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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: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday September 15 2016, @01:35PM
We are not losing the fight against international terrorists.
I know, that seems hard to believe, but we really aren't losing: ISIS' territory has been slowly but steadily shrinking in Iraq (they basically have Mosul and some of the southern suburbs still under their control, and are surrounded there by Iraqi and Kurdish forces), and is also starting to get pushed back in Syria as well (basically, everyone who isn't ISIS is now mostly going after ISIS). There have been fewer deaths by terrorist attack in Europe [datagraver.com] than in decades past, and only 108 Americans total have been killed by terrorists (counting the Christian terrorists like Dylan Roof and Wade Page) in the last decade - that's less than was killed in a single bombing attack in 1983 [wikipedia.org].
The politicians want us running around scared of terrorist boogiemen in every corner, and the media continues to believe in "if it bleeds it leads", but the fact is that we're winning, and you're much more likely to die from falling off a ladder than from a terrorist attack.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.