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Was Edward Snowden Justified Essay

1070 Words5 Pages

The date is May 20th, 2013. Edward Snowden flies to Hong Kong, China where he has orchestrated a secret meeting with reporters from The Guardian. The information Snowden had brought with him was going to be one of the first major bombshells for the UK Publication: the NSA had been using extensive surveillance on world leaders and American citizens. Snowden had carefully picked top secret documents to leak to the publication, attempting to reveal to the world the extensive nature of surveillance by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). Little did The Guardian know that this story would not only be a bombshell, but arguably the case of the year, and would blow the lid off what may be the scandal of the decade. As news of this caliber tends to, the disclosure ignited controversy over whether Snowden was justified in his whistleblowing. Edward Snowden was completely justified in the information he released; the actions of the government were unconstitutional and deserved to be exposed. Snowden started his path to being one of America’s most infamous whistleblowers as a security guard at the University of …show more content…

While Snowden was finding somewhere to run to, conspiracy, scandal, and accusations flew in all directions in the U.S. Some called Snowden a hero for revealing these unconstitutional programs, while others felt he was a traitor and an enemy of the United States for leaking secret documents. The “hero or traitor” and “was he justified?” debates weren’t the only ones heating up. Shouldn’t a government “for the people, by the people” (as Abraham Lincoln so famously stated in the Gettysburg Address) have been clear with its citizens from the start as opposed to only coming clean when circumstance forced them

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