[Peace-discuss] Bloomberg: Snowden Seen as Whistle-Blower by Majority in New Poll

[Robert Naiman]

What was that thing that Lincoln said about fooling all of the people?

I guess the government and the corporate media need to turn their
anti-Snowden hysteria up to 11.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/snowden-seen-as-whistlebloweer-by-majority-in-new-poll.html

Snowden Seen as Whistle-Blower by Majority in New Poll
By Jonathan D. Salant - Jul 10, 2013 5:00 AM CT

A majority of U.S. registered voters consider Edward Snowden a
whistle-blower, not a traitor, and a plurality says government
anti-terrorism efforts have gone too far in restricting civil liberties, a
poll released today shows.

Fifty-five percent said Snowden was a whistle-blower in leaking details
about top-secret U.S. programs that collect telephone and Internet data, in
the survey from Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University.
Thirty-four percent said he’s a traitor. Snowden, 30, worked for McLean,
Virginia-based federal contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH)

The poll also showed that by 45 percent to 40 percent, respondents said the
government goes too far in restricting civil liberties as part of the war
on terrorism. That was a reversal from January 2010, when in a similar
survey 63 percent said anti-terrorism activities didn’t go far enough to
protect the U.S. from attacks, compared with 25 percent who disagreed.

“The massive swing in public opinion about civil liberties and governmental
anti-terrorism efforts, and the public view that Edward Snowden is more
whistle-blower than traitor, are the public reaction and apparent shock at
the extent to which the government has gone in trying to prevent future
terrorist incidents,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac’s
polling institute.

The view of Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than traitor predominated
among almost every group of respondents broken down by party, gender,
income, education and age. Black voters were the lone exception, with 43
percent calling Snowden a traitor compared with 42 percent saying he was a
whistle-blower.

Discordant View
“The verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified
view of the nation’s political establishment,” Brown said.
Facing espionage and other charges and with his passport revoked, Snowden
has been holed up at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport since arriving there on
June 23 from Hong Kong, which refused a U.S. extradition request. President
Barack Obama’s administration has been pressuring other countries not to
grant Snowden asylum, and U.S. officials who have called him a traitor
include House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

The poll showed both Democrats and Republicans about evenly divided on
whether government counter-terrorism measures have become excessive.
Independent voters view the methods as having gone too far by 49 percent to
36 percent.
“The fact that there is little difference now along party lines about the
overall anti-terrorism effort and civil liberties and about Snowden is in
itself unusual in a country sharply divided along political lines about
almost everything,” Brown said.

Gender Gap
A gender gap emerges, though, on the government’s anti-terrorism programs.
The poll showed that men, by 54 percent to 34 percent, see the government
as having gone too far in its efforts while women, by 47 percent to 36
percent, said the measures haven’t gone far enough.

Despite this divergence, figures for the genders from Quinnipiac’s January
2010 poll exemplify the overall change in attitude on the issue. Male
respondents, by 61 percent to 28 percent, said in the earlier survey that
the government hadn’t gone far enough to protect the country. Among women,
64 percent said the same.
Likewise, among Republicans the percentage who said government has gone
overboard in restricting civil liberties in the fight against terrorism
grew to 41 percent in the new poll, compared with 17 percent three years
ago.

“It would be naive to see these numbers as anything but evidence of a
rethinking by the public about the tradeoffs between security and freedom,”
Brown said.
The telephone poll of 2,014 registered voters June 28-July 8 has a margin
of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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