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Edward Snowden is asking the US president to pardon him based on the morality of his action.
Well, here is a completely opposite view from the other side, so to speak:
http://observer.com/2016/09/were-losing-the-war-against-terrorism/
"Since 9/11, NSA has been the backbone of the Western intelligence alliance against terrorism. Its signals intelligence is responsible for the strong majority of successful counterterrorism operations in the West. More than three-quarters of the time, NSA or one of its close partner Anglosphere spy partners like Britain's GCHQ, develops a lead on a terror cell which is passed to the FBI and others for action which crushes that cell before it kills. If NSA loses the ability to do this, innocent people in many countries will die.
Unfortunately, there's mounting evidence that NSA's edge over the terrorists is waning. It's impossible not to notice that jihadist emphasis on communications security and encryption, which is now gaining ground, began in 2013. That, of course, is when Edward Snowden, an NSA IT contractor, stole something like 1.7 million classified documents from his employer, shared them with outsiders, then defected to Moscow."
"However, our precious edge in the SpyWar is waning fast. We are no longer winning. We're about to hear a great deal of unwarranted praise of Ed Snowden thanks to the hagiographic movie about him by Oliver Stone that's to be released this week. Don't be fooled. Snowden is no hero. In truth, he and his journalist helpers have aided terrorists in important ways. Snowden and his co-conspirators have blood on their hands—and perhaps much more blood soon thanks to their aid to the genocidal maniacs of ISIS."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @11:28AM
Human physiology at work. For those things considered routine (car crash/disease) we tend to have no fear (or little fear) due to their being routine. But for things that are extremely rare, far too many people have a built in hardwired primal fear reflex.
There's probably an aspect of this that evolved over millennia. If you were so afraid of falling from a tree that you would refuse to climb it, you also likely eventually starved to death eventually due to lack of food (trees often contain edible fruits). But if you were instead irrationally afraid of a lion hiding in the tall grass that you avoided all the tall grass, you usually lived to tell the tale and pass along your genes (because the lion in the tall grass was an unlikely outcome [as compared to falling from that tree], so you'd have been almost as likely to survive anyway). Millions of years later, that same reflex is now being exploited by terrorists to make folks cower in fear over something that, for them personally, is likely to never be directly experienced in their lifetimes.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:23PM
In that case the obvious solution is to recruit the terrorists, rather than try to stop them.
Schedule a routine terrorist suicide bombing every Wednesday morning at 10am. Once it becomes routine, people will stop paying attention to it.
Facetious as this suggestion is, it would probably save lives overall.