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real concern” for Snowden that he targeted lists of the NSA’s penetrations in China. This expansion of the whistle-blowing concept to adversaries was echoed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He complimented Snowden for having “uncovered illegal acts by the United States around the globe,” Putin’s view implies a convenient global concept of whistle-blowing that justified breaking US laws.
Even so, this whistle-blower interpretation of Snowden’s act has had immense international resonance in the media. The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists, who assisted Snowden in this enterprise, including Greenwald and Poitras, were awarded the 2014 Polk Award for national-security reporting. Former Congressman Ron Paul organized a clemency petition in February for Snowden, stating: "Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them," and his son, Senator Rand Paul, who was a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016, calling for a Presidential pardon for Snowden.
Senator Paul’s concern fitted with the growing public apprehension over increasing intrusion on its privacy. Snowden was correct, in my opinion, in describing the threat of a surveillance state and the loss of privacy is certainly a legitimate public concern. “We actually buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets voluntarily,” he pointed out from Moscow.
Snowden is correct that the technology involved in the electronic equipment we all use in the 21* century has made mass surveillance part of our daily life. There can be little doubt that our privacy has been largely eroded, if not entirely negated, by the widespread use of cell phones, credit cards, social media and the search engines of the Internet. When we use smart phones, as most Americans do today, our location is relayed to our telephone service provider every three seconds. The phone companies collect and archive our phone usage “metadata,” which includes whom we called and how long we spoke. When we use Google to search for anyone or anything on the Internet, that activity is captured by Google, a company whose profits mainly come from making available to advertisers the results of its surveillance and collection of its users’ searches. When we use Gmail, the Google’s email service used by nearly one-billion senders and recipients, we agree to allow Google to read the actual contents of our correspondence to find keywords in them of interest to advertisers. When we use a credit card, the credit card company also retains data about what we buy and where we go. When we travel in automobiles equipped with GPS, every turn and stop is tracked and recorded. And when we are in public places with CCTV cameras, our image is recorded and archived. When we use Facebook, Twitter, and other so- called social media, as over two billion people do today, we allow these companies to collect, retain and exploit its surveillance of our movements, associations with other people, and stated preferences. When we use Amazon and other on-line stores, we allow them to track and archive a great deal of our commercial activity. For Internet companies, such as Facebook, Twitter,
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