Disagree. I think he’s a tool of Russia and got paid to tarnish America and diplomacy worldwide.
He exposed what basically any G20 nation does and lives pretty damn well by virtue of doing the bidding of a foreign government that seeks to undermine democracy in the world.
Somehow that makes him a patriot.
Yes all he had to gain was international celebrity.
"A National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program has been ruled unlawful, seven years after it was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden."
Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things.
Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get discovered by other nation states and bad actors and risk our security. They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
There are many more examples of overreaches he brought to light but I don't recall all of it. The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party. Where we are politically today I think would be hard to fathom back when Snowden leaked all this.
My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.
Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.
On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.
It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
> inserting spying equipment in Google data centers
There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic.
> they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it
For hardware shipped to targeted foreigners. We should expect our spy agencies to do this if they are even moderately competent.
> They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
Where is the evidence for this claim?
> The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party.
That would be a valid concern for unchecked domestic surveillance but not for what Snowden leaked.
I may very well have some details wrong.
Re: parallel construction reference here though clearly this is more recent: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/hemisphere-phone-records/
At the bottom of this article it references the NSA and Snowden but says no explicit links was proven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Russia gave him asylum, for reasons which are not related to him helping them, purely because it antagonises the US.
He still openly criticised the Russian government, and has expressed strong desire to come back to the US.
I don't personally think either of these people are or have ever knowingly been Russian assets.
But that's not the point. Particularly after the Special Counsel investigation, Assange/Wikileaks has been portrayed quite publicly through a credible federal investigation as being used as a puppet for distributing Russian-acquired documents.
Snowden clearly ended up in Russia for lack of options when fleeing HK. There's never been any credible allegations of a Russian affiliation outside of that AFAIK.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_...
Assange had a TV show on Russian State television in 2012.
- Herman Goering [with additions]
Nothing much changes.
I think where he messed up was he got help from Assange when he was at his neediest, took it, and ended up in Moscow.