If he hadn't released all the information proving that what he was saying was true, we'd be hearing about how he was just a disgruntled employee with personal issues who was making stuff up for the publicity so he could sell books, etc.

He’s worse - a traitor who sold out his country as an enemy agent to feed his ego and greed.

How many lives were cut short as a result of his betrayal? How much were the influence operations that brought us the three ring circus of the 2016 election assisted by the information provided to the Russians?

A traitor to what? Not the country. Maybe to the NSA.

To be fair I think the NSA has done more to harm Americans than Snowden ever could have (and didn’t). If you want to call someone a traitor maybe point your finger at clapper and the other pieces of shit at the NSA that target Americans.

Can you elaborate on what harm the NSA has done?

Basically everything I have said to anyone since I was a young child is sitting in their data center, ready to blackmail me if I ever tried to run for office or pursue any power.

Ditto for everyone else here that grew up in the age of the internet and the patriot act

I agree that there's potential for harm with the data collected. I was wondering if there's any examples of actual harm.

The chilling effect it causes has already caused a ton of harm. For instance, I can never run for office because I don’t want the public to know what I said on Facebook when I was 16.

You sound like someone educated through the circular reasoning and echo chamber of Reddit and other internet fora.

You’re demonstrating a two dimensional, emotionally charged view of complex topics, which doesn’t reflect well.

My apologies for the modest challenge my comments created for your worldview.

And you sound like someone I would never ever trust.

I don’t think the NSA has ever been able to directly link any deaths to the Snowden leaks.

I also don’t see how the disclosure of NSA sources and methods had any impact on the Russians ability to get John Podesta to click on a phishing email.

> How many lives were cut short as a result of his betrayal?

Yes, how many ?

I personally think setting up the kinds of mass surveillance systems in the United States that both the Gestapo and the STASI would have salivated over is fundamentally un-Constitutional and the people who did it and lied about it deserve serious investigation and probably prison sentences.

Also the whole "Russia fixed the 2016 election" line is nonsense. The real issue was that the neoliberal economic policies championed for decades by Team Clinton devastated this huge region of American now known as "The Rust Belt" and it was disenchanted voters in that region that flipped the election to Trump (not that he did anything to reverse those policies, of course). Without the Rust Belt flip, Clinton would have easily won. Incidentally Obama's diehard 2016 TPP promotion was a major factor in that outcome, not that any Democrat wants to admit it.

As far as why the Democrats pushed "Russia did it" so hard, it's because in normal politics, such a devastating lost to a reality TV clown would have led to a shake-up in party leadership, and that would have meant FDR-style Democrats taking over leadership positions, but that's not what the financial oligarchs who control media and the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party wanted, hence Russia nonsense. Of course the 'intelligence community' got on board, because conflict with Russia is good for keeping the bloated budgets intact.

Also, the USA neocon crowd on the Republican side has been pushing for war with Russia since about 2003, when Putin rejected joining the petrodollar recycling club, as per Saudi Arabia. If he had, i.e. if Russian oil money was banked with Wall Street, there'd never have been the 2008 Georgia war or the 2014 Ukraine coup, and if Russia had invaded Ukraine, it'd have been treated just like the Saudi war on Yemen.

Notably the one thing Snowden couldn't get from his position is the budgetary outlay of the NSA, i.e. just how much money went to all the private contractors and their hangers-on. Pork city no doubt.

Snowden exposed a lot of gross corruption and un-Constitutional behavior within the US government, that's undeniable. He deserves complete amnesty and a medal for good citizenship.

There is more truth in this one comment than the whole rest of the discussion. Thanks for shining some light and coherence into the confused mess.

> sold out his country

You mean his government.

No, I mean his country.

Civil disobedience or w/e against a surveillance state culminating in fleeing to Moscow says all you need to know about Snowden’s commitment to freedom and opposition to surveillance.

It tells me he's willing to risk his life and freedom, and take a big hit to his standard of living and lose a cushy job, and contact with most of his friends and family, to inform the American people of the crimes their government is committing against them.

You said he "sold" his country out, but you got it backwards. He didn't get paid for his whistleblowing, but did get paid to help break the constitution before that. It's those still working for the NSA that are selling you out.

I hope you don’t have any power over anyone. Your views are a combination of evil and stupid.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't post like this, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659122. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and fix this going forward, we'd appreciate it

That's a possible theory. But then why wasn't that the case for Drake? And wouldn't it have been possible to do that with limited data release rather than as much as he did? For example, how is releasing lists of foreign cyber targets, or foreign embassy surveillance useful to he topic of domestic surveillance? It seems they released several thousand documents to prove his point, and yet it's believed that there are over 1M more that he exfiltrated. It seems like that's overkill for just proving you're telling the truth about domestic surveillance. This might have been a case where less is more - if he had taken/released just enough and limited the scope, then there would be more support for him.

I don't disagree. Not sure who is voting you down.

People who care about the rule of law and not having the most powerful bureaucracy in the history of the universe point their targets at our fellow citizens for basically no reason.

I was a major skeptic of Snowden for the whole first year of Glenn Greenwald's releases. The Snowden leak was too convenient for folks like me that suspected it was going on for years, ever since the 1980's encryption scandal involving RSA and also PGP. They were clearly up to no good, but without evidence it was easy to dismiss.

Then almost a year to the date of the first publishing of the Snowden docs, along came heartbleed, which clearly showed the Snowden documents were legitimate. As more technical leaning documents came out, they also proved it. Without those documents though, we'd be told it was all a fairy tale.