Edward Snowden: Villain or Hero? “You can't have 100% security and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. Society had to make choices” said President Obama. It has become a given in society that it is on the government’s agenda to procure its nation’s safety in exchange of the privacy or freedom of the people. Edward Snowden, a paladin of social justice, has now come to light with outstanding facts as for what specifically it is that the National Security Agency (NSA) is able and willing to do for the country’s sake. Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA ex-employee, worked from Hawaii on his computer support for the recollection of data in bulk from the whole nation . Under the name of Verax, which means truth teller in Latin, he …show more content…
official; and John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer now serving a prison term . Reason why Snowden had to flee before he made public what he had been doing and shared the information he had. He argued that Hong Kong was a city of people who encouraged freedom of speech; he met with lawyers and searched for solutions while in Hong Kong. Albert Ho, Jonathan Man, and Robert Tibbo, a human rights lawyer; assembled as a team and aided him to fly out to Moscow after he made public various important and top secret documents which he acquired while working for NSA through Booz Allen Hamilton . With threats by the US Government, Russian President Putin alleged that Edward Snowden had committed no crimes in Russian soil and was a free man. Although his passport was revoked, the now fugitive Snowden was able to get refugee papers from Ecuador and was attempting to cross into Russian soil from the airport . As the Hollywood plot unveiled, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, took sides with Edward Snowden to help him find asylum. Assange and his team have started negotiations with Icelandic and Ecuadorian governments for the political asylum that Snowden pursues . Julian Assange himself lives under political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since mid-2012, explained that Snowden had contacted them for
Privacy has endured throughout human history as the pillar upon which our authentic nature rests. Yet, in an age darkened by the looming shadow of terrorism, another force threatens to dominate the skyline and obscure the light of liberty behind promises of safety and security: government surveillance. As an employee of the NSA, Edward Snowden broke his vow of secrecy to inform the public of our government’s furtive surveillance acts, but does this render him traitorous? To answer this, we must first ask ourselves, traitorous to whom? When the very institution established to protect our fundamental liberties intrudes on our privacy from behind a veil of secrecy, should such informed individuals resign from judicious autonomy and
The year is 2013 and Edward Snowden is living in Hawaii. He is working at an NSA facility for Booz Allen Hamilton. The NSA mission is to protect military and intelligence networks against intruders. In May he took a plane to Hong Kong to get away from the U.S. because he had leaked documents that showed the NSA had been
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (N.S.A) subcontractor turned whistle-blower is nothing short of a hero. His controversial decision to release information detailing the highly illegal ‘data mining’ practices of the N.S.A have caused shockwaves throughout the world and have raised important questions concerning how much the government actually monitors its people without their consent or knowledge. Comparable to Mark Felt in the Watergate scandals, Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden joins the rank of infamous whistleblowers who gave up their jobs, livelihood, and forever will live under scrutiny of the public all in the service to the American people. Edward Snowden released information detailing the
Edward Snowden. This is a name that will be in the history books for ages. He will be branded a traitor or a whistleblower depending on where you look. Many Americans feel that Edward Snowden is a traitor who sold the United States’ secrets aiming to harm the nation. Others believe that he was simply a citizen of the United States who exercised his right to expose the government for their unconstitutional actions. It is important to not only know the two sides to the argument of friend or foe, but to also know the facts as well. My goal in this paper is to present the facts without bias and to adequately portray the two sides of the argument.
In 2013 Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists which were Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Edward came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. After that there were more news papers that have published about it like Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He was brought up originally in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His family moved later to Maryland, near the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.
This would lead us to the the most important question that should be asked here: What differentiates Snowden from the previous whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning and many others, making him ‘the most wanted man’ by the US government? The exceptionality of Snowden which will be analyzed in the next chapter might show if it is a reason behind the reforms emerged later or
Edward Snowden is a former National Security Agency subcontractor who made headlines in 2013 when he leaked top secret information about NSA surveillance activities. Snowden is a traitor because he revealed private information about his people and his country. He is a traitor because he violated United States privacy and betrayed the United States government and the people. Snowden did not have the right to do that just because they were ‘spying’ on us. They were seeing every step we take for a reason, why? To protect the people from so many things, like terrorism group that are the most known and talked about Isis and Al-Qaeda. Now that Snowden exposed the government, he’s revealed information that groups like Isis & Al-Qaeda are going
Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia on July 3, 1971. In 1987, he began hacking under the name of Mendax, and hacked into organizations like Pentagon, NASA, US Navy etc. He was caught hacking in 1991 and charges in 1994, but was eventually released after paying reparations. He established WikiLeaks in 2006, for which he also serves as the editor in chief. WikiLeaks is an organisation which is involved in publishing secret and classified information received from anonymous sources. Although WikiLeaks published numerous materials between 2006 to 2009, it gained global prominence in 2010 after leaking several highly sensitive documents like Collateral Murder Video, The Iraqi and Afghanistan
Edward Snowden broke all major media outlets in June of 2013. It was a story that portrayed him as traitor to the country for spying on the United States National Security Agency. Edward worked as a technical contractor at the time this was released. Edward was hiding in Hong Kong when the news came out. He planned this trip to keep himself from being instantly detained in the United States. The National Security Agency’s surveillance significantly increased after the 9/11 attacks and have allegedly kept growing since . The surveillance was within guidelines which was up for debate now that the leaks had shown the extent of the surveillance. Other National Security Agency technical contractors had stated that the constitution had been violated,
was setting out to restore the balance between the governing and the governed”, the reasoning behind his actions was in his effort to mend and rebuild the checks and balances within the government and its people, in order to free the government from corruption and unconstitutional practices without the proper consent (Snowden, 23:44). The revealing of private information to the Chinese, and later world-wide public allowed the people to decide for themselves whether they felt the government should have had unauthorized access to their private phone information. What Snowden had in mind was that the only way we can support representatives is if we know, or have an idea of what they stand for and who they are as a person, if we don’t know, our votes become ineffective (Snowden 23:57). Snowden questions the efficiency of our votes when the public is not completely aware of what our governing candidates are actually doing (Snowden, 24:17). Snowden brings this up because he believes that it is wrong and unfair for the people to not be informed of certain vital information necessary to electing candidates who represent our values. If we are not given accurate information regarding the missions of the candidates, how is it fair? How does this accurately represent our votes, and do we really have a say in what goes on behind closed doors? This goes back to the actions of the NSA and whether Snowden offered a possible solution to the issues, and the answer is yes because Snowden
Introduction- Julian Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Australia. He used his genius IQ to hack into the databases of many high profile organizations. In 2006, Assange began working on Wikileaks, a Web site to collect and share confidential information of high profile organizations on an international scale. The information his organization released earned him strong supporters and powerful enemies. For his efforts, the internet activist earned the Time magazine "Person of the Year" title in 2010. After arriving at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden, Assange was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government in August 2012.
Since President Obama took office, the act had been invoked seven times as of June 2013. Snowden remained in hiding for slightly more than a month. He initially planned to relocate to Ecuador for asylum, but upon making a stopover, he became stranded in a Russian airport for a month when his passport was annulled by the American government. The Russian government denied U.S. requests to extradite Snowden. While some decried him as a traitor, others supported his cause, and more than 100,000 people signed an online petition asking President Obama to pardon Snowden by late June. The following month, Snowden made headlines again when it was announced that he had been offered asylum in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Snowden soon made up his mind, expressing an interest in staying in Russia. One of his lawyers, Anatoly Kucherena stated that Snowden would seek temporary asylum in Russia and possibly apply for citizenship later. Snowden thanked Russia for giving him asylum and said that "in the end the law is winning." That October, Snowden stated that he no longer possessed any of the NSA files that he leaked to press. He gave the materials to the journalists he met with in Hong Kong, but he didn 't keep copies for himself. Snowden explained that "it wouldn 't serve the public interest" for him to have brought the files to Russia, according to The New York Times. Around this time, Snowden 's father, Lon
Edward Snowden’s in Brazil supporters gave the Foreign Ministry a concrete petition signed by over 1.1 million individuals advocating for the government of Dilma Rousseff to allow the US NSA (National Security Agency) whistle-blower asylum in their country.
Edward Snowden is well-known for his actions in early to mid 2013. His case, despite being more than four years old, is still highly discussed and debated in politics, the media, and even in classrooms. Though Snowden, as a modern-day rebel, has likely not finished his work of changing society, it is important to examine his actions while they are still going on, especially because of who he is. As a high-school dropout, many may not have considered him to have much potential, but despite this, he was able to land a high-profile NSA career. His life would have been all laid out in