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And books and movies are being or have been made about Assange and Alex from both sides with no repercussion. Case in point.

Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.

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It's astounding how smoothly we went from "you can criticize the government" to "you can make a documentary about someone who criticized the government and got royally fucked". As if those two are the same thing.

To be fair, none of the examples you gave seem just like "criticizing the government," honestly. Snowden physically leaked a bunch of docs he agreed ahead of time would be a criminal offense to leak. I think what he did was the right thing to do and we should have said that whistleblower protections apply to people in his position, but I feel like that's a different problem?

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