EDIT: you are probably all correct, plenty of people don't understand/care who he is or what he stands for. I still wish the government would recognize that the NSA is acting unconstitutionally and he called them out on it.
Sadly, people think "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care if the government/NSA monitors my internet usage/history/etc".
Personally, I think the terrorists have won in a small sense. TSA is a joke (American airport security), NSA monitors everything so nothing is really secure, backdoors are built into all devices, encryption across several companies is being questioned because "terrorists" use it (even though the Paris attacks communication were over SMS).
Edit: typos
And I wouldn't suggest people suddenly align themselves one way or the other based on the premise of tech-savviness, education-level, political-savviness, etc.
I would. You will find the correlation to be extremely high.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The use of mass electronic surveillance by alphabet soup agencies was common knowledge before Snowden. Right now I'm looking at source code from 1987 that was used create false positives against NSA keyword scanners. All Snowden did was release "secret" official documents detailing these programs.
[During a senate hearing] Senator Wyden then asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded "No, sir."
So here we have a representative of the executive branch lying to the legislative about mass surveillance 3 years ago (checks and balances please?). So no, it was not common knowledge.
edit: spelling
There is a serious, defensible, coherent argument against what Snowden did. You don't have to be a low-information cable news consumer to agree with it, nor do you have to believe that "if you have nothing to hide surveillance is no problem".
(To put my biases on the table: I understand what he did better, I think, than most HN people, and think the ideal outcome would be a felony conviction and an immediately commuted sentence; thus far, I think he's done more good than harm, but I think it would be better if what happened in 2013 never happened in exactly that way again.)
I think it would be better if what happened in 2013 had never -had- to happen in any way.
There isn't any perfect way, in the eyes of the state, to deal with a police state because it's a police state.
He was considered a traitor.
That is, I'm an American and I work with technology and from conversations with fellow Americans who don't work with technology, they have formed an impression based on media sound bites.
The MSM just trot out "experts" who have been instructed to repeat key phrases designed to obscure the truth. Gullible viewers and listeners just soak it all in.
That's how, even today, a significant percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.
Right or wrong, most young people do, most old people don't.
It's just another in a long list of generational schisms that will be adjusted in the future.
According to Snowden, he didn't take the files with him to Russia in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took...
The SVR operates outside of Russia, which is why I mentioned them. You really believe they weren't on him right away in Hong Kong, and they haven't gone after whatever materials he passed on to journalists? Come on.
The scaremongering over Snowden somehow giving Russia/China these documents is absurd for precisely the reason you cite - their intelligence agencies operate all over the world.
Does anyone genuinely believe that with security so lax at NSA etc. to allow a Snowden-style leak that Russia/China haven't had spies with similar access levels in place for years now?
1. I worked in the aerospace industry in the 80s. Every once in a while, whatever I was working on would show up in "Aviation News". All the details were there, everything.
2. The DoD gives more information about satellite launches to Russian than they do to their own citizens. Yes, this is to prevent Russia from mistaking an Atlas launch for a Minuteman launch, but still...
3. Does it matter? There's very few real national secrets, which are certainly overwhelmed by career-ending blunders, favoritism towards certain contractors, massive budget overruns, and incompetent designs. The amazing majority of "classified" material is absolute tripe, and whoever reads it actually becomes stupider.
Of those who do, I'd say roughly half support him and half think he should go to jail.
Those that do know seem to largely support what he did even if the way he went about it wasn't the best.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=snowden%20polls
Foreigners seem to support Snowden; however.