To pardon Snowden seems like a very popular opinion around here. Can anyone help me change my opinion on this matter? The way I currently see it: - Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them. - The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this. - Leaking standard-op…
>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
That's why he gave them to a small group of well respected journalists, so they could use their professional discretion to vet them.
>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
I highly doubt that, but even if it that were true those documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists, only the ones showing the NSA doing illegal things are.
>- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
Yes he did.
>- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent. He just copied files, fled to China and shared them with a small group of people, none of which required "secret agent skills"
>- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
So? You can't blame Snowden for that, blame the Justice department. If Snowden could have been even remotely safe anywhere but Russia, he wouldn't be there now. You can't chase after somebody then blame them for hiding somewhere safe.
>- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
No he didn't, he gave them to perfectly competent journalists. Greenwald is very competent and well respected as a journalists. Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain the important thing is that he did without them getting leaked earlier than he wanted.
>If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing.
He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
>As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.