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Edward Snowden Cons

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In the year 2013, an NSA employee named Edward Snowden leaked classified material from the NSA, in the United States. This led to a variety of reactions from the general public. In this essay, I hope to analyse the action taken by the subject, and discover if this move was a positive or negative one. Equally ground-breaking and controversial many have described Snowden’s disclosure of NSA files as a historic moment that significantly reshaped and reordered investigative journalism, news coverage and circulation, whilst heightening public mistrust of government secrets. He was able to leak many documents from the US Government including; a secret bill that only a handful of people were aware of, this bill allows the US government to view personal …show more content…

and Chomsky, N. 1988: preface), this means that they are using this system to review activities of a person through illegal acts of no consent but are justified through the power they hold, which benefits to almost create or manufacture consent for themselves. The justification from the US’ is that they are able to capture and spy on international and national criminals/gangs. Spectacle is a way of distracting audiences from reality and links with Debord with ideas from the society of spectacle, where consumption attains the social occupation of social life and he describes this as spectacle (Debord,G. 1967). This idea shows how. The violation of public trust and privacy runs to a controversial high that matches the degree and effect of Snowden’s move. Foucault presents a history of the changes in terms of criminal codes; he said that justice in the current times is biased due to representing social power. He says that modern society is bourgeois, with power dictated by middle class social agendas. This links to Snowden in terms of concluding whether his move can be justified as, currently a free man in Russia or a traitor in the …show more content…

First of all to analyse the power dynamics within the controversy it is important to ask who controls these terms? Therefore are both subjective and designed to affect the direction of the discourse. As well as these effects, every twist in the political discourse on Snowden also changes the media narrative, which suggests the wider influences behind the debate. This idea relates to the topic of social power, as an action by Snowden has allowed him to influence and enlighten knowledge/Ideologies upon the world. With Snowden he has opened a gate to reproduce the normalities of power dynamics, permitting ordinary people to learn secrets and overpower knowledge by their dominant majority. As Teun A. Van Dijk says, ‘measures of discourse access may be rather faithful indicators of the power of social groups and their members’ (Dijk, V, A, T. 2008: 67). This is almost a formula to break down and gain indication of power and social groups, for example with Snowden secrets lie with the US but are exposed through social

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Through this phenomenon, muckrakers and whistle-blowers have come to the forefront to provide the people with the information that is so often gated away. No other person in the world is more famous for this in recent memory than Edward Snowden. Snowden, former NSA associate, leaked thousands of documents pertaining to the surveillance of American citizens. This broke numerous laws and turned Snowden in a criminal. This transgression was deemed so horrible by the government that he had to flee the United States if he valued his freedom.

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