I personally do, he actually risked his life to release information about the government spying on people. And there are for sure more advanced ways now. Even your phone is listening.
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Anyone who cared already had a good idea about what the NSA did. Go and read The Cuckoo's Egg, a book published in 1989 goes into what the NSA does. it was public knowledge in 1989 that the NSA was monitoring all phone calls and all internet traffic back in the days of modems.
Nobody cared back then and the NSA continues to do what it does and nobody cares now. Nobody actually cares about privacy and constantly willingly share pretty much all information about themselves that's possible to be to be put onto a computer.
Snowden essentially just revealed that the NSA exists to people that were ignorant of it. But while doing so he revealed other state secrets to adversaries.
When the EU makes laws that require companies to disclose they're tracking you, people are angry at the EU because the cookie popups are annoying. It's very clear people would rather be tracked without knowledge of it than have even a popup on their screen. All of the information these companies collect is bought and sold regularly.
It's trivial for the NSA to just buy all of your purchase history and all of your activities online because all of that is tracked by marketing companies and no one gives a shit. Suddenly you're upset if the government knows what everyone else knows? It's like putting your personal information on a billboard and getting angry if someone that works for the government happens to drive by and see that billboard.
The only thing of significance that Snowden did was share specific state secrets to adversaries. He currently lives in Russia and says whatever Putin demands that he says. He's just a Putin stooge now.
People like the narrative of this guy who blew the lid on something nobody knew before, but anyone who cared to know already knew the NSA monitors communications, it's kinda their whole thing. According to the narrative, the evil governments are after because he revealed the existence of the NSA. The truth is the existence of the NSA wasn't a secret it's just the ignorant didn't know about it. The whole point of the NSA is to monitor communications, and it was widely known the degree to which they did this. The budget of the NSA is something you can see in public records.
Not long after the Snowden story went from the limelight, everyone went back to not caring about the NSA. Nobody actually cares about privacy, they just pretend to be upset about it for a short time before there's some other story to pretend to be upset about.
Yeah, we knew nsa spies on us. But Snowden didn’t just say that nsa spies on us, he released details. I don’t get your point at all, before most of this stuff was written off as conspiracies.
Yeah the details which helped foreign adversaries. That's the definition of treason.
If he said "The NSA is spying on everyone" there wouldn't be a story. The details that aided foreign adversaries made it a story about him being on the run from intelligence agencies and made it an interesting story. You want it to be a story about someone doing the right thing and blowing the whistle, but it didn't actually reveal anything we didn't already know in the broad sense, it only revealed secrets that aided foreign adversaries.
The term "foreign adversaries" is doing a lot of work.
We're supposed to automatically believe that any country who is at odds with US capital and foreign policy (not an actual enemy, so it's not treason to aid them) is an inherently in the wrong and evil by fiat.
And that's just not the case. And if fact as has been recently demonstrated, a country that was described as a great "ally" of America, who's illegal spying we've turned a blind eye to, has turned out to be anything but and are committing some of the worst crimes in recent history and is causing a demonstrable harm to this country.
Which is something that weakened the US, right ?
Thank you. Seems like the only sane take on this thread. We had years of Bush W. talking about TIA, cover stories on WIRED magazine on gov't data collection, etc. For leaking about domestic surveillance, yeah, good job, but we knew that, but still good job. For the other stuff, textbook treason.
This is why gatekepeeping hobbies isn't necessarily a bad thing. When outsiders become more numerous than the enthusiasts, the whole thing goes to shit.