re: #33 Justanotherhuman

What bothers me so much about all of this is the deep distrust people harbor in this govt which allows them to believe this engineered “outrage” at something perfectly legal in a perfectly legal agency which has Congressional oversight. While I’m not naive enough to believe we can trust every single govt official, elected or otherwise, what we have is the single-most effective form of govt in the world—one which many want to emulate in some form, a representative govt. What else is there but pie-in-the-sky idealism which has been tried and not proved worthy?

Instead, what we have is the theft, by a 20-something immature, idealistic hacker, over a period of years, of sensitive top secret documents, affecting not just this country, but others, and which are no doubt being studied by China and Russia and which could be sold or traded to countries unfriendly to the US.

And people are celebrating this guy?

One of the most powerful juvenile urges is to rebel, to fight against “authority.” That’s the prism through which they see Snowden’s actions, the idea that he’s a rebel who’s fighting against the system, rather than a naive little prick whose actions are neither noble nor intelligent. He’s now effectively a prisoner of Russia for the rest of his life, cut off from family and friends by a government that has every reason to keep him isolated and alone. After all, who’s going to help him, the pimps who are making money off him?