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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.
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.
The data shows Snowden has more support than the US Congress.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm 64 and I like Snowden.
I don't know if he's a snob, an asshat, a jerk or a nice guy and I don't care.
What he did was a great service to the population and citizenry of the USA.
I love my country, America, but I fear my Government.
These frakking polls are bovine scat.
he gave all the secrets to several newspapers and THEY became the judges.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
The problem with Snowden is that he unilaterally made himself the judge of which secrets should be released and which should not.
You may dislike the current system, but it is system put in place by people we elect. If you have people arbitrarily deciding which parts of the system are invalid and which aren't then all you have is anarchy. I realize that many of you would like that. But the system is what prevents people that disagree with you from hunting you down and murdering you.
So you either work with the system or you take your chances outside the system.
No, no, and again, no. Ed Snowden released his information to certain specific news organization that he thought would be responsible in their reporting. That is, people who would expose what was happening but protect identities and not release information that would do more harm than good. So please get it straight before you get your back up about it.
You say the System is what keeps people who disagree with me from hunting me down. Maybe so, to a degree anyway. But what do I do when the person who wants to hunt me down works for the System? What happens when I join a protest, or speak out against whatever ill-advised foreign adventure our leaders decide to get into next? Hell, what happens when I end a romantic relationship with one of them? You know that protesters and activists have been spied on and interfered with by the System, and that it has been abused for personal purposes. If the System protects me, why is it interfering with me exercising my rights? Where do I go when I consider the System to be the enemy because it is treating me like one?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
I agree. I can believe that Snowden's revelations hurt National Security and anti-terrorism and ALSO believe that what he did was a great service to the country. Unless they specifically asked something like, "Do you support Snowden's actions?" then I don't think you get a good sense of what people think about him.
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JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
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.