One in 3 Americans see NSA leaker Edward Snowden as ‘patriot’ than traitor
Roughly one in three Americans say the former security contractor who leaked details of top-secret US surveillance activity is a patriot and should not be prosecuted, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.
Some 23 per cent of those surveyed said former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a traitor while 31 per cent said he is a patriot. An additional 46 per cent said they did not know.
Snowden, 29, revealed last week that the NSA is monitoring a wide swath of telephone and internet activity as part of its counterterrorism efforts.
“I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” Snowden told the South China Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, in an interview published on Wednesday.
US authorities have said they are weighing possible criminal charges against Snowden, who was an employee of Virginia-based consultant Booz Allen Hamilton when he leaked documents indicating the NSA’s surveillance of Americans is much broader than had been disclosed publicly.
In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 35 per cent of those surveyed said Snowden should not face charges while 25 per cent said he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. An additional 40 per cent said they did not know.
Snowden told the he intends to stay in Hong Kong and fight any effort to extradite him to the United States to face legal action.
The online survey of 645 Americans was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday. It has a credibility interval of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points for each result.
Snowden’s revelations, first reported by Britain’s newspaper and the , have fuelled a national discussion over how the United States should balance its national security efforts with Americans’ right to privacy in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted since the leaks were revealed last Thursday have found Americans divided over the merits of the NSA surveillance programme.
Some 45 per cent of those surveyed say the programme is acceptable under some circumstances, while 37 per cent say it is completely unacceptable, the polling found. Only 6 per cent say they have no objections to the programme.
