Snowden has left us all better informed - that's heroic to me
There's a fine line between being a hero and a traitor. Whether Edward Snowden is one or the other depends very much on your nationality and where you live around the globe.
There's a fine line between being a hero and a traitor. Whether Edward Snowden is one or the other depends very much on your nationality and where you live around the globe. The whistle-blower is back in the news thanks to the release of a new documentary, , by Laura Poitras, who was one of his two original journalistic conduits.
The trio - the other reporter was Glenn Greenwald - were in Hong Kong last year when Snowden handed over a massive trove of secret intelligence documents. To many Americans, Snowden did their country a valuable service by exposing undisclosed domestic surveillance by US agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Centre. But many also faulted him - with some branding him a traitor - for exposing surveillance of foreigners as well, mostly by the National Security Agency.
Non-Americans see it very differently. To them, Snowden is a hero precisely because his intelligence leaks showed they too are victims of US cyber-surveillance hacking. His revelations, for example, knocked the wind out of Barack Obama's high-profile pressure on Beijing to rein in its military cyber-espionage by showing US hacking efforts to be even more pervasive, sophisticated and indiscriminate.
Snowden's story is of inherent interest to people everywhere, but we in Hong Kong were especially mesmerised because much of the drama unfolded here. And we too have been victims of American cyber-spying. In the first interview he gave after he fled the US, he told this newspaper that US agencies had been hacking into the city's computer networks for years.
Among those targeted in Hong Kong was Chinese University, which houses the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, the network backbone for the city's internet traffic. "We hack network backbones - like huge internet routers - that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he told the at the time.
This exposed the lies and hypocrisy of US authorities, who had long claimed they did not target civilian infrastructure like their adversaries. Thanks to Snowden, we have all become better informed about state surveillance and power. That's pretty heroic to me.
