14 DAY TRIAL // The Snowden case has already circled the world a few times and the reactions have varied on each piece of information that has been revealed about the NSA spying programs.
While news outlets informed the world about the fact that their phone calls, emails and general online activity was being monitored, US politicians took a stand and claimed that no one was getting it right and that what the NSA had been doing was for everyone’s best interest.
But the thing is they couldn’t even get their stories straight until the NSA gave everyone a copy of several talking points that should help make a unified front in dealing with this entire scandal.
But before then, they managed to trip in their own lies.
They first said that the NSA spying programs helped prevent at least one terrorist attack, while they later changed the story to include dozens of would-be attacks that had been taken down all over the world thanks to PRISM.
Then they tried to downplay the importance of PRISM by saying that it wasn’t as the media was presenting it, that the NSA in fact didn’t have access to that much information and they were most definitely not collecting data on random individuals.
To make matters worse, the president of the United States made a statement in which he tried to calm down the American citizens by saying that the programs didn’t even concern U.S. citizens or those on American soil.
Just the rest of the world, because, apparently that makes it alright.
Then they tried to appeal to our emotional side while also incriminating Edward Snowden and the media coverage of the subject by saying that terrorist cells now knew what the NSA was doing and were changing the way they communicate to avoid being traced.
And I’m just going to call them on that. I’m going on a limb here, but I’m going to assume that terrorists and adversaries of the United States already had an inkling about the fact that the Intelligence agencies were trying, if not succeeding, to tap into their communication systems.
I’m also going to assume, just going with basic logic, that these terrorists are in fact not using services provided by American companies out of principle. They’re not going to use Google, Yahoo and Facebook to converse with each other.
The things that have been revealed with the help of the documents Edward Snowden leaked are hopefully going to change the world.
Since I’ve been covering and looking closely at this issue over the past few weeks, I have been asked by friends and family why I support Edward Snowden.
My answer was always the same – he seems to be telling the truth.
Now, if the United States government denied even running such programs, I might have doubted Snowden was telling the truth and perhaps called him paranoid.
But the NSA and US politicians admitted to the programs and defended them with weak arguments.
Secondly, Snowden put his life on the line by revealing these documents. Sure, he’s called a whistleblower and he’s been accused of espionage, but he is viewed as a modern hero more than he is seen as a traitor.
Edward Snowden, a man who managed to make his way through the CIA and NSA without even having a high-school diploma, has only just turned 30.
And at this age, he has thrown his life away. As he himself stated, he will probably never see his family or his homeland again.
Even if he manages to get political asylum, he will never really be free again as long as the United States hunts him down.
If he ends up in the custody of the American authorities, he will probably end up in jail for the rest of his life despite the outrage of the people and the pleadings made by various international human rights organizations.
So ask yourself if at the age of thirty you’d sign off on your life just to be able to tell the world the truth before passing judgment on what Snowden has done and if he can be called a traitor.