Edward Snowden: Traitor Or Hero?

Whenever someone thinks about a traitor or hero, they imagine characters from movies or cartoons, but never someone in realistic life. How about Edward Snowden? Is he a traitor to the American country or is he a hero for exposing our government? After all, Snowden did leak classified material onto WikiLeak. Edward Snowden, a former US defense contractor for the CIA, exposed the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program of 1.4 million pages of classified documents around 2013. Snowden’s intentions may be seen as for doing a duty for his country in terms of showing the government violating the people’s privacy, but there is a certain limit that cannot be crossed, and Snowden did cross the line. After leaking the classified material

As Americans, the people uphold the founding father’s principles to their last breath: justice, civil liberty, conformity, individuality, difference, potential, and willingness as noted by Moser and Water. However, the two authors with their contemporary perspective argued as Americans these ideals come into clash and that is where failure precedes. It is up to the people to give the principles their shape, and not to be reminded of where Americans fall short. In terms of Snowden, he reminded the Americans the weaknesses in the US government. He reminded the people where they have fallen short. With his actions, he clashed two principles of justice and civil liberty by exposing what the government has been doing, both righteous and wronging of the people. They were surveillancing their own people, but the government had their reasons for gathering information on location information, contacts, and financial data to find out the US enemies weakness. The government may have step over the line of the people’s privacy, but Snowden is a traitor for solely defending privacy, rather than the national security as a whole. NSA do make mistakes, but they were not out of control as Snowden was when exposing the documents. His intentions of illegally downloading the information clashes the founding father’s

It was his right to expose the wrongdoings of the government, especially for the fact that Edward Snowden risk his life to do so. He wanted justice for all those who were being spied on, not for his own interest. He exposed the truth, even if it meant harm. Snowden’s actions required courage and that is what makes him a hero in our country. An article title “Snowden’s Courage,” by Jesselyn Radack under the source Nation, discusses the fact that “60 percent of young Americans support him, as well as thousands in the national security and intelligence agencies.” However, Snowden broke the trust the people had in their government. The public relationship between the two is forever broken, but it can be seen that the government is doing much better without Edward Snowden. The people that support Snowden may correlate his actions to the improvement in government, but the government just improved on their own, seeing that their actions did upset some people. Snowden did not do anything directly to improve the government, rather just expose their weakness to be fixed by the people, not him. The young americans that support him may just see one side of the story rather than the next. If the agencies supported him, he should still be working for them. That is not