I personally do, he actually risked his life to release information about the government spying on people. And there are for sure more advanced ways now. Even your phone is listening.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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A hero is a concept and since people are much more than concepts, the question is invalid.
It's a descriptor of a person or personality.
"Help! Help! I need a doctor."
"I'm sorry ma'am, but a doctor is more of a conceptual term. Nobody here can fulfill your request."
Okay but a doctor is a profession. You could have a heroic doctor but nobody's full time job is 'hero'. A hero is a term that's useful in a novel but some people wanna cosplay the role and that eventually becomes a cult.
Anyone who is regularly engaged in heroics would be a full-time hero, in the same way that anyone engaged in full time medical practice would be a doctor. In Snowden's case, he effectively quite his job at Booze-Allen and became an advocate for dismantling of the surveillance state effectively full-time. He stopped drawing a salary as an intelligence analyst and focused all his time on assembling, distributing, and propagandizing the nature of the PRISM program and the need to end it.
It's a term that is used to describe an individual engaged in a heroic effort on a sustained basis. To your point, you could easily describe a Doctors Without Borders volunteer or a volunteer firefighter as a hero-as-full-time-job. Depending on your ideology and the individual's circumstances, you could also describe a civil rights advocate or a military operative or a journalist as a hero.
It's a weak descriptor, because just calling someone a "hero" doesn't explain their heroic status. Whereas, calling someone a doctor pretty clearly illustrates how they're (presumably) spending their time. But "Hero Journalist" definitely conjures an image that is different than "Paparazzi Journalist".
According to that definition Snowden doesn't defecate, he goes for a heroic dump. I'm just saying the word gets abused and people are lots of things, including heroic and deplorable. Osama was a hero to many people. What Snowden did was pretty heroic in my opinion but the deep state probably have other ideas.
If he's shitting on the right people, I think this qualifies