Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
The Grand irony of American Politics and its apparent fight for Freedom. The winner I see out of all of this is China- America can finally take a break from taking shots at them for doing the “same” thing so blatantly. Admittedly my ini…
- Date
- June 10, 2013
- Collection
- Field Notes
- Reading time
- 2 min read
- Type
- Link
- Archive status
- Written by Fiifi
From the archive: Originally shared on 2013-06-10 through mrfiifiappiah. Language, links, and opinions reflect their original context.
The Grand irony of American Politics and its apparent fight for Freedom. The winner I see out of all of this is China- America can finally take a break from taking shots at them for doing the “same” thing so blatantly.
Admittedly my initial stance when I first heard about this (Verizon call records) was a defensive justification for the Obama administration- I am sure there is some extraordinary explanation to this big brother surveillance. This is probably a one time request for all Verizon customer phone records because they needed to track a terror suspect who unfortunately uses Verizon, and there wasn’t time to go through the proper channels for security reasons.
But after doing some research- reading the above article and watching Edward Snowden’s interview, it looks like the US government, the Obama administration, and specifically Obama deserves to take the heat for this one. Although it must be vehemently mentioned that operation PRISM begun in 2005 before the current administration, Obama in his first election bid ran on a campaign of transparency and making tear jerking speeches about how much he cares about rights- If he knew about this, he should have known that it was going to come up one way or the other, and should have found a way to tell it.Obviously the dynamics and reality of revealing the full extent of PRISM isn’t as simple as I and everyone in the media will like to make it seem. Yet still, its no excuse.
Obama met with the Chinese head of state in California earlier last week to address China’s “Cyber ethics” among other things, I hope this news made that discussion awkward for the president. The U.S. is constantly giving China shit about hacking into American corporate and government networks. But at least everyone knows China is doing it!
Not to turn this post about Obama or politics for that matter, Edward Snowden’s act is a gallant one. His interview provides an enlightening peek at his reasoning for whistleblowing. The message is eloquently clear in the interview about why it matters that he did it, and hence I need not paraphrase or add anything but concede and conclude that he, among other whistle blowers deserve a Noble Prize-anyone?