How should we judge Edward Snowden?

Edward Snowden admits to releasing the documents that the Guardian and Washington Post published last week, exposing the huge scope of the NSA’s collection of data from phone to email data. The documents show that the agency has been pretty much spying on virtually all of the citizens of the USA, in one way or another.

  The real questions are: Is this guy a hero? Should he be prosecuted? Did he do the right thing? So first off, yes he should be prosecuted. He did after all, break the law. That being said, the guy is still a hero for making the American public aware of the vast extent of the NSA data collection programs. He did do the right thing by exposing these programs much to the embarrassment of those in Washington, DC. Sure these programs are legal under the Patriot Act, according to our folks in Congress. However, the true extent of these programs was unknown to the American public prior to his release of this information. This guy took the steps necessary to make us all aware. He did the right thing and he blew the whistle on “Big Brother”.

  He also did the smart thing by admitting to being the whistle-blower. First off, he saved the newspapers involved from being investigated by the DOJ. Remember how bad that went with the most recent scandal involving the Associated Press and the Fox News reporter? Secondly, he probably made himself a bit safer by shining the light upon himself making it less likely he will just “disappear” or have some unfortunate “accident”.

  Now its time for us as Americans to make a decision. Just how many rights are we willing to give up in the name of security? It simply comes down to numbers. How many hundreds of lives are we willing to trade for our way of life? Before you answer that take a moment to think real hard about the past. We gave up thousands of lives in the revolutionary war to get to a point where we had these rights. We gave up hundreds of thousands more lives to keep our way of life in the Civil War, and World War II. We are willing to trade several hundred lives per year off in places like Afghanistan to maintain our way of life. Of course those are folks who are willing to die for their country. It’s always easier to spend someone else’s life than our own, isn’t it? But the bottom line is, once we head down the slippery slope of “national Security” trumping our rights, there won’t be an easy way back. Nobody wants to be the one getting blown up by some fanatical, nut-job, Islamic terrorist, but how many of us really want to live in a police state? Life is an unsafe road no matter what. No one gets out alive. The real question is quality of life versus perceived safety. I, for one am willing to take my chances with the terrorists rather than have my rights trampled by a government that has far exceeded it’s authority and ceased to follow the Constitution.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled surfing…
Tim
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