I always assume the argument is weak when it depends upon a personal insult. If one says Snowden is insufferable, then the personality of the journalist is also in play. Is Ruth an insufferable suck-up to authority? It kinda seems so.
For myself, I believe in the values of freedom and I am comfortable defending them.
It isn't that freedom is a pure thing. It doesn't mean the absence of restrictions. It includes the need for safety just as it requires privacy. The balance between government and the governed has always been struck around the notion of probable cause/ reasonable suspicion. Mass surveillance was always ruled beyond the pale. But freedom will tolerate targetting of suspicious actors.
Although it is arguable, I admit the possibility that the price of freedom may be a higher immediate cost in terrorism. Isolated, smaller-scale terrorists may not get picked up by targeted surveillance operatives. But in the long run, I believe the condition of a free country is more robust than that of a surveillance state.
When the issue was Republican torture, I was against it. When the issue is broad surveillance run by a Democratic president, I am against it. These things do damage to the USA.
It isn't about Snowden. It's about the violations of liberty and privacy carried out by the US over a dozen years. This has to stop.
I think what people find insufferable about Snowden is that they have no answer to the fact that his loyalty is to the constitution and he slings its values, like little pebbles, right at them. Hard to argue with someone who says his loyalty is to the people. And who has demonstrated it at great personal cost.
In this story, who is the patriot? Is it the person who values his oath to the constitution? Or the clique that introduced torture, mass surveillance, drone assassination and secret rendition to the world and tried to keep them all secret from the population they are meant to represent?
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