If the journalists released "intelligence secrets that had nothing directly to do with the surveillance of Americans" (it's not clear to me that they did, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief here) isn't that on them, not Snowden?
I don't see what's so complicated about that.
> Read everything
Well...
1) Do you expect a single person to go through 1000's of documents with their rudimentary understandings and interpretations of the law? Would you and why would you trust him if so?
2) Should he have a lawyer go through the documents with him?
3) Should he get second opinions on whether or not something is breaking the law?
4) Should he trust a team of respected journalists and their team of lawyers to go through the documents on his behalf?
The journalists he released the documents to have trust that they've established for years. That makes them hard to dismiss as looney bins. Snowden does not have that trust and would have been easy to dismiss by himself.
But - yes, he chose to release that material. If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people, that's still part of a chain of events that leads to him and his decision.
I'm glad he did what he did, and so far things seem to have gone ok, and I can't imagine the stress and pressure he's under.
You either blow the whistle or remain silent. Choosing to not release the material would mean he's compliant, and not a whistle blower. Which - given the details that have come to light - I judge the compliance of the individuals impeding on my rights to privacy far harsher than I judge Snowden as a whistle blower.
>If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people
Do you think Snowden or the journalist team are more or less likely to release something irresponsibly that would lead to the deaths of people? My bets are on Snowden; had he acted alone.
Simply because as an individual he is less capable of citing/knowing which laws what is breaking, what should be released and shouldn't be released (he would have to make that call himself, rather than discussing it among others), how details may be interpreted by the public, dangers of releasing certain information, etc. I believe it would be inevitable for him to fuck up had he acted alone.
Your argument boils down to "he shouldn't have blown the whistle" and I cannot agree with that. At all.
You're simplifying it too much. I think he did the right thing, but took some big risks of varying kinds, too. That's part of what makes someone a 'hero' isn't it? Pressing forward in the face of uncertainty and danger.
I was just arguing with the "it's all on the journalists if something goes awry" line.
Blowing the whistle comes with inherent risk. He did everything within his power to minimize that risk and act responsibly.
E:
I see I'm arguing a statement ever-so-slightly out of your original context (read your edit). So disregard this as a tangent discussion. :) Cheers.
If he had taken steps to minimize the leak but missed stuff, there would be a reasonable argument here. But he leaked things that pretty clearly didn't document misconduct, but was damaging to the NSA, and a casual skim of that stuff could have ruled out its publication.
Sometimes you leak with the situation you have, not the situation you'd want or wish to have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.
By pretty much everyone's admission, Snowden relied on Greenwald and others to minimize the leak, and that's what they've done: only a fraction of the documents he took have been published. At first blush, that sounds admirable, but when you think about this for a second, the implication is that people like Greenwald are now in possession of a huge collection of documents that aren't in the public interest (if they were, Greenwald's obligation would be to publish them!).
To the extent he amassed and shared with journalists the type of information you're talking about, Snowden has previously stated that he felt he needed to prove to journalists that he was an authentic source.
Your claim certainly still applies in the form of "he didn't need to do that" or "he didn't need that much material to establish bona fides" or even "he's lying" but to my knowledge, he didn't release damaging information himself.
Snowden did leak information to journalists who then decided to report on it, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that Snowden should have assumed journalists would be inclined to report on damaging information that didn't reflect misconduct. Snowden may also have made different assumptions than you do about what constitutes misconduct.
By every account of the people who know, Snowden read and understood every single document he leaked.
Personally, guns bother me a lot more than SIGINT implants.
1) reduces the value of US hardware on the international market, as businesses want to use equipment without backdoors installed by foreign intelligence services
2) pits the intelligence community against large portions of the tech sector, who because of market pressure will be forced to consider such activity a security threat
3) obliderates any moral high ground from which to stand on to condemn foreign intelligence services for doing the exact same thing, e.g.the State department's hypocritical efforts to condemn the Chinese for various forms of espionage in which the NSA apparently routinely engages
That's false.
>immense value for society of it
The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant. You could argue that he did more good than bad, and I might even agree; but doing more good than bad doesn't make someone a hero.
the data-mining program that slurps up e-mail and phone data of American citizens
>Even if some published documents were harmful to US government, it is not Snowden who published them.
He gave them to journalists that published them. How is it not his fault?
"The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant."
The article, as some groups do, tries to turn people from thinking and talking about the important things such as the big brother surveillance and questioning government to various irrelevant issues, such as "isn't he a traitor". They try to mislead your attention astray. Don't let them; think for yourself.
You said "slandering". That generally implies untruth, but the only thing you've really pointed to is non proportionality, which is kind of weird (does every article need to include every single fact at all relevant to the case? Presumably not, but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?)
"but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?" I call the article disproportionate, misleading and low-quality based on reading it and remembering other accounts of things.