Sometimes I just can't imagine what goes through people's heads. Edward Snowden came into the public eye with an apparently impeccable moral premise: That universal, perpetual, and warrantless surveillance of people by their own governments is a crime demanding immediate public awareness. The fact that he initially fled the US while making these revelations could be forgiven by the need to guarantee his own rights and ensure that his side of the story would be told. But ultimately, he needed to negotiate his return and come back: His country needed him to be here and put his own freedom on the line to fight for the principles he claimed to be asserting. Or, at very least, to continue demonstrating geopolitical neutrality to maintain the credibility of his moral positions.
Instead, Snowden retaliated against the US government's indictment of him by releasing US intel concerning China - a literal police state where the government not only monitors, but actively dictates the content of all media - and aligning himself with Russia, another literal police state where journalists are murdered and women rock singers end up sentenced to years in gulag for singing critically about religion. Instead of fighting for the people of this country or even freedom as a general principle, he now appears to just be doing whatever serves his personal interests regardless of whatever the ramifications may be. What is wrong with this guy? Was he ever really concerned with these issues, or was it all a game? Is he just a modern-day example of the deluded hypocrites who gave secrets to the totalitarian USSR because they were angry about rights violations in the US?
Such a waste. We can continue focusing clear-headedly on the issues his leaks have raised regardless of what he personally does going forward, but we should also acknowledge that Edward Snowden has given all the ammunition his enemies need to tarnish these issues by association with him. And what's worse is that he's not alone in whatever narcissistic thinking informed these decisions, so folks in some quarters who are angrier at this country than they are sincerely concerned with the issues that ostensibly motivate that anger will continue to venerate him. They'll continue to defend what has evolved from whistleblowing to a virtual defection into the arms of states that embody everything he claims to be fighting, and conservatives and groupthink media will conveniently focus on that rather than on what should be being discussed.
Congratulations, Edward Snowden. You've moved up quite a bit in the world since your days in an anonymous cubicle. I just hope you understand that once you're depending on Russia and China for support, you can't hold anything back out of some lingering pretense at principle - you have to tell them every last thing you know about this nation's intelligence system, because your new benefactors will always hold the threat of withdrawing their support over your head. Too bad you can't blow the whistle on them when you figure out they're not your friends. Such a waste.
2:10 AM PT: Disappointed at the abysmal ratio of substantive comments vs. Chewbacca Defenses, rank fallacies, flailing slanders at the everyone not named Edward Snowden, and other lame bullshit.
2:20 AM PT: Damn, man, just get it over with and get a figurine of Edward Snowden to put on your dashboard already. "Your own personal Snowden." Use his face for manger scenes. People would be taking it less personally if I wore an atheist t-shirt in Alabama.