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 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.
A hero is a concept and since people are much more than concepts, the question is invalid.
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.
I mean I have no idea what this guy’s like, outside of what he’s broadly known for, but I definately approve of what he did in regards of informing the greater public about the level of intrusion they are actively seeking to have into everybody’s life.
Anyone who cared already had a good idea about what the NSA did. Go and read The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book published in 1989 goes into what the NSA does. it was public knowledge in 1989 that the NSA was monitoring all phone calls and all internet traffic back in the days of modems.
Nobody cared back then and the NSA continues to do what it does and nobody cares now. Nobody actually cares about privacy and constantly willingly share pretty much all information about themselves that’s possible to be to be put onto a computer.
Snowden essentially just revealed that the NSA exists to people that were ignorant of it. But while doing so he revealed other state secrets to adversaries.
When the EU makes laws that require companies to disclose they’re tracking you, people are angry at the EU because the cookie popups are annoying. It’s very clear people would rather be tracked without knowledge of it than have even a popup on their screen. All of the information these companies collect is bought and sold regularly.
It’s trivial for the NSA to just buy all of your purchase history and all of your activities online because all of that is tracked by marketing companies and no one gives a shit. Suddenly you’re upset if the government knows what everyone else knows? It’s like putting your personal information on a billboard and getting angry if someone that works for the government happens to drive by and see that billboard.
The only thing of significance that Snowden did was share specific state secrets to adversaries. He currently lives in Russia and says whatever Putin demands that he says. He’s just a Putin stooge now.
People like the narrative of this guy who blew the lid on something nobody knew before, but anyone who cared to know already knew the NSA monitors communications, it’s kinda their whole thing. According to the narrative, the evil governments are after because he revealed the existence of the NSA. The truth is the existence of the NSA wasn’t a secret it’s just the ignorant didn’t know about it. The whole point of the NSA is to monitor communications, and it was widely known the degree to which they did this. The budget of the NSA is something you can see in public records.
Not long after the Snowden story went from the limelight, everyone went back to not caring about the NSA. Nobody actually cares about privacy, they just pretend to be upset about it for a short time before there’s some other story to pretend to be upset about.
Yeah, we knew nsa spies on us. But Snowden didn’t just say that nsa spies on us, he released details. I don’t get your point at all, before most of this stuff was written off as conspiracies.
Yeah the details which helped foreign adversaries. That’s the definition of treason.
If he said “The NSA is spying on everyone” there wouldn’t be a story. The details that aided foreign adversaries made it a story about him being on the run from intelligence agencies and made it an interesting story. You want it to be a story about someone doing the right thing and blowing the whistle, but it didn’t actually reveal anything we didn’t already know in the broad sense, it only revealed secrets that aided foreign adversaries.
The term “foreign adversaries” is doing a lot of work.
We’re supposed to automatically believe that any country who is at odds with US capital and foreign policy (not an actual enemy, so it’s not treason to aid them) is an inherently in the wrong and evil by fiat.
And that’s just not the case. And if fact as has been recently demonstrated, a country that was described as a great “ally” of America, who’s illegal spying we’ve turned a blind eye to, has turned out to be anything but and are committing some of the worst crimes in recent history and is causing a demonstrable harm to this country.
Which is something that weakened the US, right ?
Thank you. Seems like the only sane take on this thread. We had years of Bush W. talking about TIA, cover stories on WIRED magazine on gov’t data collection, etc. For leaking about domestic surveillance, yeah, good job, but we knew that, but still good job. For the other stuff, textbook treason.
This is why gatekepeeping hobbies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When outsiders become more numerous than the enthusiasts, the whole thing goes to shit.
The embodiment of “not all heroes wear capes”. Unless he did or does.
I’ll take my downvotes. No, I don’t think he is.
I think if he were, he’d have
- limited his disclosure to the programs he had an actual issue with
- at least attempted the normal whistleblower procedure through OGC
- gathered his data by social engineering staff in specific projects and not anyone he could in his office
Personally, my profile of Snowden is someone who has a large ego and lashed out because he was a small fish in a large NSA pond. The “whistleblower” story was generated by propagandists to encourage copycats by digging through the massive disclosures and finding one or two uncomfortable things to latch on to. Snowden played along because he had to; he was now at the mercy of U.S. adversaries to give him safe harbor.
Basically have ceased using mobile phones since he confirmed our “paranoid” suspicions. Boggles my mind how others can carry on. It’s like they’ve been hypnotised out of understanding their duty to poke big baron in the eye.
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
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.
A hero for sure and should get a presidential pardon instead of all the pedos and rapist!
I always thought he was. I always knew too that he’s never going to get a fair trial and that he had to do what was necessary to avoid being extradited.
He did a huge favor for the american masses, who were obliviously unaware as to how much of an extent that they were being spied on and how their privacy was exploited. Anybody who still calls him a traitor to this day, besides the government anyways, are those who truly cannot grasp or refuse the reality this man unveiled to them.
I do see people and people like Luigi as true patriots. They have done things, that no American has the guts to pull off. The American populace, just largely takes the constant raping of their rights by their government and fear them. It should be the other way around.
Yes.
Bit of a nuanced take, a trimmed down copy-paste from another comment of mine prior. Tl;Dr: he’s a product of the system that left the system.
Snowden was an individual that worked in the intelligence community in the mid-2000s. In this era, the American populace was so afraid of terrorism they signed away freedoms for national security. In this post 9/11 world, patriotism was a given, almost nationalistically, if you were American. It’s fair to say that a highly nationalistic media and culture can influence the individual to embrace those mentalities more… even if it perverts your true best interest. Snowden likely viewed service to the NSA as patriotic, and in support of his fellow Americans. While he started off supporting it, he soon saw immorality, and decided to resist against them with what I see as an effective measure. I feel that for most whistleblowers, this logic applies. I wanna say “Good job, but still shame on you for taking the job to begin with,” yet this system we’re in can cause us to support things we otherwise wouldn’t like.
Looking to modern issues: The manipulation of individuals, mass surveillance, leveraging of government by powerful. Critisizim of these was always there, but where it was pointed at and pursued sure felt a lot different after Snowden.
Yep, he is for sure. Probably the reason I care for privacy more now.
What he did was something 9,999999% would be too afraid of.
