I Am Beyond Sick/Tired Of Being Called An "Authoritarian NSA Apologist".

[JDPriestly]

90. How has Snowden harmed US foreign policy?

Our massive surveillance of the communications in foreign countries has hurt our foreign policy. But Snowden had no power to determine any of the policies that govern or permit the surveillance.

It isn't Snowden or the documents he has published or his statements or his personality or anything having to do with Snowden that has hurt our foreign policy.

It is the hypocrisy of our own surveillance program and the threat that program poses to individuals and politicians in foreign countries that hurts our foreign policy.

Snowden is just an ordinary person who has not in any way intervened in our foreign policy.

It isn't like Nixon negotiating with the Vietnamese to make sure that Johnson could not stop the Viet Nam war.

Snowden simply revealed a program that puts a lie to many of our public statements about our foreign policy.

The more sophisticated nations like China and Russia and many others already take the pompous sounding declarations of our government as so much tabaccy for domestic American chewing.

It is the confidence of Americans in the current US government and in particular in the surveillance state apparatus that Snowden has harmed.

That has nothing to do with our foreign policy. It has to do with what we will demand of our next president -- a truly free society without this excessive surveillance.