Current Events
Several media outlets including The New York Times as well as a contingency of American citizens consider Snowden a hero for exposing the overreach of the NSA. These groups are now urging President Obama to pardon Snowden and offer him a hero’s return to the U.S. as a free man for the “great service” he has done for his country. Not so fast…
Granted, Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s spy program did expose a much greater than expected surveillance of American citizens, but his actions since that revelation also raised the possibility that perhaps he is less of a hero and more of a traitor.
Snowden’s stolen treasure trove of top secret documents didn’t just remove the curtain from the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, but also revealed: sensitive data about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; the operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; the NSA’s email intercepts of goings on inside Iran; NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide” (which has allowed it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect); and the NSA’s routine hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
Since fleeing the U.S., Snowden admitted to the South China Morning Post that he took his job as an NSA contractor knowing that it would grant him unique “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed at his job for just 3 months, which provided him more than enough time to do what he went there to do. Coincidence? Hmmm…
Current Events
Sure, Snowden’s whistle-blowing exposed the domestic surveillance of American citizens and the spying on allies, but his actions following that main revelation also jeopardized America’s national security. So, instead of considering Snowden a national hero, perhaps in actuality he is much more of an intelligence risking traitor.
Is Edward Snowden really the type of person who should be lauded a hero and welcomed back into the forgiving arms of Uncle Sam as a free man??
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