[spitx]

CBS' Bob Schieffer on Snowden's junket:

  "For one thing, I don't remember Martin Luther King, Jr., 
  or Rosa Parks running off and hiding in China. The people 
  who ran the civil-rights movement were willing to break
  the law and suffer the consequences."

  "That's a little different than putting the nation's
  security at risk and running away."

  "What I see in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young
  man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us"

   "I don't know what he is beyond that. But he is no hero.
   If he has a point — which I'm not sure he does — he
   would help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face
   the consequences."

Source:

Schieffer to Snowden: Come home, face the consequences

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU5-r6mw6nQ

[msg]

Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system.

The whole point of the Snowden story is that the government is not trustworthy in this era. I would not trust the US government to give him justice any more than they did Aaron Swartz.

I think Snowden knew exactly what to expect if he "faced the music" and exactly how much attention he could keep on his story in exile.

[SqMafia]

"Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system."

You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?

[msg]

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/an...

Do any of you believe that there would have been a new Letter from Birmingham Jail if Snowden were imprisoned? Keep in mind the US authorities are calling this civil rights whistleblowing "treason". Aiding the terrorists and enemy combatant status cannot be far behind.

Like it or not, the rule of law has been badly damaged by the endless emergency.

These days you do your nonviolent resistance from behind the safety of a diplomatic minefield.

[krapp]

What Snowden did is, arguably, treason. Whatever you believe about the righteousness of his cause, or the evil of the programs he exposed, or the corruption of the government pursuing him, that he's being pursued is in fact a case of the system working as intended.

[alexqgb]

"What Snowden did is, arguably, treason."

Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.

[krapp]

Fair enough, I'll concede the point.

But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.

[akiselev]

I believe you have that backwards. The first statement is not arguable while the second one is, because of the nature of the first.

[rst]

King lived in a world where extra-judicial killings were frequent in the South, and the perpetrators (many with connections to local law enforcement) had effective impunity.

As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...

Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.

[rayiner]

Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.

[pg]

You don't need to resort to insults.

[tptacek]

HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks.

Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?

[jessaustin]

Perhaps reality has been especially frustrating?

Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.

[anigbrowl]

Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.

[rayiner]

Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.

[clicks]

    But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting 
    segregation during the height of communist paranoia and 
    racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer 
    shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 
    2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment 
    of society.

I get what you're trying to say... but I'm not sure if the latter point of that statement is so spot on. Manning was a wealthy white kid with the support of a rich and influential segment of society... as was Aaron Swartz, and yet they were both met with the heavy side of law.

[rayiner]

Manning was a soldier and faced the military justice system, which is necessarily harsh. With Schwartz, we'll never know what kind of shake he would have gotten--a judge never even got to hear his plea.

[jacquesm]

Saying that Snowden will receive a fair shake today is also pretty ridiculous.

[anigbrowl]

I don't think so. right now Major Nidal Hasan (the army psychiatrist who, by his own admission, perpetrated a small massacre at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009) is having a trial right now and acting as his own defense counsel. Predictably, he's making a hash of it and is likely to receive the death penalty because his only offered defense, which has been rejected as a matter of law, is that he was acting to protect the lives of Taliban leaders; but he's most certainly getting a fair trial - a fact which is irritating a great many people on the right.

[jessaustin]

I'm pretty sure TPTB exactly predicted the events of Hassan's trial. It has gone forward in this manner because this is the manner they desire. It's not like Hassan was held for months in solitary without the luxury of clothing.

[alexqgb]

The point isn't that the government has suddenly gone bad, but that the specific nature of the badness has changed very substantially and fairly recently. Snowden's choices may be unprecedented, but so is the situation that the rest of us are facing. His greatest fear (which he was very explicit about) is that this new and very unsettling state of affairs would go unrecognized, even after he made his revelations.

[agwa]

It was scary back then for sure. MLK and his supporters suffered beatings, faced extrajudicial lynchings, etc. I'm not disputing any of that. Yet, we don't have to speculate whether MLK could count on a fair shake from the justice system, because history tells us. MLK was arrested 30 times[1], yet he spent relatively little time incarcerated. The longest sentence he ever received was 4 months (compare that to Aaron Swartz' 6 months plea offer), but he served less than that. His famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was written when he was in jail for only 11 days[2]. As screwed up as things were then, the justice system was not so draconian that it prevented him from leading an effective campaign of civil disobedience.

I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that Edward Snowden, if arrested in the US, would be denied bail. He would be facing decades in prison. It's quite likely he'd be held in solitary confinement and he could even be subjected to "Special Administrative Measures" (a recent invention) that would severely restrict his freedom to communicate with the outside world[3]. There would be no Letter from a Federal Detention Center from Edward Snowden. These draconian sentences and measures make it completely impossible to conduct a meaningful campaign of civil disobedience, as they can be wielded to completely neutralize a movement's leaders and serve as a warning to anyone else who is thinking of doing the same thing.

What's truly ahistoric is comparing Snowden to MLK to suggest he needs to come back to the US and face the consequences. Snowden may not be facing beatings and lynch mobs, but he would be facing a justice system that would treat him far more harshly than it ever treated MLK. We've thankfully lost many of the great evils of the past, but there are new evils. Civil disobedience is even more difficult today, and what's especially insidious is that instead of it being discouraged by lynch mobs and corrupt southern sheriffs, it's discouraged by the justice system itself.

(We should be thinking about the consequences Snowden would face because the essential civil disobedience of the future may very well be about information, but if you'd rather look at "conventional" protesters more akin to MLK, consider Al Sharpton being jailed for 90 days in 2001 for trespassing during a protest against a naval base in San Juan[4], or the case of the anti-nuke protesters that was on HN a few days ago[5]. Not quite as draconian as the situation Snowden could be facing, but the sentences are still unfair, longer than what MLK faced, and make carrying out effective civil disobedience extremely difficult.)

[1] http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs

[2] http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs216.html

[3] They're mostly used for "dangerous" prisoners, like suspected or convicted terrorists, but they're also used for those accused or convicted of espionage charges: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag-564.html

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/nyregion/sharpton-and-3-fr...

[5] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

[dylangs1030]

Hey rayiner, if it helps at all, I frequently follow your comments on Hacker News, and I've been able to grasp all your (very cogent) examples of how the government was worse in the 20th century. So it's not falling on deaf ears.

Just wanted to give some encouragement since you seem really discouraged by HN this week. It's been straining on the whole community, I think.

[apu]

Strong agree (for both rayiner and tptacek). It's amazing how much abuse has been heaped on them for simply putting things into perspective, for questioning stories, for thinking carefully about what's actually being stated and claimed by various parties.

[krapp]

He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system.

His belief that justice would someday inevitably prevail belied the injustice of his system. To the degree that any of what you suggest was true in the day, it wasn't true at all for blacks, less so for those who didn't 'keep their place'.

In this modern case, Edward Snowden is the beneficiary of far, far more privilege and opportunity for fairness from his own government than Martin Luther King could ever have hoped for. Just imagine what the discourse would be if Edward Snowden turned out to be Arabic, or Muslim, or went by a Muslim sounding name. If he fled to the wrong country they might already be picking smoking chunks of him off a cafe wall. There would be no debate in the media as to whether he was a 'hero' or 'traitor'.

[rdouble]

Right, MLK lived in a world where innocent men got strung up in trees.

[anigbrowl]

You need to read more history. Without commenting on Snowden, I think the US is a substantially freer nation then it was in the time of MLK.

[akiselev]

I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

[anigbrowl]

Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort.

As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.

[akiselev]

Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia.

I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free.

Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them.

The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.

[lazyjones]

> I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

It's not something that needs a lot of thought if you consider that the current president allegedly personally authorises deadly drone strikes even on american citizens (on "Terror Tuesdays"), while Nixon had to resign over Watergate.

[akiselev]

I don't think American should get any preference here. Nothing gives the US to force its might onto other countries, but while we're at it regardless of my non-voting voice, drone strikes are better than the carpet bombings of civilians that Nixon/Kissinger ordered in Laos and Cambodia [1] during the Vietnam War, not to mention the other things American troops did to flush out guerrilla fighters (killing entire villages). The violence is at least starting to have less unintended casualties (I don't think the drone program has many casualties that were not known before the order). In the big picture, I'm more worried about how to control the state in a world whose infrastructure enables mass surveillance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu

[david_shaw]

> "The people who ran the civil-rights movement were willing to break the law and suffer the consequences."

That's correct, and I agree that participating in civil disobedience, by nature, requires being willing to "do the time" as part of making a point.

Whistleblowers, however, are a different story. I don't believe that Snowden was trying to be a martyr for Americans' right to privacy; I think he saw something that he wanted to be revealed (or that he thought needed to be, if you're arguing his side of the story) and leaked it.

[spitx]

What about Bradley Manning?

That's as pristinely analogous a case as it gets to Snowden's, with diametrically opposed approaches the actors took to pursue their causes.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bradley_Mannin...

[jlgreco]

Why should we want him to end up like Manning? Why would anybody wish that upon another human? It is a barbaric thing to suggest.

[spitx]

I do not wish (or expect) for Snowden to be sentenced with capital punishment if he were to turn himself in.

However any attorney or advocacy organization will find it extremely arduous to prove that he did this in good faith.

Fleeing only makes it worse.

It is universally considered a symptom of insincerity.

An insincerity of mission and an insincerity of motive.

It will be an entirely unconvincing case even if it were made in the court of public opinion much less closed-door hearings.

Had he even made the slightest of effort to reach out (to whatever institution, individual or group that he trusted, based in the United States) he would have left an indelible impression on privacy advocates, news organizations and the larger public, even if his criminal fate eventually remained unmitigated, by that act of outreach.

[toyg]

This is a common attack on activists: "if you're really interested in your fellow man, you must act like a saint hermit. Anything less than that is unacceptable and means you're wrong on <position you support>"

How is the problem (that the NSA can record everything we do online) related to a young man's attempts to save his skin?

Would the NSA stop spying on us if it turned out that Snowden was a buddhist monk? Would the NSA stop spying on us if he'd let himself be crucified on a hill near Washington, dying for our sins?

Turning the attention on his means is another way to deflect it from the main problem: that NSA and friends run wild on all the routers in the world with no respect for anyone's privacy or human rights. This is the real issue, regardless of whether Snowden is a saint, a prostitute, a Dutch double-agent or an alien with a penchant for bicycles.

[Kylekramer]

It isn't fair that activists are held to higher standard, but it is true. If you want to change the world, the world expects more of you. This isn't new. Occupy Wall Street may have had a point, but they allowed themselves to be marginalized due to more superficial aspects of the movement.

If Snowden had been "crucified on a hill near Washington" (or even just stayed anonymous), it wouldn't have ended the NSA's spying but it would have definitely added force to his message. Focusing on his means may be a deflection, but he is somewhat responsible for allowing the deflection being as compelling as it is.

[e3pi]

The cause for whistle blowing is totally independent of respect or disrespect of a state's corrupt or otherwise judicial system. If you're an international game changer, what we're talking about here, ES initiated a cause far transcending something as trivial as what the political poseurs back home think of him.

[jlgreco]

The possibility of being executed is merely one facet of the issue here...

[pilsetnieks]

Manning was a soldier subject to the US Uniform code of military justice, essentially a completely different legal system of its own.

[toyg]

Manning didn't step forward -- he was trapped after confiding in the wrong person. He had no choice whatsoever, he couldn't flee.

[unreal37]

I think Snowden did the best he could do under the circumstances. Expose the truth, run to a safe place, and then identify himself publicly. He's not running, he just prefers freedom to a jail cell. Who doesn't? MLK and Rosa Parks weren't facing 100 years in jail or the death penalty, were they?

[frozenport]

Don't forget that MLK was shot.

[wavefunction]

And probably not even by the guy that went to prison for it.

[pondababa]

Eh? What evidence is there for this, or is it like the JFK conspiracy theories?

[tod222]

In 1999, the King family conducted a civil case to consider the existence of an assassination conspiracy. The suit (for wrongful death) mentioned only Loyd Jowers by name, but also alleged government involvement.

The jury–six blacks and six whites—found that King had been the victim of assassination by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police as well as federal agencies. [1]

The judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that one is also ‘Yes.’” [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_...

[2] http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/MLKconExp.ht...

I submitted reference 2 as a HN story. For further discussion of the MLK conspiracy go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891883

[wavefunction]

James Earl Ray initially entered a guilty plea but later recanted. There are a lot of sources out there but never has anything been proven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray

Head down to the "denial of confession" section. Whether or not there was a conspiracy, I just wanted to bring up that it was still questionable about who actually shot Dr. King.

[prollyignored]

The reason why propaganda works, in my opinion is, you send a "simple" message a 1000 times.

Here the message is "young narcissistic man, who ran away"

"But bob, you are only arguing the means, not the end. Do you think, the idea of a surveillance-free America should be stiffled ?"

That question, will never be asked with equal flair, in a one way propaganda.

[foobarbazqux]

Yeah, the greatest accomplishments in history are often linked to narcissistic personalities, generally because the person needs to prove something to the world to make up for their secretly poor self-esteem.

[prollyignored]

Please don't think that I am trying to correct you. But narcissism has nothing to do with our Snowy. It's inception, by brute force.

What Bob is doing is, he is compressing the issue to a trifle.

It's the reporter equivalent of calling "LOL OP, you are such a short sighted faggot" and receiving precious HN karma for it.

When you can't win a debate, you win by stinking it up and making others leave.

That's how trolls killed love4eva-forum.

Every sell-out reporter is doing it, for quite some time actually.

Edit: Does anyone remember the sheer Debauchery of the press, during the Occupy movement ?

[foobarbazqux]

All I meant was it seems strange in the first place to use narcissism as an argument to attack somebody's work.

[jivatmanx]

MLK was protected by his fame. Rosa Park's act was entirely symbolic. Ellsberg was protected by the fact that he had given the information to a number of extremely influential Senators; something I'm sure Snowden would have loved to have done, if he was lucky enough to have that kind of access, and if there were still such thing as a senator who is honest and cares about the constitution.

(Or if "journalists" still believed their job was to serve as a check on, rather than an apologist for, the powerful)

[genwin]

Except that MLK wasn't protected by his fame. It's not just the gov't that is the risk.

[wavefunction]

There are questions surrounding who actually shot him. The man who went to prison for it may have been set up, as he denied personally shooting Dr. King.

MLK was planning a huge "live in" on the National Mall to pursue greater income equality and there were plenty of interested parties that would have wanted to prevent that.

[OstiaAntica]

Actually the shooter initially pled guilty. Dept. of Justice looked at these "questions" and concluded they are junk.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/mlk/part2.php#over

[wavefunction]

I bring it up only to mention that it is perhaps not so cut and dry who shot MLK...

[jessaustin]

...he had given the information to a number of extremely influential Senators...

I guess the NSA learned from that episode; apparently they preemptively told every member of Congress about all the awful things they've been doing recently. Of course the secret setting in which they admitted these transgressions was designed to put the legislators at a disadvantage. Multiple Representatives have denied ever understanding what the briefings were about.

[adaml_623]

"Snowden's Junket"? Interesting choice of words there. Does that classify as a slight or a smear?

"he would help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face the consequences" - I think that quote suggests who's smarter out of Schieffer and Snowden.

[Joeri]

Snowden knows exactly what the consequences would be, because he's not the first whistleblower. Bradley Manning is still potentially facing the death penalty, and at the very least he will never see the outside of a jail again. And still plenty of people found enough reason to label him a coward. It is way too easy to be in a comfy chair and say that other people should throw their life away to stand by their principles.

IMHO, Snowden should just ask for political asylum if that is what he went to hong kong for. Given the circumstances, he would probably get it.

[mpyne]

Manning is not facing the death penalty, is not a "whistleblower" by any reasonable stretch of the term (except perhaps by lucky accident), and his actions were different from Snowden's, at Snowden's own admission.

[jacquesm]

Manning fits the definition of a whistleblower just fine, he brought a bunch of injustices to public attention.

As for not facing the death penalty, he looks like he's halfway at deaths door already, they're just taking their time about it. The world is watching the way Manning is treated and drawing its own conclusions from that.

[mpyne]

And the U.S. undoubtedly killed a bunch of criminals by dropping the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, but even the most die-hard supporters of the bomb don't try to make that a positive point of the whole affair.

Instead that tends to be evaluated as a whole and not just with a narrow lens that happens to mesh with whatever you were looking to find.

[jfoutz]

It's a tough spot. Now days, you need at least 1.5 million to defend yourself against a federal prosecution, after the feds have seized your assets. Very few people can do that. Without the cash, it would turn into "guy did some stuff, then went to jail".

[wilecoyote]

This is easy to forget in the abstract, but never in actual practice (Aaron Schwartz for sure, but probably a vast majority who've encountered the US court system in any non-trivial way).

It is, in my mind, akin to spending / political contributions in politics. Money has an essential role to play but should not be allowed to corrupt the process.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Three branches of government. We hold these truths ...

[jrockway]

Yes, the mainstream media is full of morons. I'm not sure how this is relevant to this article, though, so I've downvoted your comment.

[onli]

Useful to know how the enemy is arguing. Sure, the consequences are torture, imprisonment and death. But who wouldn't take those consequences to be a real hero?

[jlgreco]

Indeed, the demand from some that dissidents should all throw themselves upon a pyre is peculiar to say the least. I feel safe in asserting that anyone who demands it is either foolish or has ulterior motives for demanding it.

I hope we are not forgetting that civil disobedience is not the only legitimate form of resistance. Particularly, when the prerequisites for successful civil disobedience are not precisely met, attempting it is not being noble but rather just being foolish. There is nothing admirable about taking yourself out of the fight for no reason other than to satisfy those who demand strict adherence to the principles of civil disobedience.

[untog]

Using phrases like 'the enemy' doesn't really help raise the level of debate.

[onli]

I didn't mean spitx - the comment didn't make clear that this was his position. I doubt Bob Schieffer will read this. You're right though.

[spitx]

Did Daniel Ellsberg bolt for a communist nation, sympathetic to his views after releasing the Pentagon papers?

No, he turned himself in.

Snowden wants all the glory and none of the bruises.

If that doesn't demonstrate a lack of selflessness, what does?

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Trial_and_mistr...

[Ygg2]

Yeah, no. That doesn't work like that. The times now and 40 years ago were different.

CIA, NSA and the whole gamut are now much more efficient than they were 40 years ago (no need for due process etc.) If you try to play fair, they'll fuck you over big time.

Look how much good the legal system was to Aaron Schwartz for a minor misdemeanor. You'd never hear from Edward Snowden, until he just came out and admitted he was Chinese spy and that he loves Big Brother, I mean Big Government.

PS. He isn't in China btw, he is in Hong Kong. Which isn't a communist country as comment before me noted.

[anigbrowl]

I don't know whether to be amused or depressed by the ahistorical ignorance of your comments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

[Ygg2]

True, history hasn't been my strong side, but I don't see how Watergate is relevant?

The difference in technology (between now and then) is huge, since our lives have migrated more towards the Internet. Before the wiretapping could only go so far. You needed to install wiretapping in a room (phones could always be bugged).

Now wiretapping is everywhere. You literally carry the equipment for others to wiretap you (mobile phones, laptops, google glass, etc). It's just an order of magnitude more easier now.

[anigbrowl]

'Wiretapping' means bugging your phone, by definition. You tap into the phone wire.

[gruseom]

Since you have such faith in Daniel Ellsberg's moral stature, you might want to refer to his comments on this particular case.

[WiseWeasel]

Here's a link, for the lazy:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/html5/video?id=9135822&pid=913582...

[mikeash]

I want all of the glory and none of the bruises too, if possible. I'd be very suspicious of anyone who said otherwise.

[e3pi]

You appear to have a high value or `goal' of personal `heroism'. Is this something imprinted from mom and dad or scripted in Boy Scouts? Your kind do well in High School marching band, as E- ball-peen hammers in the motor-pool, and as dutiful shrapnel fodder. That's the only reason the rest of us remain succinctly cordial and pleasant to your schoolboy entrained narcissism.

[Apocryphon]

Maybe if that communist country was neutral and non-aligned with either the West or the Warsaw Pact, like Yugoslavia. Then the metaphor would work.

[caf]

None of the bruises? You're arguing that he hasn't paid a substantial personal cost already?

[genwin]

Maybe Snowden wants neither glory nor bruises.

[andrewflnr]

If you can have all the effect, getting the message out, without getting bruises, that is strictly better than getting bruises. The only thing standing in the way of that is people like you who think you have to sacrifice yourself for your message to count. Who would Snowden be selflessly helping by turning himself in?

[g8oz]

Would Snowden be treated like Ellsberg or like Bradley Manning? Big difference.

[john_b]

Someone who can't see the "point" Snowden is trying to make obviously shouldn't offer him advice. But hey, if I got paid to rattle off my opinion on national TV regardless of its merit, I might bloviate too.

[fnordfnordfnord]

Note to Bob Schieffer: The US' pathetic record on protecting important gov't whistleblowers is responsible for Snowden's flight.

[lignuist]

Only martyrs should try to improve things?

[emiliobumachar]

Not to try to canonize the man, but MLK is a very high standard, even for heroism.

"Not as brave as MLK" does not make much sense as a put-down.