Now, how much more advanced did our foreign enemies become in attacking our intelligence? He was an extremist that made us more vulnerable to threats based on his own personal value system.
It may seem like not much changed, but it was one of the motivating factors for the big push for TLS everywhere after it was revealed that PRISM was tapped into and mirroring unencrypted communications. Also Signal probably wouldn’t be as popular as it now, with people still using unencrypted communications.
One of the NSA’s missions is to protect all of the federal government’s computer networks from cyber-terrorism. You could argue that in light of what Snowden revealed, the increased focus of security and encryption did more to protect all of the federal government’s computer networks from cyber-terrorism than any other NSA initiative ever.
Alright, so you are for more spying on actual innocent Americans. Great…
So you were fishing for confirmation rather than looking for opinions? Don’t ask a polarizing question if you can’t stomach the answers you don’t agree with.
No, I am just pointing out how ridiculous that comment actually is, lol.
It wasn’t my comment. And if it was, my point still stands. Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to hear opposing answers.
I meant “that” comment. What? am I not allowed to respond to it on my post? Get over yourself.
You didn’t just respond. You immediately went feral. Like I said, you weren’t looking for responses, you were looking for confirmation of your views. When you didn’t get it, you lashed out like a child.
You can respond however you want, but actions have reactions, and this is that.
Granted they could’ve responded a little better but as someone else said, your reaction is very out of proportion.
No one went feral. You’re overreacting.
How is this feral “Alright, so you are for more spying on actual innocent Americans. Great…”
You don’t know how I think, look at you assuming. I posted on here, of course I expected other views. And you acting all high and mighty is disgusting.
What if they were?
Then it doesn’t belong in no stupid question.
You don’t get to decide that.
Username checks out.
made us more vulnerable to threats
How so?
It’s giving away our intelligence apparatus to every other nation. What do you mean how.
Is there any particular piece of information that he revealed which could have been used by anyone really to… I dunno… bypass defenses or take advantage of people or whatever in some a way that could actually hurt people?
I dunno. Everything I’ve heard is that everything that he leaked that has been released was super innocuous militarily (not that the military is a bunch of knights in shining armor or anything) or national-defense-wise. It is (or at least should be) very embarrassing to the U.S. “intelligence apparatus”. And it’s clearly good reason to believe that Uncle Sam clearly doesn’t have our (American’s) best interests at heart. But what could possibly have even hypothetically been used to cause any harm?
(And, I don’t know, maybe you know something I’m unaware of, but it really seemed like he went out of his way to avoid any harm to anything but the reputation of the intelligence industrial complex. And maybe a few presidents.)
He didn’t sanitize names, addresses, or active locations of the individuals involved in the work he was exposing. He made each of them a direct target.
Most people who are critical of him from an educated place instead of one based on feels do so because of that. That wasn’t necessary to get his point across, it was sloppy and reckless, and completely unnecessary. People who call him a terrorist usually are the ones who believe there’s no way you could be so reckless and instead attribute it to malicious ulterior motives of trying to get people killed.
Every other nation’s intelligence services already know all of that stuff. All he did was reveal it to the American people. Intelligence classifications are meant to keep YOU from knowing
I’m sure it was no secret to these other countries that the US was spying on their own citizens.
And this is how cowards look.
‘Hero’ is a term of social worship for those that enact change.
Do I think he did a moral act that aligned with his principles, motivated by compassion for others? Did he forsee what it would cost him and do it anyway because he believed it was the right thing to do, no matter how hard? Yes, and yes.
But he’d only be a ‘hero’ if anybody actually cared enough to do anything about it, making him a symbol of social change that people would be grateful for him instigating.
Instead, he falls victim to the same traps as those who self-immolate outside buildings to make their point: a spectacle of sacrifice, exchanged for confused apathy from those he claimed to stand for.
That really sucks. He was trying to make a real difference. He had to flee his home forever, because of the cost of him trying to save it.
I think you are being pedantic. If you went in risking your life to rescue a puppy from a burning house but the puppy doesn’t make it because of the fumes or you jump on a robber but he kills and leaves with the money anyway, do you stop being a hero because you failed to enact change? That’s ridiculous.
I think the difference in your hypothetical is that people would care that he tried. But inventing a scenario to put words in the mouth of a stranger has no relevance to the reality I’m commenting on.
Think of me as you wish. I answered the question in good faith, and that’s enough for me.
I don’t personally believe in ‘heroes’ and ‘villians’. I think it’s a very rudimentary way to view the world, as if through the lens of a storybook. We have deeply corrupt and selfish people causing harm, we have considerate and compassionate people fighting for their principles. Most people are some measure of both.
Reducing people to Hero and Villain frequently excuses us any responsibility of self-reflection, as we can simply call ourselves ‘Good’ and justify unethical acts in the name of Goodness. It reduces the world down to in-group and out-group binaries, and then devastates us when we learn that a Hero has, as a fallible human, also done harmful things. It also denies Villians any opportunity to change for the better.
If you believe that Hero is an objective trait one can achieve, but that social approval is not how one achieves it, we have very different views on humanity and ethics.
I wouldn’t imagine that OP meant the question as Snowden being permanently labeled a hero for all of his life actions, nor should anyone ever be labeled as such. We are judging a specific action he took many years ago and also in a context of people generally labeling his action as good or bad since then. We are also not talking about comic book characters that are consistently one way or another through all of their actions. We can agree that a convicted felon can be heroic and a puppy loving doctor can do villainous shit as well depending on circumstance, opportunity and personal moral beliefs.
But for this specific action of exposing a terrible truth and essentially losing his way of life and being forced to live as a refugee, I don’t think we should get into the pendatry of what a hero in theory is or if his action led to any actual change. Being suppressed by forces with way more weight than you doesn’t eliminate whatever label your actions deserve.
There does exist a strong privacy movement that replicates 99% of tech products that mainstream tech companies provide. I think part of the momentum can definitely be attributed to Snowden’s revelations.
Hero isn’t a title for life. His willingness to fuck his own life up to reveal NSA secrets to the world was heroic. Him staying in Russia with everything they’ve done more recently is decidedly less so.
We want to judge him by absolute categories like morals and convictions. And that’s unfair because nobody is that pristinely moral all the time. I get that after his 007-like escape to Hong Kong, he would choose the easier way out now. If that means tacitly approving of Russia’s illegal attack on their neighbor then so be it. I think his morals compelled him to release the surveillance secret to the world. And the experience has sufficiently dulled any moral urges. Combine that with a limited list of choices of where else to go. A true superhuman hero would not want to stay where he once sought asylum if that country was itself responsible for hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum elsewhere. As I said, hero isn’t a title for life.
i totally agree with you that if he was in a position to actively oppose Russian imperialism and aggressions him not doing so does show his complicity in those crimes. but i’m not sure how much he is an actor in his life right now or he is being acted upon. i would imagine him living in a disgustingly claustrophobic golden cage with his family and their privileges and wellbeing being hung open him as if a Damocles Sword.
As I recall he was heading somewhere else, but the US revoked his passport while he happened to be catching a connecting flight in Russia and so he ended up taking refuge there instead.
He stayed in Russia because he is safe from US extradition. If the US was able to extradite him, they would assassinate him.
They wouldn’t assassinate him today. They’d just throw him in jail for life.
After all, they’re now doing in the open what he caught them doing in secret, and there have been no repercussions. So that means they no longer have a reason to shut him up, and they definitely don’t want to martyr him.
If the US was able to extradite him, they wouldn’t need to assassinate him. From the government pov, assassinations are for people you can’t lock away forever.
As long as he doesn’t do anything wrong in Russia, I’m not going to give him shit for taking refuge.
Russia>GITMO. He did the right move going there.
I think that him staying in Russia is more because that if he get out he will be arrested and deported. The guy reveal an overreaching conspiracy by the US to spy on their allies and the allies choose the side of the US
There’d have been plenty of other countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the USA.
I withhold judgement, but him going to Russia of all places (considering why he had to flee in the first place) never sat right with me.
Putin has used him to boast his image btw.
edit: I was just reminded that there were technical reasons for him initially staying in Russia. Maybe he really can’t leave, IDK.
Yes, and I wish him well. Be careful, if you’re thinking of anything.
Permanent Record was the first book I ever read (apart from the ones in school and college), and I loved it. His story does inspire me.
In my eyes, he is!
The Enemy Of The State movie from 1998 really woke me up in the past. You should watch it immediately.
As terrible as much of that movie is… It is a great movie overall and a recommended watch.
Not a terrible movie, has some great action too.
I remember seeing that film and thinking, “they wish they could do this.” They’ve tried pretty hard and somehow been more sinister about it.
What if they already had some tech like that, even back then?
I mean, there were definitely cameras everywhere but they werent part of a system(closed circuit and they looked awful). Hell, they still look like shit most of the time.
Hackman had MFs zooming in on people’s faces 100 yards out from atm cameras and stuff.
Obviously, the state wants this but it’s not there yet. If it was, it’d feel extra bad how many murders and other heinous crimes they just give up on.
Isn’t that the whole point of the AI push? To get us fully into that level of surveillance state, and to have it automated? Flock is doing its part but really they don’t need cameras to track people anymore.
I remember seeing that footage on 9/11 at the pentagon. It was like 1 frame per second.
Storage and bandwidth are expensive man!
Without reservation, yes.
Selfless and morally guided actions. He’s the dictionary definition of a hero.
What he revealed was worthwhile.
How he did it was fucked.
What he’s done since …. Hasn’t helped his image.
Vague posting master class.
Wait what has he done since?
Stayed alive and relatively free probably.
Typical ‘Americans’ who are very gung-ho for their gov’t and the nonsense it spouts get angry that Russia gave him a safe space to live. They love to bring up that he lives in Russia now, so I’m going to assume this is what they’re (very ineffectively) trying to say
I think what he did was heroic. I don’t know for sure that his motives were pure, like I can’t see into his soul, or know what his relationship with Russia was before doing it, but all in all I think what he revealed had to be revealed. The NSA were untethered by any sort of oversight or accountability to the public, and they proved beyond any doubt just how completely and totally an agency loses it’s fucking mind when no one’s watching. I doubt anything changed in that regard - they’ve probably just strafed into a different shadowy part of the landscape and are continuing with new/improved tools - but it at least taught us all that, yes, the government really is both capable and motivated to spy on every bowel movement and armpit sniff you perform, whether or not you’re a suspect in a crime. The mere affirmation that this sort of thing really goes on is worth having.
FWIW, his passport was revoked while on a layover in Russia from Hong Kong to Cuba for an intended final destination of Ecuador. This is what caused him to seek asylum in Russia because that was his only option. His involvement with wikileaks during this time is suspicious knowing what we know now, but it seems to me he either got stuck in Russia because of the US or because of Wikileaks, and he didn’t knowingly have a relationship with Russia before getting stuck there.
what is it that you think you know about WikiLeaks
That they were/are pretty pro Russia and have uncritically disseminated Russian agitprop intended to destabilize the US.
i don’t think it’s true that they’re pro-russia, and if the agitprop was true, i don’t see the problem with disseminating it.
As long as context is clearly explained and sources named I don’t disagree. But they’ve been less than reliable about that in the past. If you repeat propaganda (even if it’s more or less true) without explaining that it’s propaganda by providing relevant context then you are a propagandist.
What do we know now?
Most of us here are more of a hero, because we had the backbone to never actually work for those fascist services to begin with.
“Most of us here are more of a hero” Did you risk your life too? To release knowledge of government wrong doings? I assume he did have some knowledge spying but not to that scale.
You missed the point. To get that kind of knowledge, he first had to subscribe to the evil team. Which he did. It would be different if he had joined from the beginning with the motive to expose unlawful practices by the services. It is more heroic to not join team evil in the first place.
Have you not watched his documentary? It was free on YouTube, you should.
Guess what, I even read “No place to hide” by Glenn Greenwald / Ed Snowden. I never said Snowden is bad, but he was naive and quite fucking stupid to think he was working for “the good guys” initially. I am glad he had a change of heart and did what he did. Nevertheless it is more heroic to stay away from evil deeds than change your mind after partaking and then step away.
It’s wild how many people downvote this perspecive.
I imagine people can’t understand the evil that snowden did before the leak, because we never confront the evil that we all do as victims of capitalism.
Yeah, there’s a good chance this is part of the problem - by benefiting passively from a first world that exploits so many other countries and people in the world, we become complicit, and develop a cognitive dissonance regarding our share of responsibility for the evils of the world. Especially since obviously as a child you can’t be guilty for the world you are born into, but it requires an act of emancipation to distance oneself from a system that you recognize as exploitative if not outright evil as you grow older. And it’s impossible to completely remove ourselves from it, we can only ever try and fight smaller aspects of the unfairness.
Another part that I suspect here is that many people have a complete blind spot for the fact that in order to get into a position to leak such sensitive information, Snowden specifically had to be a helping puppet to the system for quite some time.
In that way, and with the knowledge I have about the case, Chelsea Manning is way more eligible to be considered a hero, because they got a hold of documents for which they did not need to willingly participate in any kind of evil - aside from joining the military which is at least a questionable decision for many (including myself) - especially when it comes to the military of some specific countries known for frequently attacking other countries to further their own ends.
I’m going to disagree a little bit. Even if you work for a small private company, you’re still complicit. Create or make some niche product and sell IRL/online, you’re still complicit. Using the device I’m on, I’m complicit. The only way to not be any kind of complicit is to never be born. And we don’t get a say. If we had survival skills, we may manage to stay offgrid, hunt, fish, steal for subsistence until we die or go to prison, then complicit again.
It’s a matter of degrees, and I maintain we don’t all at once sell our souls in one grand bargain, signed on our own blood. It’s more of being, if you’ll excuse the analogy, being born a sinner with the only absolution, especially for those without means, is to simply die. And survival instinct is strong.
We don’t disagree - I commented something very similar deeper down in this thread. have no idea how to link it here though on mobile - my apologies.
No worries, I saw it after. Thanks for your response.
Government institution = fascist services. Nice. Remind me to not march beside you when we finally take down the oligarchs.
Government institution = fascist services.
The NSA? Yes ofc.
Point taken. I guess I should completely amend my argument; my real point is that Snowden blew the whistle exactly on what makes the NSA so bad.
With the understanding that secret police is on your side, you will never take down anyone.
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.
the news quickly buried it and allowed propaganda to trash his name, usa surely dont want more shit to come out.
I think he was… wrong-ish?
I think he didn’t see the forest through the trees.
He was scared of government abuse of surveillance, as he should be. He was scared of a North Korean style surveillance initially justified by fear of terrorists, basically.
But, IIRC, he didn’t fear corporate abuse enough.
He couldn’t imagine the consolidated attention trap the internet would turn into, but I think the signs were there. I guess he couldn’t imagine that all this would come out and people would choose to trade their privacy for instant convenience instead of fear of terrorists, the justification of the time…
Especially at the scale we do in corporate software today.
In other words, I think he should’ve been more worried about a post-truth corporate state than a censored, oldschool dictatorship, as the former seems to be what the US is barreling towards.
So maybe he was a hero. But, sadly, I think he grazed the mark on what to warn us about.
mixed but yes. the govt made an example of him and from the popular standpoint he was serving the people. he also helped GDPR so thats factored in. currently the police state is still winning.
