Edward Snowden

I always find it difficult to classify the actions of whistle blowers. There are people who think what they are doing is just and helping to bring down corruption, but there are also those who think they should just keep their mouth shut and if they don’t like it then they can leave. Edward Snowden is one of these whistle blowers that became very popular for the mass amounts of government documents that he released to the public. In my opinion, I feel that Edward Snowden is more of a traitor than a hero. Now, I do agree to some degree that full surveillance of an entire nation’s people is not necessarily ethical. But, that surveillance was being done in order to prevent terrorists and other attacks on the US. If you are a simple citizen that has nothing to hide, then there is no reason you should be concerned with the being watched by the government. It is an invasion of privacy, but there is a price to safety and security, whether that be the lives of soldiers fighting our foreign enemies or the privacy of people in our nation. While I think that Snowden is a bit of a traitor, I don’t think the government is completely hands free in blaming him and sentencing him as such. In my Computer Security class I took last spring, we watched the Snowden documentary Citizenfour and discussed his actions some in class. What I learned is that it was very easy for Snowden to steal these files. He was given complete access to any and all files that the NSA had on their servers. He wasn’t even on the site that some of this information was stored at and was still given unrestricted access to it. Also, he was not searched going through government checkpoints when leaving the sites that he worked at. He was able to simply walk out with a thumb drive in his pocket without even being questioned and searched. I feel that these leaks could have been very easily prevented if the government but half as much effort into checking what the people they contract to do work for them as they did with spying on the citizens of the US.

But moving past the legality of his actions, I don’t feel like what he did was necessarily ethical. He stole classified documents from the government and willingly exposed national secrets. Now, I can’t say for certain that what Snowden did has any major effect on the world. The Patriot Act, something that he opposed and felt should be ended, did expire and was not renewed. The government did however pass a new bill that still allows for telephone surveillance, just changes the ways in which the government can acquire those phone calls. So there is still a law in place that allows surveillance, so what did Snowden really do? Some people, including form US Attorney General Eric Holder, say the acts of Snowden did provoke a beneficial discussion about the security of the nation. However, he does agree with me in that what Snowden did was not right and that he exposed national secrets that really should not have been exposed and did have repercussions as a result. So he did a little bit of both in harming the nation and also helping it in sparking these discussions. But ultimately what he did was illegal and unethical. But I can’t say all of this has impacted me that much. I am not hiding anything so that knowing the government is watching what we do is a concern for me. In this day and age we do almost everything online so it is not that much of a surprise that what we do, our searches, calls, tweets, Facebook posts, and everything else are saved and used. In the usual sense, these are used to do data analytics about users to make things better, but this information can be used for other purposes so it is not surprising to me that it has been.