Love him or hate him, if Edward Snowden returns to the US, it will be in shackles and he will go to prison for most, if not all, of the rest of his life. The US government doesn't waive off prosecutions because the end justifies the means; it simply looks at the means and whether or not they were illegal. In this case, those means were <i>extremely</i> illegal.<p>What Snowden did helped us as a society. He exposed Obama as a liar, the NSA as a thief, and made it politically impossible for legislators to ignore or endorse any form of secret surveillance. But he will personally suffer for that. Whether in the figurative prison of Russian citizenship, or more likely in the literal underground Federal prison in Florence, CO, where security is so tight that inmates are shown their mail on television screens instead of being allowed to touch it, he is going to pay for what he did for the rest of his life. In my view, we should all thank him for his sacrifice.
Perhaps a Freudian slip, but ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden recently called Snowden a whistleblower [1].<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140727/07183528026/former-ciansa-boss-michael-hayden-admits-ed-snowden-was-whistleblower.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140727/07183528026/forme...</a>
The only thing he deserves around his neck is a noose. He's a self-righteous prig, a moral child (or possibly a moral cretin) who violated his oath, betrayed his country and leaves the world a far less safe place. His lack of maturity, patriotism and simple common sense have had grievous consequences, and are likely to continue to do so.<p>The system also failed: no-one like him should have ever been granted the access he received. That does not excuse his misbehaviour.<p>I doubt he'll ever get what he deserves; rather, he will be feted and glorified by similar immature, unpatriotic idiots. He'll probably never even recognise the magnitude of the evil he's committed.
Why? Because he is the best Russian double agent operation in the history of espionage ?
Because he skilled gov't secrets citing domestic spying where as the vast majority of what he revealed is actually international espionage? Which although some may / may not support is legal and any country with that sort of ability and know how would only WISH they could do it too.<p>Medal of Freedom? For the record I was pro-Snowden and for a very long time thought the same - NSA and TOR, etc unwarrented secret courts, etc. Some of them need change and are wrong I agree. But if Snowden was not a a double agent or for that matter a Moscow pawn, he would have had more finesse with the information he released.<p>People are naive, myself included - no one knows what it takes to keep people safe. Look at the world around you and see whats going on and don't take it for granted.