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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.
If you rule out everyone who thinks Snowden's a pretty cool guy, you still can't make it to "all Americans hate Snowden"?
Keep grasping for them straws, brownshirts.
That's because the elderly suffered much more stringent brainwashing as children that leads them to say that they "support those who fight for our freedom" while also promoting a police state worse than Orwells worst nightmare. The younger crowd grew up with much more access to information and see the police state for what it is and do not have the blind worship of government that the elderly do.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It's a nutjob neocon superchristian propaganda rag. More reputable news sources exist (yes, even Fox News is fine for stories like this).
Thanks.
Propaganda Works. Smear someone for long enough, loudly enough, consistently enough, and people will eventually listen and believe. We've seen it happen to Assange, to Snowden, to dozens of other whistleblowers, in politics, in law enforcement, in finance. We've seen it happen to fucking gamers. Over time, a negative media narrative will stick.
The problem, at its core, is the media. They are not a fourth estate. They are the new First Estate.
I am well beyond millennial status and I approve of what Snowden did so I am not sure I believe the survey results. While I do approve, I also wrestle with the fact that he broke the law and put Americans in jeopardy. That makes me wonder how the questions were asked. I mean I can certainly dislike someone but approve of what they did.
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.
I wonder if the study controlled for the fact that people tend to get more conservative as they age.
I bet if Snowden had done his thing in the 90's, the age distribution of approval would be similar, and I bet you'd get the same result in another 15 years, when those same millennials have kids and are facing their mortality.
Progressive ideals are risky, and it takes more courage to take risks as folks age and have more to lose.
Note this is purely an academic comment and is not meant to endorse or deny either snowden or the NSA.
Please, I hate that word. It's ok for Facebook and Google to data mine the shit out of the stuff their emails and instant messages, but when the govt does it everyone flips their shit. I'm not saying the govt is innocent, but rather, they should be boycotting these corporate entities with similar fervor.
Millenials are dumb. I do research on data mining (not for the govt).
So...don't trust anyone over 30?
Conventional wisdom says that the young and idealistic grow up and shed their naive ideals as they confront the real world. By that logic, as millennials age, they will recognize the need for the surveillance state to keep us safe from terrorism.
Real World? How about that terrorism isn't as big a threat as we are led to believe? We have a media that makes billions of dollars a month in scaring the shit out of us and by being bombarded by that shit, we begin to think that terrorism is right around the corner. Perception bias. I live in meth country, according to the media, I should be experiencing high crime and meth labs blowing up every day. We had one in the last five years and one before my state's legislature passed a law that made getting Sudafed harder to get than a gun - I'm in the South.
The other thing is, East Germany and the old communist states. My fellow old people forgot those abuses and are under the delusion that our government is beyond such things; when in fact, we are seeing an out of control security government bureaucracy. Are my fellow old people concerned? Nope. We are all worried about Clinton's email server, Benghazi, IS, gay marriage, and other social "issues" that some how are going to ruin our country and our freedoms.
I really don't think my fellow Americans know WTF Freedom means.
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!
The data shows Snowden has more support than the US Congress.
How did he destroy the economy? Did he write backdoors?
Did he intercept hardware and compromise it?
Did he wiretap American companies datacenters?
Oooh, I get it, he told you your government was doing this for your supposed safety.
Yeah fuck that guy, for telling me things.
We should shoot that messenger.
How is willingly losing your hot fiance, 200k/yr job, etc. "put[ting] themself first" ?
> 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.
Problem solved.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
I got a newsbreak for you, kid: grandpa doesn't ever die. The next generation just BECOMES grandpa. Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter. I can remember when my generation was against The Man too. And one day in the future the same millennials who are protesting in Ferguson and supporting Snowden now will be bitching about the leftie protestors and voting for Republicans.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm 45 and I say give him a Medal of Honor, the man is better for the US than all of Congress and the President combined.
Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter.
It's true. And in the meantime, issue by issue, slowly, things change. That's because even though they get more conservative as they age, they rode on the backs of their predecessors, being raised in a progressively more liberal society, giving each generation a slightly higher starting point than the one before it. In my parents' lifetime we've seen schools desegregated, interracial marriage legalized, gay marriage legalized, chemical weapons outlawed, pot decriminalized, etc etc etc.
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.
Agreed. NewsMax is laughably awful. My pre-teen can pick out dozens of fallacies and examples of bias in any given NewsMax article (I often give my kids critical thinking exercises, like taking a media story and locating logical fallacies and instances of bias).
Now we might not get to eat too.
I don't see the problem here. Your food is not worth my freedom.
According to John Oliver most people think Edward Snowden is Julian Assange. Oliver did "man-on-the-street" style interviews in New York, asking people who Snowden was. Most people, if they knew the name at all, thought he was "the guy who sold government secrets to Wikileaks."
The report doesn't mention this at all, so I'm not sure what to make of the statistics. If you asked people "Which color is brighter: green or brown" but they had never heard of brown before, you wouldn't be able to draw many meaningful conclusions from it. The report itself doesn't even mention what questions they asked people. There's really just no information here at all.
Yes, look at the young sh*** running for president in the Republican Party. How does Harvard put out so many of these A** Holes?
Not everyone of us old farts become more conservative. I don't mind my tax money going to help the poor, I do object it going for the defense corporate welfare state or the Fatherland Security Department.
Millennials know who Snowden is because they watch the Daily Show.
The real difference is that older people are more likely to be fearful of whatever boogey man du jour the government is pushing. When I was a little kid, my grandparents really were afraid of communists. When I was a teenager, I was told by older folks what horrible stuff marajuana was, and how it would definitely ruin your life. In 2002 I was having a discussion with an older co-worker, who was a really smart guy, and he told me that he was concerned and scared about Sadam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.
Today government officials tell us we are supposed to be afraid of terrorists, and that Snowden hurt their ability to fight these ubiquitous terrorists.
I do not know why, but as people age, they watch more TV, become more fearful about the state of the world, and buy the official propaganda. I'm am trying to avoid this.
Not sure if you're trolling or just, well, you know.
> Good it means the government it was doing it's job correctly.
On the contrary - he demonstrated that even though the government has all this resources at it's disposal, conducting unconstitutional, warrantless searches and interceptions of communications - they failed miserably at preventing recent attacks at USA (Boston marathon, anyone? Allowing a know terrorist, that even the Russians warned US about on US soil because they couldn't write his name down correctly) and further investigation brought out that NSA, FBI and other alphabet agencies were unable to provide even one single case where all this surveillance helped prevent an attack. Guess everyone was too busy spying on their girlfriend and digging up dirt on next political candidates.
> It's illegal for a neighbor. It's entirely legal for the government.
It's also illegal for the government, since no warrants were requested and even the process the government setup for itself was abused and disregarded. Snowden also exposed multitudes of abuses, where employees of said agencies used the power in their hands to pursue their personal agenda.
Its hard to bring a case if you don't have "standing." It is also hard to prove standing when the government claims state secrets to prevent you from getting the needed documentation. The government has taken an end run around the legal system this way ensuring they never have to answer in a court of law. And you try to use that as proof that its legal? GFY.
>> Snowden damaged our industry.
US government damaged your industry.
>> Sure the leak confirmed what many of us expected. It didn't change anything though. We still have surveillance. Now we might not get to eat too.
And who is to blame if you are too lazy to get off your sofa? If you don't get to eat - good, maybe that will motivate you to do something about all the surveillance and start earning the trust back that you squandered.
It's shocking exactly how easy it is to verify this fact and how little difference that has made to the narrative.
Clearly the people who continue to verbally attack McCarthy aren't attacking him for being incorrect - they're attacking him for being right.
Well, I was pretty sure that lying to Congress was illegal, but I guess I missed the part "unless you are too important to be put in prison, in which case it's totally legal", or that spying on your ex was illegal, using NSA resources.
Troll much?
Nixon was involved in a campaign of spying on political rivals and running a ring for breaking and entering, financed by campaign funds, for personal gain.
McCarthy's witch hunts are well documented. Just because there were spies in the State Dept doesn't justify his actions.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
a substance that distorts reality, that can make you a veggie and slowly destroys your ability to have fun without it is just a way to make a whole generation less intelligent than the one before
You just described alcohol.
You can't legislate it away though. That's not the job of the government and it wastes resources in a futile effort. Everyone clearly saw what kind of hell Prohibition caused so I fail to understand why they continue to repeat that mistake. You get rid of Pot the same way you get rid of cigarettes. Change the culture and make it uncool and ostracize those who partake. It's something society has to do not the government and no matter what you do there will always be a fringe that wont stop no matter what. This insanity of using the power of government to do things that government really can't do has to stop.
And thats the problem, who cares what other people do, we already have systems in place to deal with people being irresponsible in public. Substance abuse is also a problem, but we have services for people to seek help. It has nothing to with intelligence, there has always been things that degrade your ability to perceive the world around you, and rather than wasting time preventing people from doing something, inform and help them. It seems a lot more stressful to society to fight people with self-destructive behaviors than it is to help them pick up the pieces.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
Research done in the 60's showed that almost 100% of heroin addicts ate cornflakes for breakfast as children. You could probably repeat the research today with Kinder Eggs in place of cornflakes.
If you are unhappy and turn to pot, it probably won't solve the problem. So you try something harder. obviously, it aint gonna work, so you take more and harder stuff, and it ends badly. If you start young, your judgement was probably worse too.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Nixon lied to the world about others who would challenge his running for president. Using the same methods as Carly Fiorina; who got fired at HP for doing the same thing. The only thing these two people haven't done is write a diary on the topic.
I think it's just an oft-repeated cliche that everyone becomes more right wing as they get older. I think it's just that people become grumpy bastards as they get older, which gets confused with conservatism (on account of how conservatives are dickheads). :)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Agreed. Snowden's actions _may_ have been somewhat detrimental to our security, especially in the short term, but they did a lot to help shore up the values we _should_ be concerned about in the long run.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." That Ben Franklin quote gets thrown around quite a lot, but that's just because it's so demonstrably true. It's always possible that the people in charge right now are good and honorable, but if you keep giving up liberties then sooner or later someone is going to come along who wants to abuse the system and there will be nothing left to stop them.
And just for the record, it should be noted that he said "essential liberty". We all have to give up some liberty to live in functioning society. Unfortunately everyone has different opinions about which are the "essential" liberties and when you've crossed the line between prudence and paranoia.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Spot on - people have forgotten that the only person jailed over the torture scandal was the man who didn't do any torture and instead blew the whistle on the "cruel and unusual" (unconstitutional by 8th amendment) practice . That was a couple of years before Snowden's leak and he's still in jail.
Roughly two thirds of the people surveyed in the US have an opinion (or even recognize the name). You need to drill into the original survey to find that number.
Of the people who have an opinion, in the usual demographic breakouts only the 18 to 34 y/o group tends to have a positive opinion of him.
Apparently he valued his own notoriety far more highly than either of those. It's a common trait in narcissists.
You mean the guy who said he didn't want the story to be about him? The one who gave hi information to responsible parties, so that he could stay out of the picture? That guy?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Is it just me or does this seem ironic?
Generally it seems Millenials(the ones I know and work with) are more accepting of surveillance by the government and corporations.
Gen X and the Boomers have more of the 20th century leftover attitude that Americans have a right to privacy, and that the blood and treasure spent to keep the "World Safe for Democracy" by the "Greatest Generation", etc, The Constitution, etc, means we have those rights.
You would think Millenials would be more apathetic to the whole Snowden thing(which has been my experience talking to people about it). The attitude I've encountered is the usual, "I'm just on FB posting videos, etc, playing games, etc", "I'm not doing anything wrong", "why should I care?"
My experience is that Gen X and the Boomers are much more paranoid and concerned about rights, etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Can you show me anywhere where it was said that the NSA was recording phone calls, reading mail (even email) or any other kind of surveillance on US citizens (except the metadata program, which was already ended by the time of the revelation according to the gov).
Every program I have seen exposed by Snowden was foreign surveillance, which is kind of sort of what we ask the NSA to do...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?