Snowden, hero or traitor?

Wrong question. It should be "Government spying on us: right or wrong?" It doesn't matter what we think of him. It matters how we respond to our government becoming "Big Brother."

I see Snowden as a traitor and a cowardly wimp.

When the Patriot Act was first signed into law Americans weren't paying attention. The Patriot Act was a knee-jerk reaction to 911 and never was adequately debated. If Americans didn't have an inkling of where the Patriot Act could lead, then they were being naïve. I certainly saw it coming.

If you work for the Company. And you are trusted enough to have inside knowledge about what is being developed and will soon be used. It is understood you keep your mouth shut, and your computer in your sight. Or they will hunt you down and hurt you. Were ever you go and regardless that you lost your computer for a few million dollars. It is a unspoken law of the world not just the U.S.A. And there is no place to hide. Such goes with taking the job. You know that up front. You do not like it hand them your computer,the company phone, turn in your paper work and find a new line of work in a different field of work. Such is life when you put yourself in that position. Hero or traitor does not matter here. It is a personal moral issue with yourself and you can refuse the job. Or say I don't wish to know about this. So don't bring me in to hear about it.

("Snowden, hero or traitor?")

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In the final analysis when the smoke has cleared and the dust has settled, Snowden is going to be one hell of a HERO!

It is, after all, the job of every American to expose corruption in government no matter what the consequences are. It is simply unethical to do otherwise.

PRISM is getting ready to expose a great truth, one that the U.S.A would rather the world not know of. The United State Government is in possession of a exotic classified technology like none other before it, and they are using this technology to conduct illegal, unethical, and non-consensual human experiments on 1000s of Americans, and on 1000s of others around the world. In short, some of the effects of this classified technology rivals human experiments of the Nazis Holocaust. That is no exaggeration. And that is what this whole thing is all about.

Think about it: President Obama said that the NSA wasn't doing anything that other nations around the world wasn't doing. Snowden knew that. Do you think he would throw away his life to expose something that everyone already knew? Of course not. I think that Snowden discovered what the United States Government was really doing that's so absolute shocking, that the rest of the world had to be made aware of it. Believe me, when the world learns of the nature and magnitude of these illegtal human experiments and associated exotic technology, the United States is going to find itself in a very, very embarrassing spot.

Best regards

Neither, in my view. I hardly found anything he revealed to be shocking. Disappointing, but I think it merely confirmed what many (including myself) suspected. I do think that there ought to be a debate in this country (and all countries, really) about privacy rights in the era of rapidly advancing methods of electronic surveillance, and I think that a major reason that that debate has not really occurred is because technology is advancing at a dizzying rate.

How to summarize my ideology...Center-left with a libertarian streak, I suppose.

Regular American exposing the governments wrong doings.

Independent. No ideology really.

He is a dead man walking the NSA wants this guys head off his body how heroic

traitor. i support his assassination without trial. he has been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty.

i am an Ambidextrous Christian Democrat

Hero; not like he gave away secrets about our missile defense system or anything.

Haven't been following it.