Your thoughts on Snowden

[Slimebeast]

MTZehvor said:

Slimebeast said:

MTZehvor said:

Slimebeast said:
He is a traitor, terrorist-supporter and a threat to innocent people all over the world and he deserves lifetime in prison.

How so? Revealing to a country's citizens that their government has secretly been wiretapping them over the past several years is a threat to innocent people?

I don't care what "good" the NSA claims they're doing with this. This is a ridiculous invasion of privacy, and both Republicans and Democrats have been incredibly hypocritical on the matter so far. Snowden was willing to give up his freedom, his job, and his social standing so that he could inform a country's populace that their government is recording all of their conversations. The man's a hero.

Invasion of privacy to combat crime. I support that.

To me violent crime is far worse than my loss of privacy in front of a bunch of anonymous CIA or NSA agents.

And by its very nature surveillance has to be as secret as possible. If it was totally open and public then it wouldn't be able to combat crime as effectively. This isn't anything new. All nations have always had secret agencies to fight the bad guys.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

-Benjamin Franklin

If there was some mystical barrier out there that prevented them from abusing this power, perhaps I would be less opposed. Unfortunately, that power does not exist. This ability has the potential to be misused and abused in so many ways that it'd be impossible to count. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Leave this ability to the whims of whoever comes into power, and it will eventually be abused (if it hasn't been already).

Abuse is certainly a problem and in my view a much stronger argument than just simply "my privacy must be respected out of principle, no matter the circumstances".

Abuse was certainly a huge problem with the KGB and other secret government agencies in the East and are still today in Third world countries so the potential for misuse is there, and power itself usually corrupts like you say, but I'm now aware of any severe abuse in Western democracies in modern times. Yes some abuse certainly happens but I simply don't know about many cases where a person's life has been destroyed because of government surveillance abuse in the West.

But I know for a fact that thousands of people's lives are being destroyed by violent crime and terrorism every year.