I condemn Snowden. Prove that I'm intellectually lazy.
Snowden has a well-argued moral case for what he did. He demonstrably tried to minimize harm and maximize the positive impact of his disclosures.
You give literally no reason for your condemnation (though in all fairness, your comment is likely to be rhetorical).
More to the point, you will likely argue that he broke laws and cite some unspecified damage to the intelligence community that can neither be qualified nor quantified. Importantly, you will likely do this -- as every condemning voice has -- without offering a cogent rebuttal to Snowden's case. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, you will fail to address the the clear and present danger of allowing a government to perform dragnet surveillance on its citizens without suspecting them of criminal activity.
If that's not intellectual laziness, then I honestly don't know what is.
If that's not going to be your line of argumentation, then congratulations! You are literally the first person I have encountered who condemns Snowden without being intellectually lazy or dishonest. I'll believe it when I see it.
(I feel compelled to mention, once more, that I mean no disrespect. I think your comment is rhetorical in nature, so I beg of you not to take anything personally.)
Dragnet surveillance that is being abused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
"Most incidents are self-reported", which says to me that they do not have effective monitoring - there are doubtless abuses that have gone undetected.
You haven't even bothered to provide an argument to justify your condemnation. Case closed.
/s
But the unproven collateral damage of Snowden's leaks, which had the giant upside of revealing democracy-chilling surveillance techniques, leads to mass reaction from the government. So, undeniable upside/debatable downside = Enemy of the State, threats to nations that offer him asylum.
How does this arithmetic work out for anyone?
But they are wide awake and outraged when Snowden's ostensible act of espionage has caused an enormous amount of public good and technological innovation.
It's not really the American's fault. We hear few of their real voices. It's the media that speaks the loudest.
I've only ever heard official policy statements condemning him. I am not even really sure those stating such policy agree with what they are saying (at a personal level).
[0] This is a non-partisan view. I hear it from Democrats, Republicans, and some Libertarians (who hold more to the fiscal sense of modern libertarianism than the civil liberties sense, which is a shame). There's a large group of people in the US who seem to believe that security for-its-own-sake cannot be evil, in an ends-justify-the-means version of morality.
Edward Snowden isn't an elected official. It wasn't his job to decide which US policies he agrees with. Government can't function if low level employees take it upon themselves to rule.
Seriously, there are very few traits that I can think of which really represent all Americans; we're much too diverse for that, and we're growing farther and farther apart. The lifestyles and attitudes in rural areas are extremely different from those in urban centers, and it's becoming more and more divergent (for instance, Millennials are abandoning car ownership).
So any time you see someone say something like "Americans think..." you have to take it with a grain of salt, and at best realize that they're talking about some sizeable demographic, which probably is not an absolute majority, but is large enough to make it a valid statement, unless you want to quibble about what qualifies such a statement, as if you demand that it apply to a clear majority (say, over 60%), then no such statement will probably ever be true of Americans, except things that are also true of people in many other places (for instance: "Americans like smartphones" -- not at all unique to Americans).
Pro-authoritarian boards do indeed represent a sizeable swath of Americans, like it or not. Just look at how popular the alt-right is these days.
This is an enormously basic fallacy. I was born and raised in the US and have spent a quarter century of life here, so I think it's fair to say "I know quite a few" Americans. But I would think it beyond insane to claim that my sample is useful for statements like "I know a lot of Americans and none feel this way. Who are they?". I also don't know any Trump supporters, any single parents, any heroin addicts, any cardiosurgeons, any farmers...is it really that difficult to believe that your sample of Americans isn't typical (despite its impressive size of "quite a few")?
(The comment I was replying to said that Americans are ok with one thing but not ok with another. It was implying that all Americans think the same way and I disagree)
Whether the government is actually doing that (and whether---even if it were---that's sufficient for completely extrajudicial killing that would be called "waging warfare" in any other context) may not be things an average American is asking before going to sleep at night.
No, 90% of the drone deaths weren't known indented targets. If you bomb a Taliban camp to kill a known Taliban leader, you are going to kill a lot of people, but they aren't going to be mostly civilians.
Sure some of them are civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that's legal under international law and essentially unavoidable in war.
You could argue that maybe America is aiming at targets without any regard for who surrounds them, but that you can't use that 90% figure to do it. And I also believe that you'd be wrong.
In counter point, if we start allowing anyone who feels like they can leak this stuff on their own authority, and it starts costing lives of Americans, how many would you consider "worth it"? At what point does it move from whistle-blowing so it's okay to treason?