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>I'm interested to hear a rational explanation for why anyone would think that Snowden's whistleblowing was anything but altruistic. He divulged a lot of infor
by marcoperaza 11y ago
>I'm interested to hear a rational explanation for why anyone would think that Snowden's whistleblowing was anything but altruistic.
He divulged a lot of information about America's foreign intelligence operations as well. Spying on other countries is the original and core mission of the intelligence services. There's no question as to its legal legitimacy and he directly undermined it by revealing the nature and extent of our capabilities. It also caused serious diplomatic and political problems, with Germany for example.
- woodman 11y agoThat has nothing to do with his intent though, altruistic vs malevolent. > There's no question as to its legal legitimacy... Well maybe if you ignore the whole domestic surveillance part. There is also the moral and practical issue of intentionally weakening security infrastructure and standards.
- gurkendoktor 11y ago> It also caused serious diplomatic and political problems, with Germany for example. It didn't really look like a serious problem from within Germany. Our administration is as pro-US as before. We've stopped sharing some information, but I doubt that has caused the NSA much trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany–United_States_relations#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany–United_States_relation...
- pluma 11y agoThe only thing that changed is that there's the NSA Untersuchungsausschuss, which is "investigating" the NSA spying affair. It's pretty clear that the investigations will not yield anything we don't already know and will have no consequences on US-German relations. Our NATO membership alone is enough to make us avoid upsetting the US at all costs (just as we've been turning a blind eye on Turkey all this time).