Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign citizens? I was a big fan of Snowden until he started doing that. That isn't whistleblowing against Constitutional violations and seemed to indicate a shift in his objectives. It now appears that he is just against US spying at large, which is a perfectly acceptable political opinion to have, but it doesn't justify whis…
> What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign [human beings]? Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights. If he leaked documents about operations against Americans, and then also about operations against foreigners, in my mind he did the same thing twice. If there was another difference, like spilling the location or identit…
Snowden’s leaks clearly benefitted adversaries of the NSA:
* domestic global powers such as goog and fb were able to lock down their customer data, which has the downside of shifting unchecked power to those entities
* foreign powers of the us now had confirmed intel on usa’s global intelligence gathering playbook and adjusted accordingly
Additionally, we can perhaps gain insight to any potential upsides or downsides of the proliferation of civil libertarianism that is directly attributable to the actions of Ed Snowden. I do believe personally that the first global superpower (whether the CIA and Google, China, etc) that obtains a way to break all current encryption (and has all of the pcaps) will have a huge upper hand in understanding social effects of this movement of the late 2010’s.