Whistleblower Edward Snowden Is Tech Person Of Year

[Purveyor]

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the American people, through their elected representatives in Washington, chose to exchange a significant amount of freedom for safety.

But until a lone information-technology contractor named Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents to the media this summer, we didn't know just how much we'd surrendered.

Now that we do, our nation can have a healthy debate — out in the open, as a democracy should debate — about how good a bargain we got in that exchange.

For facilitating that debate, at great risk to his own personal liberty, Snowden is this column's technology person of the year for 2013.

While a long line of so-called leaders of the tech industry were repeating the smug mantra that "there is no privacy" — all while secretly cooperating with the NSA's surveillance program — Snowden risked prosecution and jail to give Americans the chance to choose for themselves whether it still matters in the digital age.

Secrecy has long been a favorite tool of totalitarian regimes that want to stifle internal political debate. Secret courts were a staple of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, used to exile dissidents to Siberian gulags. They are still used today by China's communist government to silence its critics.

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http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/12/29/342604/edward-snowden-is-tech-person-of-year/

[randome]

1. He copied documents after tricking his coworkers into giving him their passwords.

The only lower form of tech would be if a photocopier was involved.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[cantbeserious]

2. Glenn Greenwald Video Keynote To 30c3 12/27/2013

[cantbeserious]

3. Hedges On the Security State

[WorseBeforeBetter]

4. They shouldn't be working at the NSA if they give up their passwords.

This is pretty basic stuff.

[Major Hogwash]

5. Snowden stole over 1.7 million secret documents from the United States.

Snowden is not coming back to the United States.
He supports Rand Paul for President, and he thinks that the rest of us should, too.
So does Greenwald.

Snowden is not a whistleblower.
He is a traitor.

[Ichingcarpenter]

7. Snowden is causing irreparable harm to the US government's ability

To destroy the constitution



And you ............. Are a fascist if he is a traitor.

[woo me with science]

6. Thank you, Edward Snowden.

[KoKo]

8. I liked this part, also:

Not since Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunt of the 1950s had fear become so palpable in the land of the free and the home of the brave. That was enough to cow most of the tech industry's largest companies into cooperating with the NSA.

Fortunately, some Americans are not so frightened of our enemies as Rumsfeld that they would trade liberty for safety.

Some believe that taxpayer-funded entities such as the NSA and the FISA court should have some measure of public oversight, to ensure they are helping to protect the U.S. Constitution, rather than undermining it.

Now that the scope of NSA spying has been exposed, let's have a debate about all of it. And let's thank Edward Snowden for moving that debate into the public arena.