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Comment by fandroid | Hacker News Reader

Due to the extent of mil intelligence docs stolen, and since the domestic programs deployed were lawful at the time, whistleblower is a disingenuious title for Mr. Snowden.

Putting aside domestic disclosures, it's difficult to see how the scope of stolen materials merits praise or euphemistic titles. Snowden is a fugitive. As it pertains to the majority of what was stolen, he is not a whistleblower, but a thief.

Had Snowden simply revealed unconstitutional domestic mass surveillance programs, perhaps he could be pigeonholed as a whistleblower.

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> Had Snowden simply revealed unconstitutional domestic mass surveillance programs, perhaps he could be pigeonholed as a whistleblower.

Multiple former officials did this and society largely didn't believe them and didn't care. Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, and others came forward through the appropriate legal channels and lost their careers, faced prosecution, and absolutely nothing changed.

Legally, you're technically correct. Snowden is a fugitive. That doesn't change the fact that he fundamentally changed the way we think about privacy and the government's role in digital privacy for the better. James Clapper lied to Congress weeks before Snowden's revelations, yet he never faced perjury charges. That's what a broken system looks like.

Power vacuums get filled. NSA was largely torched to the ground. Good or bad, there was a counterbalance between big tech and the NSA that is now gone. SV snatched up the power.

Everyone connected to big tech, Graham and company, stood to gain immensely from Snowden's treason against his country. Naturally, "hero" is the word. I'd speculate that Snowden singlehandedly added trillions in value to big tech.

> there was a counterbalance between big tech and the NSA that is now gone.

What?!?! Big tech was the primary facilitator of NSA surveillance through PRISM, they worked together to spy on billions of people. The idea that the general public benefited from this relationship is laughable.

> I'd speculate that Snowden singlehandedly added trillions in value to big tech.

Care to elaborate on this? How did Snowden add trillions in value to the companies that enabled the NSA to spy on everyone?

Big tech connected their data centers with cleartext links which NSA surveilled in secret, without their knowledge. Perhaps this isn't accurate?

Big tech wises up to Big Brother snooping on them, locks down, then continues to accumulate all of that precious data, out of view of the IC. Control over that data is worth trillions.

since the domestic programs deployed were lawful at the time

Just last month:

> Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

> In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/u-s-court-...

No mass surveillance is similarly irresponsible, albeit in an entirely different manner, to unchecked mass surveillance.

The sweet spot is to have mechanisms and institutions in place to adequately "watch the watchers watching the watchers". Instead, we get judges putting on a dog and pony show, while our IC leaders were originally forced to lie or mislead about the secret programs.

Americans are wildly spoiled. We now have, by far, the most libertarian policies regarding E2EE, on a global basis. Take a bow, Ed, this is all your doing.

See you in 2050. Watch Hawaii.

> since the domestic programs deployed were lawful at the time

Assuming for the moment that this is true...

Even something that is secretly lawful can be entirely immoral and only doable if kept hidden from the public who would otherwise object. The whistleblower's responsibility is to the public, not just their organizational superiors.

It's unhealthy to believe that the law dictates ethics.

If the government wanted anyone outside of natsec or the IC to care about this, they shouldn't have operated a massive unconstitutional dragnet. That would change the tenor of discussion, I promise.

The IC does their job keeping us safe precisely so we don't have to concern ourselves with things such as:

* Which servers in China we are hacking

* Foreign surveillance

* Joint CIA/NSA programs

Damage is ongoing. Relationship with foreign leaders, for instance, has suffered irreparable damage.

Snowden's very existence as a propaganda mouthpiece does align with Putin's long term active measures. His greatest value is in undermining internal confidence in our institutions that protect our freedom.

Yeah, he could have selectively leaked only important crimes of the US government but he instead leaked tons of shit that endangered the lives of Americans overseas and gave our enemies insight into how we conduct intelligence gathering in hostile countries.

Add that to his shady Russia ties and he's not the hero many make him out to be.

Had Snowden simply revealed unconstitutional domestic mass surveillance programs, he'd be labeled as a conspiracy theorist at best.

I imagine the data he took were to serve as proof of these governmental over-reaches. Nobody would've taken him seriously without solid proof.

He could have stolen only the docs related to domestic surveillance. Snowden could have handed only those docs to his media handlers who would then vet them with the IC.

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