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...when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.

I find that reaction quite horrifying. It is appalling (although not surprising) to me that supposedly educated people are willing to support extrajudicial process and treatment amounting to torture because they don't agree with the way someone has acted. Even if they think a crime has been committed this sort of blasé Bush-style attitude that "you're with us or you're against us, and if you're against us you deserve everything we can dream up to do to you" contributes a lot to foreign disgust at the US attitude.

Couldn't agree more. The Bush years were a plague on not just the U.S., but the rest of the world. It represented time and time again, across all spectrums of society, the worst of humanity. Power and corruption on all levels of government over the people.

I can appreciate that things cannot stay static and that we must keep evolving and changing. But what the NSA does now and Bush, Gitmo, etc - these are not progression, but regression. I think what Assange and Snowden have done are highly respectable since a real democracy can only function at its highest level with a true open society and a government for people, not corporations or oligarchs. All these secrets and spying just serve to keep the boot of those with power tight against the neck of those who have less or none. Sad.

adding Assange and Snowden to Bush doesn't exactly make anything better.

So you're saying that if the government is passing the boundaries of legality and morality, people should just keep their heads down and not say anything?

Frankly, I'm disgusted by you "American" attitude towards this. I've seen more non-Americans who support Snowden than Americans, which is really very depressing. Because those are supposed to be your American values, of freedom, privacy and basic human rights. But it's like after 9/11 you've all been brainwashed to believe those aren't very important, and what matters most is "national security" at all costs.

Do you really think most of that spying is done to catch terrorists? How naive, are you, really? Is the spying on every single European to catch the terrorists? The spying on EU and Latina American countries to catch terrorists?

When secrets are dirty, they should be exposed - at all costs. Yes, even if it means endangering people's lives. Why? Because people have also given their lives in the past to earn those rights. Their lives shouldn't be wasted because "governments knows best".

> I am on record here on HN as having participated in the Take Back the Fourth protest in Minneapolis about overreaching NSA surveillance.

Let your argument stand on its merits, not on what the argument-maker has or hasn't done in the past.

> He would have done a lot more good for humankind by increasing the NSA's ability to conduct surveillance in China and in Russia...

The United States has done tremendous good for humanity. But given our history of extralegal, unaccountable meddling in the foreign policy of other countries and how spectacularly it's blown up in our faces over and over again, I must absolutely disagree with you.

> the two countries that have protected him so far...

Every time a Snowden discussion comes up this point also bubbles to the top, as if people actually thought Snowden chose to flee to those countries because he felt that Russia and China had better support for freedom...as opposed to those two being practically the only possible countries he could flee to without being assured of his extradition.

> I seem to be joined in my daily activities by a lot of Americans who think that Snowden didn't help anyone by revealing official secrets

I think the NSA didn't help anyone by grossly overstepping its mandate and doing things which only tinfoil-hat cranks would have claimed the government did five years ago.

> which governments to oppose

This sort of belief, where government wrongdoing can never be exposed because the United States is implicitly locked in some sort of existential crusade against foes which do even worse (and exposing it would undermine this crusade), can be used to justify all sorts of evil, totalitarian actions. I don't think our moral yardstick should be set relative to the worst country(ies) in the world. I don't think our ideals (the ones tested by the War of 1812, the Civil War, WWII, the fight against segregation, and countless other times) are so fragile that we need to sink to the bottom of the barrel in order to guarantee our national survival.

> another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there

If this is the mindset of the "general opinion of the American public", I fear for the long-term future of rule of law in this country.

>The United States has done tremendous good for humanity. But given our history of extralegal, unaccountable meddling in the foreign policy of other countries and how spectacularly it's blown up in our faces over and over again, I must absolutely disagree with you.

Source that shows where US surveillance has spectacularly blown up?

>If this is the mindset of the "general opinion of the American public", I fear for the long-term future of rule of law in this country.

Slippery-slope fallacy. No one cares about your fear of some scenarios you imagined.

What is the recourse when no one (except a few powerless individual) in either the legislative or judicial branches will hold any government agency or participants accountable for such blatant violations of law?

Snowden was not the first NSA whistle blower. Others, like William Binney understood that this was not just a violation of unlawful search & seizure, but a complete usurpation of representative government itself.

Snowden's extreme actions finally resulted in bringing semi-known NSA abuses to the American people as fact without debate. Enough so that the co-author of the PATRIOT Act once the NSA's director imprisoned (that is either public theatrics or meaningful progress.)

Do all government whistle blowers deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison? Snowden, presumably, believed that what was being done was so appalling amoral, he put everything he had on the line. Then he did what little he could do to secure some very basic level of personal autonomy for whatever remains of his life. I would only accept criticism from others in the same position.

As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.

The shocking level of quiet acceptance and resignation is to me indication we need many more like Snowden, not only in the US. And frankly, I've come to think that the most important form of political activism is not to agitate for change at this point, but to build up support structures for whistleblowers and find ways of actively encouraging whistleblowing. Not just technical infrastructure for anonymous leaks, but physical protection, escape routes, and support networks.

Not just to get leaks, but to destroy morale in these organizations by making everyone worry about whether their co-workers will turn. Make these agencies consume themselves.

I do recognize that states needs intelligence to protect their interests, but that does not make it right. In fact, I see it as a symptoms of a fundamentally broken system, and yet another reason why the state can never avoid becoming a tool of oppression.

One thing that makes me happy about recent developments though, is that while I used to be far out on the fringe when it comes to my views on the immorality of US foreign policy (I used to regularly face people who refused to accept that CIA actions that past CIA directors had publicly admitted to in broadcast TV interviews ever happened, that's the extent of the trust the US used to have with the European right), here in the UK I now meet people far, far right of me politically who now agree with me or even are more negative to it than me where they'd previously have refused to acknowledge it even as a possibility.

The view of the US as "land of the free" is rapidly disappearing amongst the type of people I meet, and it is more and more common to hear people across the political spectrum refer to the US a police state or complain about increasing authoritarianism. It's not long ago since the idea of meeting Europeans who refuse on principle to travel to the US would be utterly bizarre - now it is relatively commonplace.

As for a "tendency to treachery", I find that description disgusting. Anyone going into public service has a duty first and foremost to the people. No matter what they might sign or what other promises they might make. In that respect he did his job far better than most other NSA employees, whether or not the public are grateful for it now.

> As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.

I agree, it's terribly depressing. There is this narrative of "the NSA is spying on us" when Europeans should wake up and realize that their domestic security service are doing exactly the same, either secretly (France, UK...) or openly (Sweden). But considering how both the moderate right and the moderate left have been perfectly accommodating about it, people, provided they are even aware of it, are left with little legal recourse.

I'm Norwegian, and the most horrifying demonstration of how weak the press is we got when one of the major newspapers (Dagbladet) published claims that the Norwegian intelligence services (without specifying which one - there are 3) handed over millions of call records per months to the NSA (EDIT: specifically claiming this was about surveillance in Norway).

The response was downright scary:

All the three agencies denies that there was any surveillance of Norwegians in Norway, as one would expect them to do.

But the agency responsible for foreign military surveillance "admitted" to handing the NSA tens of millions of call records from conflict areas. Now, Norway is a small country, with limited military involvements: The only areas we are active in are areas where the US is active too. They wanted us to believe that Norway has a foreign surveillance capability where we are able to collect that kind of call volume in places like Afghanistan, that the NSA does not already have.

If we do, that too should be news, and should have led to further reports and political questions raised. And it should have led to questions over how, then, the domestic intelligence couldn't make do with far less money, as military intelligence apparently manages to do a massive amount of surveillance in war zones on what suddenly looks like a shoestring budget... But the press response was to parrot what military intelligence said.

They held a press conference - something they hardly ever do - and made what appeared to be revelations about operational ability - something they never do - and courted media all day.

Meanwhile, the Police Security Service, which in the past have been caught red-handed carrying out substantial illegal surveillance, kept extremely low profile despite the fact that the allegations made by the newspapers (and reiterated in a piece by Greenwald) was that this was about surveillance in Norway which means it is the Police Security Service's "table". They were able to get away with a denial through a press contact and were then out of the news picture with no further questioning.

Apparently not a single news source saw it as odd enough to question why military intelligence was all over the news and why they might want to push for further responses from the people actually responsible for surveillance in Norway. The people who (under their previous name - the Police Surveillance Service) not only spend decades carrying illegally political surveillance of the Norwegian left, but were even caught carrying out illegal surveillance of the member of parliament who led the parliamentary commission investigating their illegal surveillance while he was investigating them.

The press did not apply any pressure at all. Not publicly at least. They just immediately accepted the claims from military intelligence. Dagbladet folded immediately and backtracked. And the major papers subjected their online forums to the harshest moderation I've ever seen in Norwegian papers.

Frankly, no event in Norwegian politics in the last 30 years have scared me more than how that was treated: Whether or not Dagbladet's claims were true or not, it demonstrated either a scary ability of the establishment to shut down any kind of real journalism around it, or a scary level of apathy and disinterest. I'm not sure which is worse.

You don't say. Being a French expat in DK, I found the apathy of the French public in answer to allegations of internal, warrantless surveillance appalling. Apparently, gay marriage is more important. The Danish government has kept mum about the subject, as far as I know, and I haven't heard anything in the Snowden documents concerning DK, but considering how eagerly the Conservatives previously in power went to look for WMDs in Iraq, I fully expect PET to be carrying out the same operations.

Regarding the press and the government, what are their usual working relationship? My impression here is that Danish people are much less cynical about the government than the French are. Combined with a culture of consensus-seeking, this could lead to the press not being as incisive as it could be (though on the other hand, it's apparently possible for politicians to be evicted over scandals that would make the French barely bat an eyelid).

>As for a "tendency to treachery", I find that description disgusting.

Perhaps it's because you don't know the definition of the word? What he did is textbook treachery (betrayed the trust his government had in him).

> The day the news broke that Edward Snowden had left Hong Kong, I was out of town at a soccer tournament with my daughter. The parents of her teammates, mostly younger than I am, heard me announce that news, and when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.

Then you know a lot of shitty Americans.

In 20 to 30 years, when this becomes part of history, I would be interested in tokenadult asking those same people what they thought of "Gitmo". Then they should ask their children. Later, they should ask their grandchildren.

One hopes that it will be a feeling of shame, or at least outrage. Sort of like hearing how Rosa Parks was treated when she tried to get a seat on the bus.

> some people remember not to stab their co-workers in the back when they go to work.

> detect that tendency to treachery in advance.

The downvotes might be because you seem to equate whistleblowing, an act of conscience, with treachery.

>"I don't treat Snowden as a hero, and I hope no one else in the United States emulates him..."

The inevitable corollary is that you'd rather we all still be completely in the dark regarding our government's activities.

He does an awful lot of work to build credibility and then try and use it to spread fud around Snowden. Would there even have been a "Take Back the Fourth" without Snowden? Perhaps next year we will all be at the "Remove the 4th" rally instead.

The polls are conflicting, but this one says Americans think he's a whistleblower: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-ins...

Also, when you have a concerted effort by the administration, congress, and the security industrial machine to pariah Snowden, then it affects the polls. Without the smear campaign, we'd be united.

"But the United States (like every other country in the world) needs some intelligence-gathering capabilities."

But the United States(like every other country of the world) needs control by the people who supposedly controls the country in a democracy.

If all the people is spied, and the people has no way of controlling it, then it is not a democracy anymore.

Remember that absolute power is way more dangerous than terrorists. Terrorist killed 3000 people in 9-11, Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot killed tens of millions after taking control of the State.

Remember Hitler took control of an advanced democratic republic with the excuse of going after terrorism.

Godwin alert

this may be appropriate, in this case...

My guess is those who want to see Snowden put in jail for life are victims of lifelong conditioning as, whether you agree with him or not, he's clearly someone who has been prodded by his conscience to defend what one would think is a Western value (the freedom not to be spied on in an open society). Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history knows a state with an unchecked domestic surveillance apparatus will end up dysfunctional and corrupt. What most people don't understand is how much power surveillance capabilities grant to whoever has access to the information.

If you take a peek at history, you will see that we never learn from it and repeat the same mistakes. That's a thing a historian friend of mine says a lot.

What strikes me is this:

when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there.

It's terrifying how people silently consent to putting people in prisons that are above the law and feel smug about it. It shows they truly never bothered taking a lesson from even recent history.

Very terrifying... the Milgram experiment shows the average person has little conscience. Most people value a sense of order, and the illusion of stability it implies, above all else.

Maybe reading Little Brother[1] will help think a little deeper.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

- Thomas Jefferson

[1] http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

The root problem with your thinking is here:

> And it is possible--it has been done--to decry current NSA practice and still stay in the United States, as some NSA officials have done in the last few years.

Those NSA officials made no headway. Snowden's method will change things, even if it's just to lock down access to sensitive materials at the NSA. By your logic Rosa Parks should've stayed at the back of the bus and made a polite complaint to the bus dept.

At minimum, due to the failure of due process in the Bradley Manning case, Snowden is entirely immune to criticism for his choice to leave the country. And after the Bolivian presidential plane was forced to land, he gained immunity to criticism for staying in Russia. Anyone who fails to concede these points is in possession of a malfunctioning brain and/or does not have the interests of the American people at heart.

Joining the armed forces voluntarily means you voluntarily entered UCMJ jursidiction. Espionage is illegal under UCMJ. That's the actual, formal law. It's not a failure of due process.

Manning's torture after his arrest can hardly be considered any part of due process. Obama's refusal to intercede in that situation was what finally soured me on him for good.

Exactly. I would not have objected to Manning receiving multiple life sentences for his violation of the law, if due process had been respected. But it wasn't.

In his defense of Snowden's decision to flee the country, Daniel Ellsberg elaborates more on what's different between now and when he made the decision not to flee in 1971.

What should Snowden have done? Filed a complaint with the grievance committee, and then gone about his merry way? Don't be naive, even these bombshells are not enough to shake most people out of their stupors.

> I'll note that Americans my age and older (well above the modal or median age of HN participants) have multiple sources of information through which to form opinions on this issue, and don't rely solely on governmental statements or influence from political leaders to make up our minds on these issues.

What is your point?