Is Snowden A Saint Or A Demon?

He needs no introduction.  Both a saint and a demon, Edward Snowden is 31 years old [1].  He has received gifts of exceptional brilliance, articulacy, courage and pretty teeth that give him his boyish smile.  Gifts such as these come with concurrent burdens and two of Mr. Snowden's biggest are making people around the world aware that their expectation of privacy has been taken away and urging the world community to restore it.  Whether Mr. Snowden is deemed a saint or a demon would depend on which side one is on, the freedom lovers' or the freedom takers'.

A fortuitous finding of an article on Catholic Online reporting on a system that can record every telephone call in an entire nation is surprising [2].  Why would a Catholic website report on a subject that has nothing to do with Christianity?  Would TED not be an appropriate, if not the ideal forum to address such topics?  I believe it is and it had done so [3].

On second thought, perhaps it is possible that the expectation of privacy and the lack of it have origins in the Garden of Eden and therefore they are appropriate topics for a Catholic website.

More thinking has led me to conclude that it is not only possible but also natural for Adam and Eve to have hoped that God would not find out that they had eaten the Forbidden Apple.  Their hope is equivalent to an expectation of privacy.  Their expectation was not fulfilled since God is omniscient.

Nothing escapes God--God knows everything.  It is therefore ironic that Adam and Eve, who expected privacy, had eaten the Forbidden Apple in order that they could be just like God and know everything, and in the process destroyed the very expectation of privacy they desired.

Millennia later, descendants of Adam and Eve in certain organizations are still trying to be  God.  They want to be omniscient and omnipotent.  For these people, Edward Snowden is a demon for he is standing in their way, thwarting their plan to obtain the knowledge they want and the power they crave.  For those who wish to live like God rather than be  God, Edward Snowden is a saint for he is thinking of ways to give everyone a respectable degree of privacy, just as God has complete privacy over certain knowledge that is to be respected, that earthlings do not know and need not know and that would be harmful for them to know.



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
[2] http://www.catholic.org/news/politics/story.php?id=54610  Mute the speakers after clicking on the link.  The advertisements are annoying.
[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet/transcript?language=en