The Government's True Identity In V For Vendetta By Alan Moore

Now, the character “V”, from Alan Moore’s graphic novel “V for Vendetta”, had a very different way of exposing the government’s true identity. V was seeking out vengeance for what happened to him in his earlier years, specifically in the concentration camp he was held in, but he also wanted to show the people how the government really was. V is a mixture of both good and bad, it just depends how the reader decides to view him. In the beginning of the book he saves this young girl, by the name of Evey, from three men, Evey exclaims, “You rescued me! Like in story!” (13) which makes the reader consider that he can be a moral guy till he answers her question about who is he really is. He refers himself to the bogeyman/villain where he later says,

To start off, V goes off and kills individuals that work for the government and makes them fear him. Whereas Snowden just published as much information as possible in showing what the government, or NSA, were discretely practicing. V hid behind a mask throughout the whole tragedy whereas Edward Snowden revealed to the public he was the one who released the information. V took many actions that went against the law, such as, causing massive destruction and murdering people to emphasis his distrust among the government. However, Edward Snowden acted simple and less harmful by publishing all the files he had so everyone was able to see what was going on. There was an amount of response from the public when both of these individuals revealed the government. In V for Vendetta, the reaction from the individuals was admirable and the crowd looked up to V, meanwhile with Snowden there is still debate going on whether he played the hero or the antihero in this whole situation. Both of these individuals, ultimately, stood up and fought for freedom by exposing the abuse of surveillance from the governments and agencies to the

An individual is able to tell just by looking at the environment V was in and comparing it to the environment Snowden is in. In V for Vendetta the ones behind the surveillance are people themselves, whereas to this modern time with Snowden, the ones truly behind surveillance is technology itself. There is so much technology surrounded by citizens that it makes it easy for the government or anyone else to know what people are doing or where people are at. As quoted in “The Dangers of Surveillance”, “many of us already carry GPS tracking devices in our pockets, not by government command, but in the form of powerful multifunction smartphones” (Richards 1940). Cellphones play a huge role in advanced technology since they started out as big box phones and developed into small, thin touch screens that require data in order to function. According to Susan Landau, “the result is that cell phones disclose far more personal information than stationary ones did in 1986” (68) which make it far more easy for the NSA to observe. Its even more possible since the NSA has another program, PRISM that mainly focuses on Internet use, generally for Apple products since that’s what the majority of people use now a days. The dilemma between that though is according to an Apple spokesman they “never heard” of PRISM (Greenwald, MacAskill 2), so the NSA violated their privacy without the company’s consent. Also, according to Edward