What Snowden did was objectively good, and he did so at great personal cost, but you should be cautious about making any living person your hero. His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else, and it’s very possible he will disappoint you in the future. Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else. The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.

He did a good thing. Don’t know enough about the man to pass judgement.

And after all, the guy that killed Hitler (undoubtedly a good thing) was very much an asshole.

I still like the fact that he released so many documents that when the newspaper tried to open the file it broke Excel, so he had to come in and fix it.

I mean I have no idea what this guy’s like, outside of what he’s broadly known for, but I definately approve of what he did in regards of informing the greater public about the level of intrusion they are actively seeking to have into everybody’s life.

conservatives have a wierd obssesion of him being a"traitor" guess exposing conservative hypocrisy is traitorous.

It’s hard to say he’s a hero, but, what he did was undoubtedly heroic.

He could have been, but his actions and words since has made me feel he had ulterior motives from the start.

Bit of a nuanced take, a trimmed down copy-paste from another comment of mine prior. Tl;Dr: he’s a product of the system that left the system.

Snowden was an individual that worked in the intelligence community in the mid-2000s. In this era, the American populace was so afraid of terrorism they signed away freedoms for national security. In this post 9/11 world, patriotism was a given, almost nationalistically, if you were American. It’s fair to say that a highly nationalistic media and culture can influence the individual to embrace those mentalities more… even if it perverts your true best interest. Snowden likely viewed service to the NSA as patriotic, and in support of his fellow Americans. While he started off supporting it, he soon saw immorality, and decided to resist against them with what I see as an effective measure. I feel that for most whistleblowers, this logic applies. I wanna say “Good job, but still shame on you for taking the job to begin with,” yet this system we’re in can cause us to support things we otherwise wouldn’t like.

Looking to modern issues: The manipulation of individuals, mass surveillance, leveraging of government by powerful. Critisizim of these was always there, but where it was pointed at and pursued sure felt a lot different after Snowden.

I think about where we’d be without him, and I think about where we are.

Oddly enough, it’s the same place.

I approve of what he did, but I don’t approve of his ideals.

No, his behavior shall be average, not an exception. However we have to fight the repression that target him, like every other one that stand against repression

Guy gave up his life to show Americans (and the world) the truth, and we as a society just ignored him.

Yes

He told the truth about the US spying on it’s citizens. I got nothing respect for him.

His demand to return to the US and give himself in was if he got a public (non military) trial.

The government’s offer under Obama was that the only guarantee they would provide was that he wouldn’t be subject to torture.

Even if he had negligible effect on state level surveillance, the documents he shared provided some insanely valuable perspective into the capability and power of nation states in the cybersecurity space.

Anything the NSA is or was doing can also be applied to other major countries like China or Russia, and the capability + compute power has only grown in size since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

EDIT: Also in true American foreign interest memery, the top two most heavily surveilled states are Iran and Pakistan.