[abugheratwork]

> What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign [human beings]?

Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights. If he leaked documents about operations against Americans, and then also about operations against foreigners, in my mind he did the same thing twice.

If there was another difference, like spilling the location or identity of a person likely to be at risk, please spell that out. I have yet to see an example.

[slg]

>Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights.

That is what I am talking about as a "perfectly acceptable political opinion", but it is not an opinion that is based off any laws. Almost no mainstream political figure would share that opinion and therefore if that is the basis of Snowden's arguments, it isn't a wonder why he was treated harshly by the mainstream political system. Foreign spying is an accepted aspect of modern life. I totally understand if you think that spying in unethical. But Snowden would have been received much more favorable if he simply focused on the domestic spying operations which are largely unpopular rather than also revealing the foreign operations which are mostly accepted as necessary by the general population.

[wannabcodr]

Just the fact that, at the time in 2013, a large amount of unknown data was stolen and shared with foreign powers by someone with such privileged access was certain to have catalyzed risk adjustments to global operations, including down to the level of specific human assets. Without a doubt, those in the military are informed that Snowden absolutely did real damage to operations. I’ve heard this in person from multiple military officers. Casualties aren’t going to be discussed.

Snowden’s leaks clearly benefitted adversaries of the NSA:

* domestic global powers such as goog and fb were able to lock down their customer data, which has the downside of shifting unchecked power to those entities

* foreign powers of the us now had confirmed intel on usa’s global intelligence gathering playbook and adjusted accordingly

Additionally, we can perhaps gain insight to any potential upsides or downsides of the proliferation of civil libertarianism that is directly attributable to the actions of Ed Snowden. I do believe personally that the first global superpower (whether the CIA and Google, China, etc) that obtains a way to break all current encryption (and has all of the pcaps) will have a huge upper hand in understanding social effects of this movement of the late 2010’s.

[monocasa]

> Without a doubt, those in the military are informed that Snowden absolutely did real damage to operations. I’ve heard this in person from multiple military officers. Casualties aren’t going to be discussed.

They said the same thing about Chelsea Manning, then in her trial the prosecution finally admitted that they couldn't actually point to any casualties.