Pardon Snowden
To pardon Snowden seems like a very popular opinion around here. Can anyone help me change my opinion on this matter?<p>The way I currently see it:<p>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.<p>- The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.<p>- Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security &#x2F; defense of the US.<p>- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.<p>- Snowden leaked &#x2F; whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.<p>- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.<p>- Snowden&#x27;s documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.<p>- Snowden&#x27;s innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to &quot;clam up&quot;, and place more mistrust on &quot;outsiders&quot;, such as high-school diploma Snowden.<p>- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.<p>If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing. As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR&#x2F;diplomacy damage on the US.<p>I have a lot of respect for whistleblowers, and also for Snowden. What he did is nothing short of heroic. But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia. What&#x27;s missing for me?