Your Handy Wonkette Guide To How You Should Feel About Edward Snowden
It has been nearly a month since Edward Snowden woke us from our pleasant dream that the Fourth Amendment was still a thing, yet amazingly, the NSA's legal-sure-why-not data suck-and-swallow is still a major story. Yr Wonkette loves the taste of crow, so we are fine admitting we were slightly off-base about Snowden being an annoying fame-whore ; we are apparently not as smart as Edward Snowden and didn't understand at first that the chances of NSA sticking as a major national story are increased if Snowden himself is compelling and polarizing. Heck, maybe that's why he's continually releasing stuff that doesn't have anything to do with domestic surveillance, such as that we spy on China, and oh, everyone else, too , even our allies (especially them, the bastards!), as Der Spiegel reported on Sunday. Maybe Snowden is just trying to keep "winning the morning."
But maybe you're still not sure how you feel about him, so why not let yr Wonkette do your feeling for you? All you have to do is tell usWHAT ARE YOU?
"I do not want the terrorists to win, and I don't do anything wrong or look at unconventional porn, even!"You hate Edward Snowden for obvious reasons, except maybe you like him a little bit because you do not care for this Obama whom Snowden is irritating. On the other hand, here's a great opportunity to pretend you're not rabidly partisan because you can say "Hey I agree with Obama on this one!"
"I really don't think the US should be building this kind of infrastructure to collect all this information! Even if it stops an attack, the risks of abuse are too great."You love Edward Snowden for obvious reasons. However, you might as well forget about it because this shit is here to stay. Please just don't vote for Rand Paul, OK?
"I don't like that the trade-off between my privacy and my security is being negotiated in secret, but maybe something like PRISM could work with the right guarantees, if it's actually stopping people from getting blowed up."You like Edward Snowden because he's made this into a long-lived national story, somethingprevious NSA whistle-blowers couldn't do (because they didn't have sexy girlfriends), but maybe you're not terribly happy that he's decided to release so much stuff that's not pertinent to US civil liberties, just because he apparently doesn't think anyone should spy, ever, and he believes this so vehemently that he's prepared to... hide in a country that's run autocratically by a former KGB director. Maybe you wish Edward Snowden were less ridiculous.
"I hate the United States, and I think we should live in a stateless society where blah blah blah."You love Edward Snowden. Also, you're an idiot.
"There aren't many countries in the world that I'd trust to wield the NSA's powers, but the US is one of them. However, the very existence of Edward Snowden shows we need to reconsider who has access to these programs and the information they unearth."How do Obama's balls taste, Patriot? Also, not a bad point. You don't have strong feelings about Edward Snowden because this is the Best Of All Possible Worlds anyway, so why bother?
"I don't really give a shit about politics, I just love reading about spy stuff and ridiculous people."You love Edward Snowden, because he is about spy stuff AND is ridiculous. We've already mentioned his fleeing the US to hide in autocratic countries because Freedom, his pole-dancing super-hero girlfriend, and his quaint notions about espionage, but did you know he also thinks the US should return to the gold standard? At least he didin 2009 , which shows that really smart people can be really fucking wrong about stuff, too.
There you go, hope it was helpful. Are there other ways to feel about Edward Snowden, you may ask? No, there are not.
[Guardian / Independent / USA Today / Slate]
It would be better to say, regarding (b) above, that that is an assumption that cannot be known to be true. As far as GregComlish's reply to bibliotequetress goes, that is not as strong as "false", but still pretty strong.
Steverino, I have great respect for your opinions, and generally I agree with this one. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, so I wouldn't use the term "narcissism", but I do believe that Snowden's motivations were a mix of genuine concern about domestic intelligence-gathering, and a personal desire to be a hero. I completely agree with your point (1). Snowden's risk evaluation was way the fuck off. Most of the people who would tend to support the leak are also supporters of the Administration, which is terminally anti-leak. I suppose the whole being-a-libertarian thing may have thrown him off.
As for your point (2), it may indicate that Snowden is, in personal relationships, an asshole. Or it may indicate that he was trying to maintain an air of normal life. In either case, <i>not</i> giving his GF any advance notice was the right thing to do, as it has apparently freed her from any retributive investigation.
On point (3), I think your analogy is faulty. Feit was able to maintain his anonymity because (a) he was much more highly placed; (b) he was in DC when the WaPo was still a newspaper, so his contacts were in person and very hard to trace; (c) his revelations regarded illegal (not just secret) actions by the Administration, so there was never a heavy-duty track-down-Deep-Throat investigation, as that would have been an implicit admission of guilt (also, lots of people really hated Nixon).
Whatever Snowden&#039;s original intentions were (and they may have been to jump in the spotlight ASAP), once Greenwald started pimping the stuff, I assume Ed realized that he was only a couple of days away from discovery and decided to get on with it. I don&#039;t see that as a matter of &quot;narcissism&quot; so much as a matter of inevitability. Maintaining anonymity is increasingly difficult. When was the last anonymous-for-at-least-two-years leak? I certainly don&#039;t know.