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.
All the people upsetting the hive mind.
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.
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I think this, like most binary thinking commonly done on social media, would be a superficial analysis. Swipe left or right, those are your two choices., and not swiping at all equals swiping wrong. Age of Information my ass.
I should. There's just something about him. It's like he loves to hear himself talk. I just can't get past that.
It's like Julian Assange. I know there were serious accusations against Assange (that may have been fabricated) but even before those there was something that kept me from believing he was truly righteous.
Chelsea Manning though is a hero, imo.
I agree with you on Assange, he became too involved in publishing scoops and bringing in large headlines that he got his head too far up his own arse.
I always wondered about why he stayed in the embassy and wasn't smuggled out from it in a diplomatic car and flown to Ecuador.
It wouldn't be the first time someone was smuggled out from a country using an embassy.
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Kinda
Anonymous == State Actor .... not a hero. They like super man or batman for people who don't understand tech and geopolitics. I am not worried about hackers... I am worried about billionares now trillionares, corpos and the deep state. Couple harassed with live bugs and bloody pig mask settles eBay lawsuit
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Snowden is a symptom of a larger surveillance problem. the actions he took were neither good nor bad.
allying himself with Russia only helped distract the American public from his actual intentions and allowed The State to discredit him further.
his actions also allowed other organizations like Wikileaks to gain positive attention which ultimately allowed Trump and his corrupt administration a foothold into circumventing American democracy.
in short, he was an unexpected but useful pawn in the journey to destroy the American hegemony which has directly benefited organized fascism.
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I think he was… wrong-ish?
I think he didn’t see the forest through the trees.
He was scared of government abuse of surveillance, as he should be. He was scared of a North Korean style surveillance initially justified by fear of terrorists, basically.
But, IIRC, he didn’t fear corporate abuse enough.
He couldn’t imagine the consolidated attention trap the internet would turn into, but I think the signs were there. I guess he couldn’t imagine that all this would come out and people would choose to trade their privacy for instant convenience instead of fear of terrorists, the justification of the time..
Especially at the scale we do in corporate software today.
In other words, I think he should’ve been more worried about a post-truth corporate state than a censored, oldschool dictatorship, as the former seems to be what the US is barreling towards.
So maybe he was a hero. But, sadly, I think he grazed the mark on what to warn us about.
Sure. Pointless hero
Hmm... Interesting essay question. I think for the year it happened, yes-ish. Had it been today, it would have been like whatevs, because everyone is giving away their privacy in exchange for some functionally. And so, as I think back on it, it didn't really mattered. I think this could've been debated either way.
