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Comment by ghrifter | Hacker News Reader

Most "tech savvy" people support him and how he made us aware of the NSA bs, but a lot of normal people who just watch the news view him as a "traitor" to 'Murica (America).

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

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I don't think it's particularly charitable to caricature people who don't support Snowden as being jingoist "'muricans". In fact, the term "'murica" is pretty classist; even the word itself mocks the accents of flyover country.

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.)

"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.

That's also true, but orthogonal to what I'm saying.

The point is that you've put the criticism on the person in the situation (Snowden) instead of the people/system that created the situation.

There isn't any perfect way, in the eyes of the state, to deal with a police state because it's a police state.

I wouldn't conflate tech-savviness with being a Snowden-supporter.

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 wouldn't conflate tech-savviness with being a Snowden-supporter.

I would. You will find the correlation to be extremely high.

> he made us aware of the NSA bs

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.

Mass surveillance was common knowledge? I'd encourage you to read about James R Clapper. To cite the wikipedia page:

[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

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