Edward Snowden: Did he do the right thing?

[TotallyOz]

What are your thoughts?

[AdamSmith]

Right thing.

[Guest FourAces]

Wrong Thing.

His execution of what he did was terrible. I have seen gang bangers do drive by shootings with more class.

I have no problem with the information he shared but what was the purpose? He has offered little to no valid reason for doing so. Had no end game, did not create some major protest by the citizens of the US which might have had impact.

He should have watched some 60s protest films before he stumbled around drunk like with the information he wanted to get out. Did he change anything, nope. Does he have people marching in the streets,nope. All he did was yell hey look at this and ran away ... actually he ran before yelling even. Someone who truly believed in their cause had passion for it would stand and fight!

Five years he will be a footnote at best.

[TotallyOz]

Interesting that so far the results of this poll are similar to that of the national poll on the Huffington Post.

[Guest hitoallusa]

I guess that's the power of statistics.. What I don't get is that he will end up in a country that is much more corrupted than the US. I think it's an irony. Yes nothing has changed but things will change in the future good or bad. He simply didn't understand the physiology of the intelligence community.

Interesting that so far the results of this poll are similar to that of the national poll on the Huffington Post.

[caeron]

I find it more than a bit ironic that Obama says we should have a national debate about this, but wants to crucify the guy that tells us what we are actually debating....

[RA1]

www.nbcnews.com/technology/privacy-vs-security-false-choice-poisons-debate-nsa-leaks-6C10536226

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest NCBored]

www.nbcnews.com/technology/privacy-vs-security-false-choice-poisons-debate-nsa-leaks-6C10536226

Best regards,

RA1

Interesting article, but more questions than answers.

I find myself somewhat undecided/uncertain on the issue. And my opinions may be influenced by years in a large corporation, where I knew that all network traffic was logged - and I worked with some of that data, often anonymized.

Or it may just be that I feel that ship sailed long ago and it isn't coming back.

If the data is only collected and never looked at by a person but only stored or an analyzed by programs - how significant a breach of privacy is that?

[RA1]

Answers are only thoughts looking for more questions. I agree with you. The main thrust is how willing we Americans are to "give up" freedoms and other things in search for security which is impossible, according to me.

The most secure method is to be completely anonymous and keep moving whilst avoiding crowds. Wealth, fame, body guards and all such obviously do not provide security, only the illusion. Regardless, there is always risk.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest hitoallusa]

The programs will be evolved so that it doesn't violate one's privacy. The problem is that if such a powerful program emerges then some people will have financial advantage because they will have some info faster than others. Now that will bring a serious problem and cause a severe disparity in wealth distribution. Luckily, people will come up with counter measures to that and counter counter measures will be developed so I don't worry too much.

As for Snowden, I hope my Obama could be a little bit lenient toward this kid and bring him back to the US. He needs a second chance.

[JKane]

I think Dick Cheney calling him a traitor is pretty major vindication for his actions.

I'm not too sure of Snowden's motives, but am glad people are finally paying attention to extremes the security industrial complex keeps surpassing.

[Guest EXPAT]

Bill Maher tweeted today that shouldn't Snowden pick a country with better human rights and civil rights record than the US? Otherwise what's the point?

[Guest zipperzone]

Bill Maher tweeted today that shouldn't Snowden pick a country with better human rights and civil rights record than the US? Otherwise what's the point?

He does not have that luxury. His choices are somewhat limited.

[AdamSmith]

Agree with zip. His point now is to try and keep his nuts out of the Hotel Bradley Manning.

[lookin]

His point now is to try and keep his nuts out of the Hotel Bradley Manning.

True enough. But what do we do? Do we sit back as our government learns more about what we're doing and we learn less about what it's doing? How long will it take us to revert to where we were 250 years ago? Are we already there and just too dumb to know it?

[Guest hitoallusa]

How long will it take us to revert to where we were 250 years ago?

[Guest gcursor]

Actually I have been writing a paper on Edward Snowden for my college writing class. Essentially one of the points of my paper stated that throughout history, people's rights have been trodden down upon. Our founding fathers decided they were upset because of taxation without representation. Lincoln (and others) were upset because of the African American's lack of rights. The women suffragette movement raised concern about the lack of women as equals. Even today, gays fight in many areas to get some of the same rights that other Americans already have.

If we were to ignore these problems then our country would not be what it is today. Mass shootings, a media which sensationalizes every story with little regard for the truth and the luscious delectable pleasure we get from chugging down reality TV (sorry I digress

Where would we be today without the victories and defeats that people have suffered to achieve a small portion of true equality for all? I would venture to say that we would still be in Britain since none of us would have the courage to stand up for our convictions.

Yes, it is the people who stand up when they feel that people's rights are being infringed upon who cause our country to progress forward. Edward Snowden did what he did because he felt strongly in his belief that something wrong was being done possibly harming the rights of people everywhere. Further he felt that this was being done covertly by our government which is supposed to be "by the people, for the people".

I believe the question that we must ask ourselves is what would it take (if anything at all) for any of us to give up our fat, happy life as Edward Snowden did?

gc

[RA1]

I know plenty of people who are unhappy about the current state of affairs in the US, including some on this board, but I don't know what they would give up to correct any of it. Even during the Revolutionary days there were few Thomas Paines and it may have been that fewer than 50% of the citizens wished to separate from England. So, what does that mean? For one thing it means that a few folks who are willing to take the bull by the horns and risk much can influence us all. However, there are almost always consequences. We can observe some that Snowden has already suffered and most of us are wondering how much more and in what form others will take.

In the meantime, polls, letters to the editor, news readers at work and various other things have little to no effect on the outcome or so it seems. However, pols seemingly are sometimes somewhat sensitive to public opinion, therefore it isn't over until it is over. BO has certainly been "accused" of reacting primarily, not taking the initiative.

Best regards,

RA1

[TampaYankee]

Bill Maher tweeted today that shouldn't Snowden pick a country with better human rights and civil rights record than the US? Otherwise what's the point?

This is a rather stupid remark for Bill. It is not exactly Snowden's choice alone. He has to find a country willing to accept him given the political pressures involved. File this in the category of 'Blow it out your ass'. Sorry Bill but you did.

In another thread on news reporters I remarked that even smart people say stupid things. The same holds for opinion givers which fits Bill to a T.

[TampaYankee]

I find the premise of this poll somewhat lacking. This question is not so black and white. I believe some of what he accomplished is to the good. I also believe some of it, not so much. Where to draw the line and weigh the sides. I do not have enough visibility to know how to do that. I do believe he did significant good and it will be seen as that in the long run. I also believe he did some short term damage to some of our interests.

IMO a more black and white value question to ask is: Is Edward Snowden a whistle blower or a traitor? That reduces the question not to his actions which may have unintended consequences but to his motives: good or bad. That choice is also subjective but less gray. Did he act out of concern for the constitutional principles of our Republic or for the benefit of our adversaries? I believe the former.

If on the other hand one sees no significant benefit to what he did short term or long, or alternatively no significant harm, then I guess the original question is more pointed.

[Guest EXPAT]

This is a rather stupid remark for Bill. It is not exactly Snowden's choice alone. He has to find a country willing to accept him given the political pressures involved. File this in the category of 'Blow it out your ass'. Sorry Bill but you did.

In another thread on news reporters I remarked that even smart people say stupid things. The same holds for opinion givers which fits Bill to a T.

Bill is a comedian. . . By the way

It was a joke. But Bill has a point. What was his game plan ? Exposé the secrets and keep shopping at Kroger's? He had to know only these awful countries would take him in and they would be worse than the US on civil rights.

[AdamSmith]

About the Reuters article

The latest effort to distract attention from the NSA revelations is more absurd than most

• Glenn Greenwald
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 July 2013 15.53 EDT

(updated below - Update II)

When you give many interviews in different countries and say essentially the same thing over and over, as I do, media outlets often attempt to re-package what you've said to make their interview seem new and newsworthy, even when it isn't. Such is the case with this Reuters article today, that purports to summarize an interview I gave to the daily newspaper La Nacion of Argentina.

Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It's particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly "blackmailing" and "threatening" the US government. That is just absurd.

That Snowden has created some sort of "dead man's switch" - whereby documents get released in the event that he is killed by the US government - was previously reported weeks ago, and Snowden himself has strongly implied much the same thing. That doesn't mean he thinks the US government is attempting to kill him - he doesn't - just that he's taken precautions against all eventualities, including that one (just incidentally, the notion that a government that has spent the last decade invading, bombing, torturing, rendering, kidnapping, imprisoning without charges, droning, partnering with the worst dictators and murderers, and targeting its own citizens for assassination would be above such conduct is charmingly quaint).

I made three points in this La Nacion interview, all of which are true and none of which has anything remotely to do with threats:

1) The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that.

He carefully vetted every document he gave us, and then on top of that, asked that we only publish those which ought to be disclosed and would not cause gratuitous harm: the same analytical judgment that all media outlets and whistleblowers make all the time. The overwhelming majority of his disclosures were to blow the whistle on US government deceit and radical, hidden domestic surveillance.

My point in this interview was clear, one I've repeated over and over: had he wanted to harm the US government, he easily could have, but hasn't, as evidenced by the fact that - as I said - he has all sorts of documents that could inflict serious harm to the US government's programs. That demonstrates how irrational is the claim that his intent is to harm the US. His intent is to shine a light on these programs so they can be democratically debated. That's why none of the disclosures we've published can be remotely described as harming US national security: all they've harmed are the reputation and credibility of US officials who did these things and then lied about them.

2) The US government has acted with wild irrationality. The current criticism of Snowden is that he's in Russia. But the reason he's in Russia isn't that he chose to be there. It's because the US blocked him from leaving: first by revoking his passport (with no due process or trial), then by pressuring its allies to deny airspace rights to any plane they thought might be carrying him to asylum (even one carrying the democratically elected president of a sovereign state), then by bullying small countries out of letting him land for re-fueling.

Given the extraordinary amount of documents he has and their sensitivity, I pointed out in the interview that it is incredibly foolish for the US government to force him to remain in Russia. From the perspective of the US government and the purported concerns about him being in Russia, that makes zero sense given the documents he has.

3) I was asked whether I thought the US government would take physical action against him if he tried to go to Latin America or even force his plane down. That's when I said that doing so would be completely counter-productive given that - as has been reported before - such an attack could easily result in far more disclosures than allowing us as journalists to vet and responsibly report them, as we've doing. As a result of the documents he has, I said in the interview, the US government should be praying for his safety, not threatening or harming it.

That has nothing to do with me: I don't have access to those "insurance" documents and have no role in whatever dead man switch he's arranged. I'm reporting what documents he says he has and what precautions he says he has taken to protect himself from what he perceives to be the threat to his well-being. That's not a threat. Those are facts. I'm sorry if some people find them to be unpleasant. But they're still facts.

Before Snowden's identity was revealed as the whistleblower here, I wrote:

"Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here."

That's what all of this is. And it's all it is: an ongoing effort to distract attention away from the substance of the revelations. (This morning, MSNBC show host Melissa Harris-Parry blamed Snowden for the fact that there is so much media attention on him and so little on the NSA revelations: as though she doesn't have a twice-weekly TV show where she's free to focus as much as she wants on the NSA revelations she claims to find so important).

Compare the attention paid to Snowden's asylum drama and alleged personality traits to the attention paid to the disclosures about mass, indiscriminate NSA spying. Or compare the media calls that Snowden (and others who worked to expose mass NSA surveillance) be treated like a criminal to the virtually non-existent calls that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper be treated like a criminal for lying to Congress.

This "threat" fiction is just today's concoction to focus on anything but the revelations about US government lying to Congress and constitutionally and legally dubious NSA spying. Yesterday, it was something else, and tomorrow it will be something else again. As I said in an interview with Falguni Sheth published today by Salon, this only happens in the US: everywhere else, the media attention and political focus is on NSA surveillance, while US media figures are singularly obsessed with focusing on everything but that.

There are all sorts of ways that Snowden could have chosen to make these documents be public. He chose the most responsible way possible: coming to media outlets and journalists he trusted and asking that they be reported on responsibly. The effort to depict him as some sort of malicious traitor is completely negated by the facts. That was the point of the interview. If you're looking for people who have actually harmed the US with criminal behavior, look here and here and here - not to those who took risks to blow the whistle on all of that. As always, none of this will detain us even for a moment in continuing to report on the many NSA stories that remain.

UPDATE

The original La Nacion interview which Reuters claimed to summarize is now online; the rough English translation is here. Here's the context for my quote about what documents he possesses:

"Q: Beyond the revelations about the spying system performance in general, what extra information has Snowden?

"A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public."

And exactly as I said, the answer about the dead man's switch came in response to my being asked: "Are you afraid that someone will try to kill him?" That's when I explained that I thought it was so unlikely because his claimed dead man's switch meant that it would produce more harm than good from the perspective of the US government. The only people who would claim any of this was a "threat" or "blackmail" are people with serious problems of reading comprehension or honesty, or both.

UPDATE II

For those who say that they wish there was more attention paid to the substance of the NSA stories than Snowden: here is the list of the NSA revelations we've published over the last month. Feel free to focus on them any time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/13/reuters-article-dead-man-s-switch

[TampaYankee]

Bill is a comedian. . . By the way

It was a joke. But Bill has a point. What was his game plan ? Exposé the secrets and keep shopping at Kroger's? He had to know only these awful countries would take him in and they would be worse than the US on civil rights.

So is John Stuart but if you do not believe they are opinion givers any less than David Brooks or Frank Rich then you don't watch the same Maher and Stuart I watch. The venue is different, and they have a broader act, that is all.

You are right. I don't think his plan was to become a whistle blower just so he could get a cushy asylum in some paragon of democracy. I do believe he hoped for something close to that for asylum -- Iceland. But he could have gone there without blowing the whistle.

I agree that he did not think things through as thoroughly as he should have. For one, Iceland was unwilling to decide on asylum before his landing on their territory. That probably restricted his chances to Iceland asylum or forced repatriation, a chance he seemed unwilling to take. Clearly he should have cemented his asylum oppourtunities before announcing his identity to the world. Going to Honk Kong was not a good call either. Once there, with the publicity, he has little choice about Russia, another unfortunate step.

However, all of that preplanning would have been risky too. By leaving the government to out him as the leaker, they could portray his motives in any light they chose and it would not have been to his liking. By getting out in front, he initiates the public discussion with his side as the first volley, chosing to publicly admit his actions rather than skulking away in the night to be outed by the government.

There was no pretty way to do this and the long lense of history will judge him a whistle blower or traitor after all the heated rhetoric has past and the government practices and damages come into focus.

[Guest CharliePS]

It seems typical, and all too human, that there is more interest in Snowden and his motives than in the information that he leaked, and the government has played that distraction for all it's worth. I don't really care why he did it, but I do care what he has revealed about a government that I trust less and less.

[Guest hitoallusa]

Jimmy Carter supports Snowden.. I am not sure why my Obama is not so lenient to this guy.