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I upvoted you because you merely posted your opinion, with which I agree. His actions did result in loss of trust in the US from foreign governments and people

I upvoted you because you merely posted your opinion, with which I agree. His actions did result in loss of trust in the US from foreign governments and people but I think his main intent was to alert the American people to what their government is doing. I consider him a patriot and my only regret is that he was trapped in Russia though I'm not sure his plans to travel to South America would have panned out.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Agreed. We (the public) should never give up attempting to obtain a pardon for him.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
moomin 6y ago
He was planning to go to Ecuador, wasn't he? Which at the time was pretty friendly to those viewpoints. And then Ola Bini got arrested and detained so I don't think it's that friendly anymore.
- pseingatl 6y ago
  Correct. The US canceled his passport while he was in Russia, hoping that they would deport him. Whoever had that idea should be fired. Given the Assange situation, it is fortunate for Snowden that he did not reach either Ecuador or Venezuela, the latter country offering him political asylum as well.
jsu32 6y ago
If that was his intent: Why not selectively publish only the parts about surveillance of US citizens? Why publish details of how the US was dealing with adversaries like China? From the looks of it, Snowden cared about getting famous more than any specific goal.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  Selective publishing runs into the problem of easy deniability and drawn out recognition if any due to its narrow scope. The weight of the body of the revealed secrets forced the hand of the US intelligence agencies to admit their veracity. Considering how whistle blowers in the US are routinely persecuted, the malfeasance in so many cases successfully survives whistle-blowing, and the leadership who directed authority over the malfeasance avoid responsibility for it, that "shotgun" strategy is likely a predictable emergent response. Until the US organizational culture and culture in general is orders of magnitude less hostile to whistle blowers, this asymmetric response will likely continue. The reflexivity of this situation likely means US organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. An altogether horrible development all around.
  - kyboren 6y ago
    > [...] organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. This is the insight and strategy Assange laid out in his 2006 essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance"[0] and put into practice with WikiLeaks. > Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial. > We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment) > In a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not. We can show most of this difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between all the conspirators. Call this total conspiratorial power. > Instead of cutting links between conspirators so as to separate a weighted conspiracy we can achieve a similar effect by throttling the conspiracy — constricting (reducing the weight of) those high weight links which bridge regions of equal total conspiratorial power. > Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down. > Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance. [0]: https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
tcgv 6y ago
It's a dilemma, he broke the law to expose what he believed was an unethical, overly excessive, and later ruled illegal [1] surveillance program. In pardoning him would more people feel motivated to become whistleblowers, possibly with different outcomes? How dangerous would that be? If he's not pardoned, what message does it pass to future generations? [1] "U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal". Reuters. Retrieved September 2, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/us-court-mass-surveillance-program-exposed-by-snowden-was-illegal-idUSKBN25T3CK https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/us-court-m...
exolymph 6y ago
> I upvoted you because you merely posted your opinion, with which I agree. Shocker, upvoting someone you agree with!
- jaywalk 6y ago
  I just upvoted you because I am also shocked by the action of upvoting someone you agree with.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Agreed. We (the public) should never give up attempting to obtain a pardon for him.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

moomin 6y ago

He was planning to go to Ecuador, wasn't he? Which at the time was pretty friendly to those viewpoints. And then Ola Bini got arrested and detained so I don't think it's that friendly anymore.

pseingatl 6y ago
Correct. The US canceled his passport while he was in Russia, hoping that they would deport him. Whoever had that idea should be fired. Given the Assange situation, it is fortunate for Snowden that he did not reach either Ecuador or Venezuela, the latter country offering him political asylum as well.

jsu32 6y ago

If that was his intent: Why not selectively publish only the parts about surveillance of US citizens? Why publish details of how the US was dealing with adversaries like China? From the looks of it, Snowden cared about getting famous more than any specific goal.

yourapostasy 6y ago
Selective publishing runs into the problem of easy deniability and drawn out recognition if any due to its narrow scope. The weight of the body of the revealed secrets forced the hand of the US intelligence agencies to admit their veracity. Considering how whistle blowers in the US are routinely persecuted, the malfeasance in so many cases successfully survives whistle-blowing, and the leadership who directed authority over the malfeasance avoid responsibility for it, that "shotgun" strategy is likely a predictable emergent response. Until the US organizational culture and culture in general is orders of magnitude less hostile to whistle blowers, this asymmetric response will likely continue. The reflexivity of this situation likely means US organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. An altogether horrible development all around.
- kyboren 6y ago
  > [...] organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. This is the insight and strategy Assange laid out in his 2006 essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance"[0] and put into practice with WikiLeaks. > Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial. > We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment) > In a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not. We can show most of this difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between all the conspirators. Call this total conspiratorial power. > Instead of cutting links between conspirators so as to separate a weighted conspiracy we can achieve a similar effect by throttling the conspiracy — constricting (reducing the weight of) those high weight links which bridge regions of equal total conspiratorial power. > Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down. > Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance. [0]: https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

tcgv 6y ago

It's a dilemma, he broke the law to expose what he believed was an unethical, overly excessive, and later ruled illegal [1] surveillance program. In pardoning him would more people feel motivated to become whistleblowers, possibly with different outcomes? How dangerous would that be? If he's not pardoned, what message does it pass to future generations? [1] "U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal". Reuters. Retrieved September 2, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/us-court-mass-surveillance-program-exposed-by-snowden-was-illegal-idUSKBN25T3CK https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/us-court-m...

exolymph 6y ago

> I upvoted you because you merely posted your opinion, with which I agree. Shocker, upvoting someone you agree with!

jaywalk 6y ago
I just upvoted you because I am also shocked by the action of upvoting someone you agree with.