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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.