In a way yes. Both are pretty self serving. Snowden is in a country with worse human rights abuses than the majority of countries out there, including the USA. A country where democracy is stifled and the Internet is more censored and monitored. Both Snowden and Putin come with epic levels of hypocrisy.
I dont have respect of Snowden. I know lots of people fawn over him, but his hypocrisy is too large for me to ignore.
While there is a kind of irony in the situation it seems completely unfair to me to paint him with the Putin brush. Saying they're self-serving is saying nothing really, most humans are. And when you compare what they actually did - Snowden exposing and fighting (at great cost to himself) totalitarian methods vs. Putin's enforcing of such methods the comparison just falls apart completely.
Snowden wasn't an insider in the Russian surveillance apparatus. He doesn't have inside info on what they do. For a whistleblower on this level I think he's been very brave to even take on the US surveillance state. You have to pick your battles.
As far as I know Snowden hasn't praised Russia or pretended they don't have these problems. Until he does, calling him a hypocrite is facile, imo.
ghoti said:
To me he has given me nothing that I didnt already have a good idea what was happening, and at the same time hurt intelligence in his own country.
Really? The scope and scale of spying and knowing so much of the details is very different from having some kind of idea that surveillance was going on. He was absolutely instrumental in exposing that.
And how has he hurt intelligence?
