More Americans see man who leaked NSA secrets as 'patriot' than traitor

So, in summary, the difference between a patriot and a traitor is just PR. Pun intended.

What really pisses me off is that Democrats seem to support Obama in anything he does; half of them think this kind of shit is perfectly fine, likely because their team is the one doing it. Really sorely disappointing.

traitor XOR patriot.<p>This is so narrow minded in my opinion. Snowden has done something good to the world, because US administration is secrectly messing with everybody around the globe.<p>Stop considering it happened only within US borders or as an internal matter. US and US media still are using a group (country) scale reduction to draw some bad opinion on Snowden, divide and gain some people to this spying dementia.<p>If you look on an international scale, the trivial question would be : hero or villain, and the answer is quite obvious.<p>AAaaaand somebody is knocking on my door...

I see him as more of a responsible citizen with a big brass pair. It&#x27;s the 50+% who apparently don&#x27;t mind what&#x27;s going on as long as it keeps them safe from terrorism that I consider traitors.

Sample size is 645 people - I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s large enough to mean anything.

Surprise: press has large effect on what people think was actually leaked. I&#x27;m sure 99% of those interviewed have no idea what he actually leaked entailed. I&#x27;d be more interested in a study that asked people if they knew what they were actually outraged about. A majority of the insinuations of the original &quot;leak&quot; have since been retracted and those actually following the details of the story have no belief that there is anything illegal going on.<p>Real opinion pieces that actually ask the hard questions like &quot;should the government know less than Google&quot; are all but ignored, in favor of 6 year old backdoor &quot;zero-days&quot;, frontpage&#x27;d on HN, for applications that have been out of favor for even longer, or politically motivated &#x27;stub&#x27; court cases that aren&#x27;t expected to go anywhere. It has all the indications of a coordinated media event, not a real political scandal. Nobody really cares what&#x27;s going on, we just care that there is popular support going forward. Popular support for what exactly? for general NSA outrage?

I can think of a word that rhymes with patriot for this guy.<p>That said it was great to hear the congress and the heads of the departments agreeing that the entire process deserves review. There was zero animosity, etc at the finance committee meeting today. Very cool to see when the government is working, a dialog is happening, etc.<p>But this guy is the ultimate sophomore, and if you ask me he was turned by China or just by some dreams of entering into some 31337 hax0r club illuminati.<p>All for leaking a powerpoint detailing what was codified in law over the past decade.