Edward Joseph Snowden is the American I admire the most today. He sabotaged the United States' most ambitious, long-term well-planned program to completely pri

Edward Joseph Snowden is the American I admire the most today. He sabotaged the United States' most ambitious, long-term well-planned program to completely privatise spying around the world (through tech companies that would make money off it - a true capitalist wet dream), thus helping democracies around the world survive a bit more longer. To this end, Hollywood had also slowly changed the tone of their content to carefully push narcissism to the public, so that people would overshare information about themselves, the people they know and their own activities, publicly on the internet. Private tech companies (like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook etc.) meanwhile slowly moved on to harvesting more and more data, testing the boundaries each time slowly, to create profiles of their users they could analyse for behavioural insights and this allowed them two streams of income - from providing access to personal data of individuals to government agencies and by using this personal data to manipulate the users to sell something. Another big goal, with the "cloud computing" push is to get government agencies and companies worldwide to store their privileged information on servers online that can be easily accessed. This serves two main purposes - the push to "computing on the cloud" means access to technology can be highly controlled, and denied to other countries. (In today's connected world, US companies can deactivate and cripple nearly all computers, including smartphones and tablets, if it wants, of any country, if it is connected to the internet). The other purpose is that corporate espionage is easier if all data is on the cloud, thus allowing the US and the west to maintain a technological lead over others. Ofcourse, it's easier to do this with some help with allies and thus we have the "5 eyes" and "9 eyes" program, where other spy agencies of other countries agree to share each others database. It is a brilliant program but against democratic values. People like Assange, who help whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, deserve our full praise and support. Democracy cannot survive in darkness and denial of information. The public are not dumb, as some politicians like to think so.