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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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:31AM
After the DOJ hack, which Snowden wasn't responsible for, the notion intelligence has been a complete joke. And if we are being completely honest, Clinton's actions with her mail server isn't that far removed as far as security goes, and no one is calling her a traitor (well no one in the DOJ at least).
And suppose Snowden's actions did compromise terrorist investigations, it doesn't detract that the government was acting illegally. Clean up your own house before you go assigning blame.
And for as much of a cluster-fuck the middle east is in now, I'm actually hopefully that curbed actions there might keep us from another world war, because fuck if anyone in intelligence has been keeping that monster at bay.