Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. I'm saying he should be defined by the morality of his decision when he made it.
Even if it resulted in something detrimental or even catastrophic, I still think that Snowden made the moral choice because those programs don't belong in a free society.
There are also crimes for which they are. In fact I think we can judge him on outcomes alone and he will still come out ahead, but even in the face of adverse outcomes, the fact that he sought to expose these very illegal programs with repercussions that echo around the globe, means that at the very least he deserves better than de-facto exile and the threat of assassination.
How can you judge someone on anything but intentions? Nobody knows the future, nor can we ever say what would have happened if an action hadn't been taken.
If drove drunk and ran over a pedestrian, and he turned out to be a mass murderer on the way to strike again, you should still go to jail. You didn't intend good or act morally based on your knowledge at the time, and society would do well to discourage people from following your example.
We'll never know all the outcomes from Snowden's actions, good or bad. We'll never know what would have happened if he'd kept quiet. But why did he do it, and what did he believe would happen if he did or didn't speak up? That's the question. Not easy to answer, but it's the moral question.
> Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes.
Why else is behavior even a concern, except for its outcomes?
When people oppose surveillance, it's because they fear the possible outcome(s) of surveillance.
Likewise, then, for Snowden. It shouldn't have taken John Oliver to have to point out to Snowden (while interviewing Snowden literally opposite from the Russian intelligence headquarters) that he has to accept responsibility for his actions, good and bad, but apparently that's the world we live in now.
Because if you assault me on the street and chop off one of my legs, and then it turns out that that leg had cancer, I would still expect you to go to jail.
What he did was illegal, which is why he needs a pardon to begin with (if not to signal that he has political support in case of an attack from other gov branch).
> Why else is behavior even a concern, except for its outcomes?
Because expected outcomes matter, too. If I shoot you and you live, that's called "attempted murder", and IMHO should be punished exactly like actual murder. If I shoot you and a paramedic who is trying to stop your bleeding gives you a medicine that you're allergic to and you die, the paramedic should still be treated as someone who acted honorably.
We judge actions based on intent because we want to encourage people to act with good intentions. Outcomes are frequently beyond our control.
> he has to accept responsibility for his actions, good and bad
True, but it's common for us to honor those who choose a good tradeoff. Eg, "yes, you shot the criminal and killed him, which is bad, but you rightly judged it was better to save the hostage's life. That's a wise and moral tradeoff, here's a medal."
> Many people believe Snowden's tradeoff was right.
Any my assertion is that the people who believe that do not understand the trades that Snowden made, but instead think that because Snowden punched the boogeyman, anything else Snowden could be responsible for is mitigated completely.
I'm not saying we should hang Snowden from the yardarm, but it would be nice if people would at least acknowledge the negative repercussions that we know of today, and the possibly much more negative repercussions that have yet to be revealed, and weigh that into their calculus somewhere.
The fact is that NSA is still around, will continue to be around, will continue to collect information overseas, will continue to be able to collect information domestically (albeit under more policy controls), and all of this was completely predictable when Snowden flew out of Hawai'i for the last time.
Was everything else that came with it worth it? Playing populist politics to try and drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. (just prior to Putin's heel turn with Ukraine, no less)... was that and everything else worth it?
And someone please explain, why was it not possible to simply leak the civil liberties concerns such as phone metadata, AND NOTHING ELSE? He'd still have "started the debate", no? Why did he steal Tier 3 information that he's only leaked to China (and no other journalists) up to this point?
He's not responsible for anything. He was legally required to leak when his bosses ignored his reports. You can't be "responsible" for doing what you're required to do.
Besides, the NSA mass surveillance programs are next to worthless.
Moving from collecting 5% of the uninteresting communication in the world to 99% is irrelevant when it's the 0.0001% that isn't so easily collected that we're looking for.
A program of mass surveillance like that is only good for things that aren't a national security risk, such as stopping drug dealers, counterfeiters, etc. Perhaps useful, but nothing we need a massive secret-police force able to tap everything for.
> literally opposite from the Russian intelligence headquarters
Wow, do you rant about conspiracy theories outside of HN as well? Because that's the lamest piece of "evidence" I've ever heard.
Also, we know from multiple leaks that the USA threatened Germany and other countries to keep them from giving Snowden asylum. He literally had no other choice than Putin's Russia.
There is a traitor in the room, I'll give you a mirror to help you find them.
Everything save the FSB HQ-sponsored interview was dead serious... and the snark on said FSB shout-out was why it was parenthetical.
You can't simply argue that 1 good thing outweighs an arbitrary number of bad things from your decision. Otherwise the NSA would be able to use that logic to argue for an actual policy of no limit to surveillance: "Hey, we disrupted that one plot from our decision to engage in illegal spying, so that makes it OK to scale up surveillance as much as we want, right?"
Has anyone even figured out what Snowden did with all the stuff he leaked from NSA while at Booz-Allen (i.e. the rest of stuff with the IP addresses of Chinese servers NSA was attacking, that he leaked to Chinese media)? The stuff he leaked to Greenwald was from when he worked at Dell, not Booz-Allen. Greenwald and the other journalists claim they never got the documentation that Snowden obtained while he was at Booz-Allen, Snowden claims he took nothing with him to Russia... so where is it? Where did it go?
Did he destroy it all in Hong Kong? If so why did he claim he needed to jump over to Booz-Allen to get to the "Tier 3" information in the first place, if he was never going to leak that data to anyone?
Where was he in the 11+ days between when he left Hawai'i and when he apppeared in Hong Kong?
He may not be a Russian spy but even now he has left as many questions as he's answered...
Even if it resulted in something detrimental or even catastrophic, I still think that Snowden made the moral choice because those programs don't belong in a free society.