Snowden a Hero, Hell No

Cable news is filled with those who are now proclaiming louder than ever before just how much of a hero Edward Snowden is and those who are sitting near them refuse to push for their definition of a hero.  These people and organizations do not have a clear idea of what a hero is nor do they know the true definition of courage, honor and dedication.  I say this because they are calling Snowden a hero and if there is a hero bone in his body, it has yet to be shown.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are using Snowden’s cowardly actions to drum up donations and financial support.  In their own little blurb titled “President Obama: Guarantee due process for Edward Snowden”, they demand the following; “Edward Snowden risked everything to expose the secret NSA spying program of our calls and emails. Now he's been formally charged with violating the Espionage Act—the same law used to charge Bradley Manning, who provided information to WikiLeaks.  As the Department of Justice moves in on Snowden, we need to raise our voices to ensure that Snowden is treated fairly and legally, and that the massive abuse of government power, that he risked his safety to expose, finally comes to an end.”

You have got to be kidding me right.  You steal documents from your job, detail them to the highest bidder and that makes you a hero and one” risking your safety”.  I guess the same can be said about someone who shoplifts except maybe they don’t work there.  Or how about someone who is paid to reveal company secrets to one’s competitor, would they also earn the title hero?

The Guardian Newspaper is another who seems to believe quite strongly that Mr. Snowden is a hero and according to Andrea Peterson, writing for the Washington Post Blog, her article titled “Edward Snowden is wrong: His mission has not been accomplished, she reports that “In a video interview with the Guardian released shortly after he stepped out of the shadows, he espoused many of the same hopes about the public having input on the secret machinations of intelligence agencies. But he also gave a much more lofty goal: substantive policy change.”  “The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests”.  And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy”, says Snowden.  Ms. Peterson’s take is “Public opinion over his disclosures has been divided and no significant policy changes to NSA surveillance have emerged. And the administration is standing by the status quo despite the lack of evidence that it has been effective at its stated goal of halting terrorist attacks.”

For Ms. Peterson, The Guardian and Mr. Greenwald who champions Mr. Snowden like no one else, I say this.  I grant you that the NSA needed to be reined in and more of what our government does should not be in private but in public but even I know that there are something’s that cannot and should not be shared with the public at large.  We claim to want to know everything and for some being nosey is a birthright but to be completely honest with ourselves, we only want to know the things that affect us individually and not collectively.  You think you want to see executions on television but when they were being aired, many of you turned the channel, closed your eyes, climbed under your mother’s skirt and cried foul. 

Now comes Barton Gellman, from The Washington Post in his article titled “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished.  He takes this Snowden thing a little bit further by saying “Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate. Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.  The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.  “You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.  “But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”

There is so much wrong with this that I truly do not know where to start so I will allow you to read and decide for yourself.  What is discovered in this article that no one else seemed to notice is what Mr. Gellman said next?  “By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever”.

So really, if Snowden did succeed then where was this firestorm in the 1970s?  Did others step forward and perform this awesome feat of heroic actions back then.  If you check closely you will find that some did but none of them were ever hoisted upon the shoulders of media and paraded around like some Greek God.  These people also did something else that Mr. Snowden didn’t, they stood and fought.  Snowden failed the hero test when he ran off to another country and hid behind them to “stand his ground”.

A hero is one who stands tall and refuses to retreat because he/she truly believes in what they are doing and that it is right.  A hero rushes into events to guard those who are unguarded and defend those who are undefended.  A hero is one who looks far beyond the benefits and welfare of him or her and looks only to the benefit of the whole.  None of this describes the actions of Mr. Edward Snowden and thus makes him no hero.  Just someone who believes he is doing right and now seeks to justify it by any means necessary.  Even if it means using others to do so.  When did our definition of a hero include the hero being selfish?