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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:11PM
Gravis, no one forces you (nor anyone else) to open the link to a story you consider to be a "troll article"; those are in the minority and as such are not burying other articles.
Personally, I do greatly appreciate the articles about bleeding edge or otherwise interesting science news, but like many SN readers, I usually don't have enough experience to write a worthwhile comment, nor in fact to enjoy most comments by those who do understand the subject matter unless said comment is particularly well-written.
Unfortunately, political matters do draw a lot of attention because such matters potentially affect EVERYONE, and the foundation of that effect is the threat of lethal force which is the means by which all governments I know of enforce their collective will on members of the hapless populace. Advances in science have a small chance of providing a benefit which may affect you a few years down the road, whereas changes in politics can have an impact within weeks or days - of the baton-to-face sort.
(Incidentally, this is why I think it is so important that the authority of my own country's government, the USA, be clearly and concisely defined. So much USian scientific work is forbidden under threat of death that politics has become a threat to the practice of science. Should the USian government be returned to its lawful state where its authority absent consent is limited to that of its source - a single human being's - then the potential for advances in the fields of power generation, medicine, chemistry, and more spikes up through the roof. I also find it interesting that the other person to come to mind who threatened the use of lethal force in an attempt to slow or stop scientific progress was Theodore Kaczynski [wikipedia.org], more commonly known as the Unabomber.)