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Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes
hcs_$reboot writes "In a lengthy interview from Rolling Stone, Bill Gates, was asked: 'Do you consider [Snowden] a hero or a traitor?' The Microsoft founder responded, 'I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero. ... You won't find much admiration from me'. What about government surveillance? 'The government has such ability to do these things. ... But the specific techniques they use become unavailable if they're discussed in detail. Rolling Stone retorts that privacy can be an issue: 'We want safety, but we also want privacy,' says the journalist. Bill Gates tells his main priority focuses on stopping the bad guys: 'Let's say you knew nothing was going on. How would you feel? I mean, seriously. I would be very worried. Technology arms the bad guys with orders of magnitude more [power]. Not just bad guys. Crazy guys.' Meanwhile, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressed the opposite opinion about Snowden at a tech conference in Germany. 'He is a hero to me, but he may be a traitor to other people and I understand the reasons for them to think that way. I believe that Snowden believed, like I do, that the U.S. has a right to freedom. '"
Good thing they executed Einstein... oh wait...
Nobody. Absolutely NOBODY.
The wealthy want to keep people under the control of the government, so they can increase their wealth and power over us.
Sorry, but for every good deed he accomplished he did at least two dirty deals and bribed a couple of politicians to get richer..
Even evil sociopaths have to answer to their wives.
Gates isn't exactly neutral on this matter. Companies as big as Microsoft don't happen without close friendships with the government, and those relationships get even closer when the company is let off easy in an anti-trust case. Even if he did support Snowden, he wouldn't be able to publicly state that.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
OK, then, how about Fermi? Emigrated in 1938 to escape fascism and helped the U.S. (the "enemy") develop the atomic bomb.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
History is written by the victors and all that.
The summary didn't include the full sentence by Gates. Just for completeness, he said: "I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero."
I wonder if he applies that line of thinking to other heroes.
Rosa Parks - broke the law ... ... ...
Mahatma Gandi - broke the law
Martin Luther King - broke the law
Paul Revere
John Hancock
Oscar Schindler
Underground Railroad...
French Resistance...
Wow, there is so much wrong in this post I don't even know where to begin.
Let's start with the "claimed and won whistle-blower status". That is completely false. First off, the whistleblower laws only apply to government employees. As a contractor, they did not protect him at all. Second, he is charged under the Espionage Act, which does not have any whistleblower or "public good" exception. People prosecuted under this law are forbidden from telling a jury that they were acting for the greater good, the only thing that the jury is allowed to hear is that the law was broken.
http://www.politifact.com/pund...
Second, as for "the worst thing that could happen to him", consider the prior example of Thomas Drake, who was a whistleblower years before Snowden, followed the letter of the law precisely, and as a result had his house raided by armed FBI agents. They also raided the houses of three other people who knew Drake, the FBI holding the families of these associates at gunpoint. The prosecution of Drake was in fact persecution, as Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court said explicitly when he called it "unconscionable".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
He has not "kept revealing stuff" in order to "keep his value". He gave his documents to a few trusted reporters before he fled, and since he left he has not released a single thing. The continuing revelations are from his original release to the reporters, he is not providing anything new at all. He says he has none of the documents anymore, and the NSA and CIA and FBI have not shown any evidence that he does have them. The intelligence agencies have instead used weasel-words to insinuate that he does without literally accusing him of it.
The collection efforts directed at our allies need to be revealed, because they are part of a larger pattern of flagrant disrespect and veiled acts of war the intelligence agencies are perpetuating universally across the globe. Do you even realize we are talking about universal surveillance of every man, woman, and child on Earth? The reality is far worse than any dystopian science fiction you can find. The NSA is worse than the Stasi, as said by a former Stasi official.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
As for our political and military allies also being economic competitors, how the hell do you justify spending more on our intelligence budget than the rest of the First World nations combined? In what possible way is that an economic advantage?
The worst part of all this is that I cannot ever know for sure if you are simply grossly misinformed, or you are a government shill paid to deliberately post false information in an organized propaganda attempt.
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
You, sir, terrify me almost as much as the totalitarian government intelligence agencies.
The Gates foundation is just the last piece of exploitation for him. It really should take minutes to gather enough data to show that Bill Gates should not be used as a morality touch stone. He started by stealing a professors work, caused immense harm to the computer era, and does not mind harming people to get ahead. He is a liar, a cheat, a thief, and is working to undermine society pretty much every where he goes including his home (yes, Common Core is that bad).
Asking Bill Gates if someone is a hero is akin to asking Bill Clinton about monogamy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.