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Sorry, but I really don't buy the argument that USA is worse than Russia in this respect. Snowden, while I totally applaud what he did and would love to see him pardoned, or protected under whistleblower laws, leaked a ton of highly classified information. Again, I think he did the right thing, but him being prosecuted is not the same as "if anyone speaks about the actions the U.S. takes in secret they are hunted to the end of the world." Plenty of people have overtly criticized the U.S. government without any fear of retribution.

Yeah, if Snowden had of betrayed the ~~KGB~~ FSS/FIS he would have fallen down some stairs onto some bullets a long time ago.

if he was lucky where lucky one agent for the CIA ended up getting tortured and allegedly burned alive in the basement of the KGB and I suspect the poor sods that Kim Philby burned all got a quick clean death

If Snowden blew the whistle (to the minimum extent possible to inform the public about what was happening) and stayed in the U.S. to face the music, I could buy the argument that he was a hero and deserves a pardon. What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe and revealed publicly a lot of tactical information that only serves to hurt U.S. intelligence operations abroad. Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome. Now he's a part of a propaganda machine of a tyrannical regime. Sorry, but that makes him a Russian agent, traitor and a dirtbag.

Really curious how you feel about Litvinenko's work with MI6. Western agent and traitor to Russia should be non-controversial and not bad from Western point of view, but how about the dirtbag?

I suppose I don't place data surveillance and stuff like journalist executions, apartment bombings, staging theater/school hostage situations in the same weight class of morally wrong.

Did you have "data surveillance" in mind when you wrote "Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome"?

What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe ..

No, what happened was that he attempted to fly to a relatively neutral country in South America, and the U.S. government (rather stupidly) revoked his visa while in transit.

Well, he is somewhat right. Snooping tech that three-letter-agencies have here is likely to be well beyond anything Russia can possibly have. I've seen some of it in Russia about 15 years back (to my shame, as a student, participated in the development) and even though my code was kinda ok-ish, this was literally child's play ;) You could monitor small percentage of phone calls, but it is a far cry from bulk wiretapping, voice recognition and search/analytics/social-network-analysis that is probably in place here.

Espionage (what the US programs were for) is very different than the widespread victimisation of those who are seen as undesirable.

The Russian government is actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands of people. Whether it's because they were unfortunate enough to have been born gay, or because they want to talk about Russia's annexation of eastern Ukraine, or whether they just don't think Putin should be in power forever.

Call me crazy, but I think that's worse than passive collection of reams of data.

The US government is also actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and they have been doing so since before Martin Luther King's days. They're just far more subversive about it because they're sitting on reams of money.

Could you be more explicit and provide some examples.

"Freedom zones," trying to get MLK to commit suicide, the Red Scare, subversion of activist groups during the Nixon years, Kent State, manipulation of social networks and Wikipedia, controlling the media to the point that it might as well be called the state media unless you're watching BBC or Comedy Central.

I could go on and on. The Russians are not worse than the US, they're just not as good at hiding it.

The US government does not "control" the media, and allows private news organisations (Fox News, The Wall St Journal) that effectively act as a mouthpiece for the opposition party to flourish. Not so in Russia, where independent news organisations are under constant attack.

You're absolutely right that the US has done some deplorable things in its past (including, as we now know, the recent state-sanctioned torture of probably innocent foreigners). That doesn't make what Russia's doing today, in fairly plain sight, any less repugnant.

Your problem is comparing Russia's censorship to the US's spying. Russia has its own intelligence gathering programs that we know little about, but we know a lot about the US's censorship (and how they manipulate the media) and it would make more sense to compare those two.

For the same reason that it makes no sense to compare the US GDP to the size of Poland's navy, there's no value in comparing Russian censorship to US intelligence.

There's really no need for the comparisons. Both versions are terrible, who cares which is worse. How we go about fixing it should be the topic of discussion.

No, one is clearly much worse than the other. Many journalists have been killed in Russia, for example.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in...

I imagine if a Russian version of Snowden ever occurred, he wouldn't remain alive to continue leaking documents.

So the West and Russia are equally bad? Who cares which is worse? The people who live there.

Are you still repeating that "putin hates gays" meme?! Read the facts: http://gallery.mailchimp.com/d0e55f3197099944345708652/files...

Yes. The recent policy is similar to Section 28, a British policy enacted in 1988 and only finally repealed in 2003. Though the text of the law talks of "protecting children", its effect has been to stifle the freedoms of gay people to talk openly about their sexuality.

Further, the Russian government has presided over an incredibly well-documented increase in violence towards gay people. The notion in the above report that Russian gay people enjoy greater freedoms than those in the US is utterly specious.

That the author takes John C. Dvorak seriously should tell you everything you need to know.

> With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated

That's pretty much the point though, isn't it? Of course the US is going to prosecute someone who reveals their state secrets on such a massive scale. Every country would. However, what they don't do is routinely assassinate and imprison political opponents.

In the same way, I agree with you that the cooperation between internet companies and the NSA/CIA is very concerning. However, I believe this still pales in comparison to the amount of oppression and state-control over the media that you see in Russia.

What the US is doing is definitely not right. But I don't believe we should let our disappointment about that trivialize the totalitarian state that is Putin's Russia.

Pretty clear fallacy of tu quoque:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Based on your spacing and carriage returns, it's pretty obvious you aren't American and have an anti-American bias. Not saying the US is a shining example of civil rights - they certainly are not - but your comment adds nothing to the discussion.

That's plain wrong. The OP is arguing that US violations of civil rights are far more significant and consequential than the ones in Russia. OP is right because US claims the mantle of world leadership, has the world's largest military force, and a dominant economy. US should be held to a higher standard.

I suppose what you are saying is that prosecuting someone for a trial by a jury of their peers (with access to the best defense you can imagine) is much worse than poisoning people with radioactive materials??

At the end of the day, Snowden was a member of the U.S. Intelligence community and entrusted with classified information and, for better or worse, he willfully broke the law. What do you expect, that he would not be prosecuted? Do you think if that happened in Russia, Putin would have any reservation from assassinating him before he managed to flee to his biggest foe and reveal who-knows-what to earn his welcome?

The biggest thing about the difference between Russia and the United States is the end goal of their actions. Putin is ensuring his power base, while the US is trying to stop terrorism. I don't like what they are doing but this is what the NSA thinks what works to stop terrorism. If you look at both President Obama and President Bush they did close to the same things regarding national security. It may be a faulty assumption, but this leads me to believe that there are things that these programs protect the western world from. The people who work for the CIA and NSA aren't idiots and they definitely have committed some horrible actions, but they wouldn't being continuing these missions if they were futile.

I would like to live in a world without religious extremism, but it has and will always exist. They utilize the poverty and illiteracy of certain places in the middle east to make teenagers believe suicide bombing is the way to get to heaven. Humanity is facing many existential crises and this is the way we are currently handling one. It is definitely not an optimal solution, but it doesn't matter if we can't solve our ever increasing CO2 emissions and the many other problems resulting from greenhouse gases.

You have drunk the cool aid.

Everything the US does is to maintain their global position of power. The end goal is obedience to the US and control over as many natural resource and territories as possible. Either directly through military force, or preferably through subversion, coercion and integration.

This is not unique to the US, it is what empires do, and the US is now the biggest empire ever created. We have and continue to cooperate with, fund, and protect some of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen.

Ours is not a noble mission with just wars to free the slaves of the world and introduce democracy. The only way democracy is acceptable is if the American candidate is electable. If the natives happen to make the wrong choice, coups happen, sanctions happen, directly military action happens.

These are not conspiracies, extreme leftist propaganda or the ramblings of Americas enemies, they are historic facts.

Are there other bad regimes in the world? Of course. Have their been regimes worse than the US? That depends. If you only want to talk about life in main land US, of course much much worse than that. If you include what regimes supported by the US has done it is hard to say yes or no.

We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much more so than any of the Putin dissidents. (With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated)

Assange has a TV show on Russian state television, and Snowden is a guy who fled to Russia with literally thousands of stolen NSA documents and now does TV propaganda with Vladimir Putin. Those are not dissidents. Those are Russian agents, whether they realize it or not.

They are western dissidents, whether or not they are also Russian agents.

Its not uncommon for dissidents forced to resort to exile to be leveraged for propaganda purposes by regimes opposed to the ones with regard to which they are dissidents, but that doesn't make them any less dissidents.

Why do people want to make things exclusive that are not?

Does that mean that North Korean dissidents who speak about against the regime when they escape are CIA agents?

If a North Korean signals intelligence officer managed to smuggle thousands of strategic DPRK intelligence documents and himself out of North Korea, I would assume it was with the help of a foreign government.

You are using the exact "reasoning"/propaganda that communist regimes used in Eastern Europe in the past. EVERY dissident who fled to a Western country was automatically labeled a spy.

If you were an Eastern European person who made it into West Berlin with thousands of secret Soviet intelligence documents in the 1960s, then you probably were a spy.

Some were, some were not (I grew up there). Also, while some spies are money-motivated, most spies from Eastern Europe were simply fed-up with the system.

We will never know for sure, but did you watch "Citizen4"? A closer look at Snowden - IMO, it's highly unlikely that he was a spy. It is clear (to me, at least) that he is highly principled, not money-driven. He'd have to be an extremely good actor.

Snowden's principles are exactly what make him such a great Russian agent. They don't have to sell him on the ideology since he already has it. It's like Aikido. All they have to do is take the momentum of his enormous ego and sense of self righteousness, and just sort of redirect it a little bit. Now all of a sudden Snowden finds himself sitting in Moscow being debriefed by Russian intelligence. It's brilliant on the part of the Russians and terrible for NATO.

It is easy to criticize the US but the entire West is working together. Is Assange or Snowden safe in Germany or Norway? The longer Europeans pretend that the problem is only the US the easier it is to have business as usual.

Yeah they would never do that in Russia or China.

How many Americans would move to Russia vs Russians moving to America?

Apples and oranges my friend. Using the same academic tone, one could make even North Korea sound like a great civilized place to be, but then when you get there it isn't anything.