Quite the opposite assessment of the Snowden case - the aftermath from 2013

Quite the opposite assessment of the Snowden case - the aftermath from 2013

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a contract employee of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), exposed a top-secret surveillance program, PRISM, among others. This was a shocking accusation that showed the U.S. government had direct access to the data of major tech companies such as Google and Facebook, collecting domestic and international communications. It exposed the reality of a surveillance state that had grown bloated during the post-Cold War "War on Terror" era, especially in the post-9/11 era of heightened security.

The government and intelligence community naturally reacted strongly, with CIA and NSA officials denouncing Snowden as a "fraud" and a "pawn manipulated by the Kremlin" for "threatening national security" and "giving terrorist organizations a learning opportunity. His defection to Moscow via Hong Kong also reinforced the composition of the ghosts of the Cold War, and he was treated as a traitor within the U.S. government.

Silicon Valley and liberal civil society, on the other hand, had a very different assessment. Many in the tech industry were outraged that the NSA had backdoors into their servers to spy on customer information, and felt themselves to be "victims of a disgraceful state activity. For this reason, Snowden was hailed as a "whistleblower" and "anti-establishment hero." Mark Pincus, founder of the gaming company Zynga, publicly stated that he should be "pardoned and greeted with a confetti parade," and many Silicon Valley cultural figures concurred [7†files_uploaded_in_conversation].

This divergence of assessments highlighted a serious fault line in American society at the time. Washington's post-Cold War emphasis on national security and Silicon Valley's advocacy of freedom and openness, and the backlash against the bloated "anti-terrorism surveillance regime" of the 2000s, were the defining factors in the distrustful relationship between technology companies and the government in the 2010s. The Snowden case was more than just a personal asylum drama; it became a symbol of the 21st century conflict between national security and individual liberty, between government authority and tech industry responsibility.

-The case rekindled the debate in the U.S. about whether the U.S. is a surveillance state or a free society, and at the same time, European countries and the international community criticized U.S. surveillance activities. As a result, the trend toward tighter privacy regulations and data protection legislation was encouraged.