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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.
I think about where we'd be without him, and I think about where we are.
Oddly enough, it's the same place.
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.
The USA has stretched 'technically not torture' too far for that to be comforting.
Sure. Pointless hero
He told the truth about the US spying on it's citizens. I got nothing respect for him.
Guy gave up his life to show Americans (and the world) the truth, and we as a society just ignored him.
ignored him.
No we hunted him and he had to hide in Russia.
it’s not so much we ignored him as the government ran a huge smear campaign to discredit him
We got the GDPR
I'm starting to think the world isn't even worth saving, since this is how the world treats those that want to save it.
Need to just let Dalamud fall already and embrace the next umbral era.
Definitely.
Yes, at minimum a martyr.
Watching his disclosure real time while everyone around me ignored it was something else
Seeing how little we actually did, I often wonder if he regrets coming forward.
I don't think you remember https before. Snowden's revelations kicked off LetsEncrypt and the much broader deployment of https.
https://www.standwithsnowden.com/news/lets-encrypt-and-snowden.html
Yes, but...
He was a definite hero in releasing what he discovered. He blew the whistle on things that the government was doing that it had no right to do, and that people had a right to know about. He risked his life and freedom to do it, and is paying for that by having to live in exile in Russia.
The "but" is that at times he has speculated on things that he doesn't have any direct knowledge of.
For example, what he revealed in the PRISM leaks is that the US was tapping into submarine cables owned by companies like Google and getting the data that was going between various Google datacenters unencrypted.
That showed up in the PRISM leaks as this slide:
Snowden claimed that Google was cooperating with the NSA, when that slide shows what was really happening. The NSA learned how Google's architecture worked, found a vulnerability, and exploited it without Google's knowledge. Google reacted to the PRISM revelations by putting in a huge effort to encrypt data everywhere, in transit and at rest.
Until then they had thought that the data was safe. The places inside the Google network where the data was unencrypted were protected by significant physical security. They didn't think anybody could get in, at least not get in undetected. But, their threat model didn't include the US government treating them the way they'd treat an enemy country.
Google did "cooperate" with the US government, in that when it received a legal order for someone's data they complied with that legal order. They even set up systems to make that process seamless. Things like the FISA court were a bit of a joke, so it was really easy for the government to come up with a legal order that Google release the data. But, Google still did require that the government go through the motions of getting a court to sign off on the orders. I think that's why they were so surprised that the government didn't think that was enough and had tapped into their backbone traffic.
If you look at what actual full cooperation with the government looks like, look at the revelations of Mark Klein. He was also a heroic whistleblower. What he showed was that AT&T set aside a special room in one of their facilities where AT&T would copy all the Internet traffic hitting their network so that the NSA could sift through it as they wished. There was no need for a diagram of where AT&T added or removed encryption because AT&T was just handing it to them unencrypted.
So, yeah. He is a hero for what he did. But, he was irresponsible for mixing the things he knew for a fact with his own personal speculation on them, because some of his speculations were wrong.
Enough of his speculations were right to make it worthwhile. The other option was to let the NSA control the narrative on how the data was collected and used.
Better to have them vehemently deny his errors than have them deny it all and have to prove the true ones.
He is the biggest American hero this century, bar none.
100% I do. Him and nicholas are the biggest black spot on the obama administration and I hope the things that bring him the most shame. They are part of a small group of heroes of the millenia. Snowden being in russia because he brought to light what the governement was doing is one of the biggest indicators of our dystopia.
Anybody notice a stock "Now Playing" app has automatically downloaded on their Android without their knowledge at some point?
Because I definitely want my phone always listening just in case there's a song I don't know that can be identified by an app I'm not even aware of!
God I need a dumb phone.
Man, knowing nothing about what you're talking about and being confidently paranoid is an amazing way to actually miss the ways the corpos are fucking you.
It's too complicated to even begin to describe why what you're saying is embarrassingly wrong, and that's actually ok, not knowing how your phone works is not something against you, being confidently incorrect and not even wanting to learn is.
Thanks, man. Been having a shit week. Literally just noticed this standalone app today. Have actually had problems with paranoia before. Though it should go without saying to anyone that my second paragraph has an obvious /s attached it.
But again, thanks so much for telling me I'm embarrassing and I don't want to learn anything, even if I posted this on a literal no stupid questions page, with an open ended question, akin to "does anybody else...?"
Yeah, okay. I do want to learn.
I especially want to learn to make sure I never explain anything to anyone like you just did to me.
This could be a coincidence, but I was randomly eating watermelon talking about how good it was and looked up and then this. 
Now playing has been a thing since the pixel 3. I think it works by having an on device set of hashes for the starts of songs and listens for them snippets to then show it on your lock screen for what would be the duration of the song or until it hears another.
Isn't that purely on device?
It is. Unless you have you've attracted the attention of a state level spy agency, then it's a useful tool in the arsenal of weaknesses on your device.
I have zero regerts going to GrapheneOS. Still, I understand wanting to go back to a dumb phone. I miss the old internet.
It was a Pixel feature that they turned into a standalone app.
Yes
I think he is a very sad man. He thought americans cared, he thought if americans knew they were getting fucked over they would do something. He thought american democracy is worth fighting for.
He was wrong.