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.

Guy gave up his life to show Americans (and the world) the truth, and we as a society just ignored him.

It’s hard to say he’s a hero, but, what he did was undoubtedly heroic.

He told the truth about the US spying on it’s citizens. I got nothing respect for him.

I think about where we’d be without him, and I think about where we are.

Oddly enough, it’s the same place.

conservatives have a wierd obssesion of him being a"traitor" guess exposing conservative hypocrisy is traitorous.

Seeing how little we actually did, I often wonder if he regrets coming forward.

Yes, at minimum a martyr.

Watching his disclosure real time while everyone around me ignored it was something else

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.

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.

Yes. Unequivocally.

He did a good thing. Don’t know enough about the man to pass judgement.

And after all, the guy that killed Hitler (undoubtedly a good thing) was very much an asshole.

100% I do. Him and nicholas are the biggest black spot on the obama administration and I hope the things that bring him the most shame. They are part of a small group of heroes of the millenia. Snowden being in russia because he brought to light what the governement was doing is one of the biggest indicators of our dystopia.

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.

I consider him a true American patriot.

Nothing is more patriotic than wanting your country to do better.

Implementing drag net surveillance was a terrible decision, and exposing it was truly heroic.

Sadly, Snowden is now in the clutches of Russia who can and does use him as their pawn.

It is easy to say that this is where the EU should have stepped up and given him sanctuary, but that would have been less than ideal for him.

1. Europe and the US have close ties with police and law enforcement, while no EU nation would hand their own citizens over to the US, they would absolutely hand over a US citizen to the US if requested.
2. During the war on terror, Europe was complicit in plenty of illegal renditions of their own citizens to the CIA, they were then sent to illegal black sites and tortured, plenty of these persons have since been proven innocent.

Given the high profile of Snowden’s leak, the US still want’s him back, and back then even more so, had Snowden gone to the EU, he most likely would have been extradited, kidnapped or even assassinated.

By staying in Russia that was a far lower risk to him.