Keeping things secret from the people is a very dangerous practice in a democracy, and the government is permitted to do so only under very specific circumstances. Reading the documents leaked so far, I don't see anything that needs to be kept secret. The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do. But in any case, now that the documents are public, the courts need to rule on the legality of their secrecy...
I believe that history will hail Snowden as a hero -- his whistle-blowing exposed a surveillance state and a secrecy machine run amok. I'm less optimistic of how the present day will treat him, and hope that the debate right now is less about the man and more about the government he exposed.
-- Bruce Schneier
I agree with Schneier and the core of his article. We shouldn't really focus on Snowden himself and his motives. We should be much more concerned about the surveillance state run amok that he has exposed. I personally am very glad he exposed a lot of what is going on so we can at least have a discussion about what is over the line and what is appropriate. A surveillance state with no checks and balances is fatal to democracy.
Snowden as tech person of the year seems very appropriate.
agreed.
when the story about him first broke i thought he was a traitor and be shot on sight.
now with the actual information coming out and it being true i consider the guy a hero.
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
they didnt name him that because he's a good tech.
They named him that because it would be controversial and improve page hits.
From what I read he's pretty freaking smart/clever curious..
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
No doubt that Snowden arouses strong feelings in many people.There are really just two possible choices for person of the year. I want to say Pope Francis, but I’ve got to go with Edward Snowden.
The spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics and a whistleblowing fugitive from American justice have just one thing in common: impact. Francis, by shifting his church’s focus to social justice, may change the world. But Snowden, by revealing the vast extent of government surveillance, already has.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Mine is that the future is going to be kind to Snowden.The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can't handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn't stay in the government at that level, or you're made aware of it, a week. ... The fact is Presidents rarely say the whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect and what they're doing and what they believe and why they're doing it and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
Seems relevant.When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr. Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home...
In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:
■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor...
■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)...
The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.
If he had stopped after informing Americans about our own government spying on us, he might be heralded as a hero. But, divulging how we spy on other countries, whether friends or foes, is treasonous.
I agree 100%. Disclosing that the NSA is spying on Americans is entirely different than disclosing how the NSA spies on everyone else, which is what we expect them to do.
In any case, I'd say he's definitely the person of the year in terms of the amount of news he's generated.
He should have been assassinated. Seeing Putin of all people give a guy asylum from America of all things is an embarrassment for our country.
He then had to release it to foreign media outlets in order to get it published, which means he had to give them something more than just what happens in America to Americans. Nobody in Europe would really care.