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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: 2, Interesting) by guizzy on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM
I'll echo Scott Alexander here: you can't compare causes that work at a steady, reliable pace with causes where much of the effect is in outliers.
If terrorists had, right now, a nuke in New-York or London or any major western city, they would not hesitate to detonate it. It fits with their goals and their MO. Then you'd have 10 million deaths by terrorism in a single day. It's not because most years there's only a handful of Americans killed by terrorists that it should be treated as less important than, say, deaths by falling off furniture. Because there won't be a year where 10 million people will suddenly fall off their beds to their death, but there could very well be such a year with regards to terrorism. Just one such event per century (which is really not that much of a stretch) would spike "deaths by terrorism" to over 100 000 deaths/year.
Flu's the same thing as terrorism in that regards. Most years have a couple thousand deaths by flu. Then there's the Spanish Flu that killed between 50 and 100 million in a single year. You don't want to wait until this happens before you take flu seriously.