system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Edward Snowden is no hero. CMV.

Edward Snowden is a criminal, not a hero.  I say this because I believe in democracy and the rule of law.  I do not say this because I believe in PRISM, or because I don’t value my right to privacy – I do.  But Snowden broke the law in a serious and dangerous way.  

We live in a representative democracy.  The people have elected legislators and Presidents who have enacted laws establishing a system for classifying and declassifying information.  You may not like this system, I happen to think its necessary to some extent (though clearly it has been inappropriately overused) – but my feelings about the system are irrelevant to my argument.  The system was created and repeatedly endorsed by the election and re-election of members of Congress and Presidents.  It has been upheld by the judiciary.  

No private citizen has the right to unilaterally decide the law shouldn’t apply to them, or that their opinion of the world is more valid than others.  We don’t let individual citizens decide which specific programs their tax dollars should support, and we don’t allow individual citizens decide to declassify secret information.  There are good reasons for this.  I doubt anyone here would care to defend the leakers in the Bush Administration who outed Valerie Plame, but Snowden has committed the same crime (though admittedly for more admirable reasons). 

In our system of government, the proper way to seek changes to (or the abolition of) a system like this is though the political process.  The obvious rebuttal to this argument is that the public cannot seek changes to a system that it is unaware of.  This argument is not persuasive to me.  We may not have known the specifics of the NSA’s activities, but the fact that the US government has been engaging in extensive surveillance since at least 9-11 was widely known.  If it was a priority, voters could have elected members of Congress who would investigate such programs and seek to modify/eliminate them.  They have not done so.  The American people have validated this security apparatus in election after election.  That is their right – and Edward Snowden had no right to contravene that decision.

Edward Snowden may have been a hero if he had taken the harder route.  If he had exhausted his ability to protest within the system, then resigned and toiled in the trenches of politics pursuing a more open and accountable government with no guarantee of success or glory – that would be heroic.  But instead he decided to break the law and flee the country.  That isn’t heroic, its criminal.
gpt
>No private citizen has the right to unilaterally decide the law shouldn’t apply to them, or that their opinion of the world is more valid than others.

So Martin Luther King, and other people who were civil disobedient are not right in their actions? The colonists were not right to rebel against Britain? If nobody ever decided to break a law for the greater good we wouldn't exist as the nation we are today. 

Furthermore, Edward Snowden has a right to do what Edward Snowden wants, nobody is prevented from doing anything in this world, sure there are consequences for your actions, but we all know that doesn't stop people from breaking the law. Had he protested in the system he would have just been fired and swept under the rug. Without leaking documents or some sorts of hard evidence, he would have been brushed away by our politicians as some sort of conspiracy theorist. The only way to bring serious awareness to this problem was to break the law and sacrifice himself so that the public had a knowledge of what was going on with their phone communications and other forms of communications. 

He is a hero, because just like Dr. King, Edward Snowden stood up for the people that either had no knowledge or didn't have a voice in the situation. Sure, it's criminal, but a lot of our history is based on people who committed crimes for the greater good and this is just another one of those situations.