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Comment by schrodinger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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