Whistleblower Edward Snowden is tech person of year | Hacker News Reader

Whistleblower Edward Snowden is tech person of year

usatoday.com

115 pointsekm212 comments

Tech? I don't want to diminish Snowden's doings a single bit, but I think what he did was only remotely tech-related. It's somehow like nominating a great journalist, who writes about modern research in physics, as a scientist of the year.

Seems like you want more of a coder of the year. What's more interesting in tech than Snowden right now?

I don't think that's right. I'm sure people would be willing to accept, for example, Elon Musk as tech person of the year — because what Musk's companies are doing is actually interesting technically. What Snowden did is copy a bunch of files that contain information which is interesting politically and societally.

The fact that technology is somewhat involved in the story doesn't make it a technical advancement. There was technology involved in Watergate too (e.g. tape recorders), but I don't think anyone looks back at 1972 and sees Carl Bernstein as a good candidate for tech man of the year.

He's completely changed how people in the non-elite-security world view computers.

Certainly his influence isn't limited to tech, but I think his impact on tech, at least IT and communications (god I hate the term "ICT"...) and startups and software and hardware... has been beyond any other single person this year. Or any company (2013 didn't see a lot of interesting products, IMO).

I guess a better way to put it is that Snowden released the tech story of the year. But the story of releasing a story is a story of journalism and politics, not itself technical.

Maybe if we had a figurehead in the NSA to point to who approved PRISM et al., it would make sense to call them the "tech person of the year", because of their being in the tech story of the year.

Goes to show that the people who popularize get more recognition than the people who produce.

Snowden was a publisher of the technical work of thousands of NSA staff.

The recognition Snowden is receiving is for the revelations about the NSA programs, not the creation of said programs.

He isn't being lauded as a creator, but as a whistleblower.

Would it not be absurd to thank McNamara for the work of Ellsberg?

judk is just a mildly amusing troll.

The comments on that article make me very sad.

Heh, well usatoday is mainstream media. If you're going to find anyone who thinks all this NSA stuff should have stayed secret for "the good of the nation", that's where you'll find 'em.

I'm just glad that a mainstream site like usatoday is bold enough to give this award to him.

Perhaps it is mainstream media but that university student who thinks today's Russia is a communist country is taking the cake.

Most of the anti-Snowden stuff seems to get a fair amount of push-back. Agree with what others have said though, in choosing him as Tech Person of the Year isn't a high enough "honor".

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