Why I don't care about Edward Snowden | Hacker News Reader

Why I don't care about Edward Snowden

sanders.senate.gov

24 pointsdluan17 comments

From reading the opening and skimming the rest, I infer that the author's stance amounts to "Snowden raised incredibly important questions profoundly affecting our society, but I don't care about the debate regarding his fate and therefore the fate of future whistleblowers; they don't matter and neither does the question of encouraging or discouraging them in the future."

Weak stance in my opinion.

I read it as implicitly approving of Snowden's capital but not wanting to lose the political points for calling him a hero.

I agree, weak stance from a politician who appears to avoid that kind of thing more than others. At least that seems to one of the points he's campaigning on.

In his defense, his team posted a story written by a writer at the National Journal.

But I do not believe you can separate Snowden from the surveillance debate until his fate is determined (and is acceptable). As the man who exposed the lies, he deserves not only thanks and credit but a fair resolution to his current situation.

The piece is quite directly a statement that the focus on Snowden's is a distraction from the issues he raised, and is actively being kept as such by people who interest is in avoiding the substantive issues (and, while it doesn't say this, one might argue that the actual discussion of the issues raised by Snowden is essential to actually going anywhere with the debate about his ultimate status, which until the issues debate happens is just a noise that produces nothing.)

And it's not a stance by a politician. The HN headline was misleading (by including "Sanders" as if it were part of the title or the original source, as well as -- and this has still.not bee corrected -- by omitting the "(2013)" that should be included): Sanders' office reposted this wheb ut was current as recommended reading, but the source is Ron Fournier of the National Journal, and there is considerable distance between reposting something as writing on an important issue that people should be aware of and adopting it as Sanders own position.

To clarify:

Senator Sanders is not the author of the article. Also, when I read the article there were no quotes at all from the senator.

Hacker News: Your Facebook post linking to this article has a misleading title.

> Love him or hate him, we all owe Snowden our thanks for forcing upon the nation an important debate. But the debate shouldn't be about him. It should be about the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows.

Yes. This is about what snowden revealed, not snowden. He's just a guy who fled this country for his life. It's a disservice to his sacrifice to try to shift the focus from the issues he raised to something less important or relevant.

Aside from the privacy aspects, one of my main gripes with the surveillance state is the return on investment. Who are we protecting ourselves from again, and what are the risks of loss of life and property for me and the ones that I love? Why are 'they' trying to kill 'me' and break my stuff? Or, are they after someone else? And, if they really are after me, are there more effective ways to get them to stop? Is it really an 'existential threat'? (What does that even mean?). And, how does it compare to other threats that I face?

How does an average citizen like me even rationally assign a price that I'm willing to pay when the facts are so obscured. I hear a lot of people (who I don't necessarily trust) yelling 'fire', but I don't see any smoke or feel any heat. And, conveniently, it just so happens that those people are the ones in charge of taking my money and my freedoms.

"By: Ron Fournier"

...

Whoa, I did not originally catch that. Thanks very much for pointing it out. I updated the title of the submission.

The original article is no longer available on that site, but here's the saved version.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150121075232/http://www.nation...

The text of the Facebook post that links to this thread still needs to be updated.

Thank you for your alertness.

More about Ron Fournier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Fournier

In short, he's a conservative political hack who's had his own stint of controversy.

Since the link is 404'ing, I'm going put this in the "internet troll using URL manipulation" bin.

Came up fine for me just a few minutes ago.

Working for me

All I'm getting is a 404 error code and this:

https://i.imgur.com/bTc7Tw4.png

works for me, try this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tDSohcr... or maybe this: https://web.archive.org/web/20150925204600/http://www.sander...

To see the page, you’ll need to disable HTTPS Everywhere for senate.gov, as the site’s broken over HTTPS.

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