Except For Millennials, Most Americans Dislike Snowden

HughPickens.com writes: Newsmax reports that according to KRC Research, about 64 percent of Americans familiar with Snowden hold a negative opinion of him. However 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a positive opinion of Snowden which contrasts sharply with older age cohorts. Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, U.S. News reported. Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent). A similar breakdown was seen with views on whether Snowden helped or hurt efforts to combat terrorism, though the numbers flip on whether his actions will lead to greater privacy protections. "The broad support for Edward Snowden among Millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming," says Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They are a generation of digital natives who don't want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls." Opinions of millennials are particularly significant in light of January 2015 findings by the U.S. Census Bureau that they are projected to surpass the baby-boom generation as the United States' largest living generation this year.

Comments

Those idiots couldn't invade Pittsburg!

[AndyCanfield]

I was at the U.S. Embassy in Laos monday morning. It was a horrible experience. A brand new embassy building staffed with paranoid idiots. When I got home to Thailand I described the experience at
http://www.andycanfield.com/Th...
I may be 66 years old, but Ed Snowden is my hero. He can sleep on my floor any time. He could sleep on my sofa if I had a sofa.

Re:Those idiots couldn't invade Pittsburg!

[AndyCanfield]

I was at U.C. Berkeley in 1968. We forced the US out of Vietnam, we brought down Richard Nixon. We can do it again; we can bring down the US NSA.

How? The same way we did it before - by teaching everyone we meet. What did we teach them in the 1960's? "The government MIGHT be lying to you." Once they learned that, they began thinking and checking, and they saw that very often the government WAS lying. When Richard Nixon denied the accusations, noboty believed him.

What do we need to teach people today? Perhaps it is "The government does not TRUST you." The constitution says that Barack Obama is the boss of the NSA, and that the AMERICAN PEOPLE are the boss of Obama. So how can an organization not trust the boss? Keith Alexander has admitted to Congress that the NSA has lied to the American people, who are his boss. You lie to the boss you get your ass kicked. This posted message is part of that education.

The question is not whether Ed Snowden can get a fair trial. The question is whether Keith Alexander can get a fair trial. So far he hasn't had a trial at all, depite his confession that his agency broke the law.

Re:Dubious

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be 50 in a couple of years and I think Snowden was a hero. Possibly he even qualifies as a super hero.

If you just look at the questions asked, they slanted the whole thing.

Of course Snowden hurt national security. But there are thins more important than national security. Like freedom.

  If we don't have Freedom, then we are better off without national security, because maybe some freedom fighers (aka terrorists) will liberate the people of the US from the government.

Re:Doublethink

[jythie]

I don't know about that. Millennials by and large seem to be better informed, well, maybe not 'better', but more likely to know about things since they tend to be a lot more integrated with online communities. They are also more likely than older generations to have some (if light) knowledge of the technologies involved since they have gone more of their life exposed to them.

Re:Disgusting.

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!

It seems almost as if the survey didn't include my age group, or many of my colleagues from my age group. Some of us remember the 1960's, the frauds and nonsense of political and federal abuse against Vietnam protesters, and the Nixon era abuses of federal power quite well: Distrust of "the man" was fashionable, but demonstrably justified. And we had older acquaintances who remembered the "House Committee on UnAmerican Activities" of John McCarthy, and who'd lived with state enforced segregation in schools, or with being in American concentration camps for the Nisei, or in European concentration camps for being Jewish, gay, Communist, crippled, or for struggling against the invading armies.

Names change, and techniques of abuse change. So must the demands for liberty, and freedom.

Re:Propaganda Works

[jythie]

Something I will be curious to see over the next few decades is how propaganda is affected by advertising saturation. Something that has been worrying marketers is that young consumers (ones more accustomed to multitasking and who grew up with heavy advertizing) filter out a larger amount of marketing than other groups. Even as their knowledge and skills improve (ah, the dark uses of all those psych majors), advertising is becoming more difficult and consumers more jaded and less uniform.

Since propaganda can be seen as a specialized form of marketing, I wonder how that type of manipulation is going to adjust. It used to be that one coherent message would affect most of the population the same way, but increasingly the same techniques and narratives will have differing effects on different populations. So what we tend to see more and more of is propaganda generating smaller more fanatical groups along with others forming backlash against tem.. it kinda works if you examine only the successful parts of the application, but is no longer all that useful for changing general public perception, just creating partisans.

What a sacrifice!

[Anonymous Coward]

My opinion about what Edward Snowden did are summed up by what his father said in August 2013 on ABC's "This Week". He said that his son “has sacrificed more than either the president of the United States or [U.S. Rep.] Peter King [who called Edward Snowden a 'traitor'] have ever in their political careers or their American lives. So how they choose to characterize him really doesn't carry that much weight with me." (Those who sided with the colonists in the American Revolution were also called traitors.)

This survey is bunk. I'm 37 years old.

Re:So let me get this straight

[Ravaldy]

I like what you wrote because I feel the same way. I think he provided a great service to the whole world.

I'd also be curious how many of the millennials would hire him to work in their business. I bet the % would be significantly lower and I wouldn't blame them.

I'm curious if the older generation would think more of Snowden if he faced the music after releasing the information? After all, heroes of the people have either suffered or even died for their cause to be recognized.

IQ, Standard deviations, and propaganda

[HBI]

46 here. I work in the military-industrial complex. Snowden did us all a signal service.

Think about the limitations of the general public in perceiving this. Do you really think that people who think Kim Kardashian is interesting and like the NFL are really going to give this any serious thought? They'll parrot the line the government throws out.

The interesting part of the poll is that even a tiny percentage think that Snowden did the right thing. Not enough to give me much hope, but enough to surprise me.