Edward Snowden Argumentative Essay

In the word of Edward Snowden, “I don’t see myself as a hero because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity” (Brainy Quotes). Many people and even universities have studied this case so much to where it has divided a lot of people including in the House of Senates. After reading this case several times I’ve developed my own decision that Edward Snowden is a hero in my eyes. My purpose in this paper is to inform you about facts the case showed and allow you to make your own decision rather Edward Snowden is a Whistleblower or a Traitor. To explain my position I will base my essay in three section. The first is basically Edward Snowden background information, the second is the steps he took to get the information and his purpose of releasing the documents, and finally I will give my reasons with help from others on why we support him.

Edward Snowden, a U.S.

citizen, was raised in Maryland, near the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters. Snowden dropped out of high school halfway through his 10th grade, then later took courses at a local community college. In May 2004, at age of 20, Snowden enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve to undergo Special Forces training. Snowden quoted “he wanted to fight in the Iraq war because he felt obligated as a human being to help free people from oppression.” Four months later, he broke both his legs in a training accident and was discharged. In January 2005, Snowden took a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland‘s Center for advance Study of Language, a Department of Defense-funded research center. (Exhibit

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In March 2007, Snowden traveled to Geneva, Switzerland where he was employed by the CIA to maintain computer network security for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Part of Snowden’s job was that he was given security clearance to access classified documents. In February 2009, Snowden left Geneva and moved to a military base in Japan to work for a private contractor to the NSA. In September 2010, Snowden traveled to India to provide technical expertise to the U.S. embassy in Delhi. During his week-long assignment, Snowden enrolled in a Certified Ethical Hacker certification program with Koenig Solutions, which described itself as an off-shore training company. In March 2013, Snowden took a job in Hawaii as an infrastructure analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor for the U.S. federal government.
Snowden held a top secret clearance, he gained clearance by him signing the federal government’s Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement as well as Booz Allen nondisclosure and confidentiality agreement. Snowden later dismissed the government nondisclosure agreement as a “civil contract” and acknowledged that the only reason he took the job was to gain access to classified communication intelligence from the NSA. Snowden stated that “his position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world to hack the NSA. Soon after joining Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden began coping top-secret documents. During the week of May 13, 2013, Snowden copied a last set of documents and notified his supervisor for a leave of absence for two weeks to receive treatment for epilepsy. Seven days later he boarded a plane for Hong Kong to meet with the reporters Glenn Greenwald, a Journalist who revealed that a top secret order issued by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) required Verizon to give the NSA metadata information on telephone calls both between the U.S. and other countries and within the U.S. and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who served on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
In the report Edward Snowden did not give out the NSA documents as an act of him being malicious. At one point in time Snowden considered making secret CIA documents public but decided against it because he thought with President Barack Obama in office a wave of reforms would occur. Shortly after assuming power, President Obama closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law. Snowden did violate laws by releasing government secrets to the public but in his eyes he felt that citizens should know what the government was doing. I support Snowden’s actions because the government does a lot of secretive things like hacking people phone lines as it says in the article. People deserve to have privacy and the government should only interfere if something or someone is suspicious. Privacy is giving to those who deserve it until proven guilty.
One of the writers of Edward Snowden delivered the paper to stated, “that the choice Snowden made was based on basic theories of civil disobedience: that those who control the law have become corrupt, that the law in this case is a tool of injustice, and he felt compelled to act in violation of it in order to expose these officials bad acts and enable debate and reform. Even now after this event has occurred the fact that Snowden exposed the government was the right things to do because now it to the point where in the world there are police officers killing people for no reason and aren’t being charged as heavily as a regular civilian.
An author by the name of Fred Kaplan wrote in response to a major article by New York Times Editorial Board arguing that Snowden is a whistleblower, not a leaker, and should therefore be granted clemency or even amnesty by the U.S. government. Until this day there has not been a good argument on how Snowden is a traitor the only big thing they can put on him is that he leaked government information and it has weakened the U.S. government’s ability to prevent terrorist attacks on civilians. After the 9/11 attack the government still has not figured out how terrorist bypass all surveillance and security in the airport. Anybody in Snowden’s position that felt he/she did not want to be spied on would have probably did the same thing he did. I applaud Snowden not only for exposing the government secret in spying on civilian phone calls but for not being afraid to identify himself. Snowden himself said “he didn’t reveal himself to get attention but to let the people know who to credit for learning what the government was doing undercover.”
A spokeswoman for the Government Accountability Project, a national whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, said that “Snowden met the legal test required to be consider a whistleblower. However, as a national security employee, Snowden was not protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (WPA), which applied to most federal workers. This Act regulations guaranteed the freedom of speech if evidence was shown. Once denied by the WPA he was subject to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), which allowed national security whistleblowers to release classified information to either the inspector general of the federal agency or a member of a congressional intelligence committee. The Act allowed whistleblowers to report a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law” through the same channels. Since Snowden went public his actions were a possible violation of the federal Espionage Act.