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Pros And Cons Of Edward Snowden

Decent Essays

In 2010, Snowden took a job as a private contractor at an NSA facility in Japan. He worked for Dell corporation which contracted with the agency. As we know, after 9/11, opportunities for contactors increased as the American security state turned many of its intelligence tasks to private corporations. This job gave Snowden a top-secret clearance and greater access to surveillance secrets than he previously had working for the CIA. Like his reaction in the CIA, Snowden seemed even more shocked by what he saw going on in the NSA: “I could watch drones in real times as they surveilled the people they might kill. You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. …show more content…

This Court officially charged him under the 1917 Espionage Act, with “theft of government property”, “unauthorized communication of national defense information”, and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.” So, he would face the possibility of 30 years in prison, and even the death penalty was still available under one section of this …show more content…

This would lead us to the the most important question that should be asked here: What differentiates Snowden from the previous whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning and many others, making him ‘the most wanted man’ by the US government? The exceptionality of Snowden which will be analyzed in the next chapter might show if it is a reason behind the reforms emerged later or

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