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Analyst Snowden elected as students' delegate at the University of Glasgow
Former NSA analyst Edward Snowden was elected as the students delegate in the Scottish University of Glasgow. Read full article
Former NSA analyst Edward Snowden was elected as the students delegate in the Scottish University of Glasgow. Read full article
Comments
Disclaimer & comment rulesEdward and Mordechai...
Feb 19th, 2014 - 05:17 am - Link - Report abuse 0Ambassadeurs to the USA and Israel for the new Republic of Scotland...
Ahhhh dreams....
LOL! I love this. Students at their finest. The part of their life when they are anti-establishment before they become part of the establishment.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 09:55 am - Link - Report abuse 0@2 Elaine, yeah I find it hilarious too. It's very much Life of Brian with the student population, always has been for as long as I can remember:
Feb 19th, 2014 - 10:02 am - Link - Report abuse 0“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Yes, it takes me back.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 11:08 am - Link - Report abuse 0It has always been thus.
@3 To be fair, I think students have a role in challenging the system. They are meant to challenge the status quo, sometimes with good results but often misguided by a natural inclination to rebel against pretty much anything. It can effect change in countries with oppressive regimes but, come on, Scotland?
Feb 19th, 2014 - 11:09 am - Link - Report abuse 0It is amusing to meet rebellious students a few years down the line when they are enjoying the fruits of society. Strangely they no longer seem to want everyone to be equal and to share their wealth with anyone once they have acquired their own. They no longer want to bring down the establishments that afford them safety and structure. They no longer want twits like Snowden destabilising and exposing the work of the governments they voted for. In other words, they grow up.
I love Life of Brian. Especially the scene where they talk about the different socialist parties all warring against each other. So true.
Well it is students that usually bring about change. Just look at Venezuela right now.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 11:20 am - Link - Report abuse 0Most of us have families and bills to pay to be out on the streets protesting.
@6 Yes, in oppressive regimes, and now with the use of social networking, they can and should. As I said ^^^.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 12:06 pm - Link - Report abuse 0#2 Elaine it could not have been worded any better. One can't really fault them, all students worldwide go through this phase. Many of the 60's flower child and Woodstock attendees are now CEO's and in power in the government. Maybe that explains a lot.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 01:37 pm - Link - Report abuse 0And they do play a role in challenging the government, just as (in the USA) the ACLU plays a significant role in US politics.
I agree ElaineB put the whole situation into context. A little middle-class rebellion from safely inside their campus in a free and modern democracy. This is the kind of article that raises a wry smile before one moves on.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 01:48 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I'm sure, for these same students now, that in 10-20 years time this will provide an amusing little dinner-party tale to ironically prove how radical and right-on they were, you know before the kids and the mortgage and running two cars, going ski-ing this year? and oh, the cost of private tutors these days!!
I wish the truly brave students in VNZA all the best. Facing bullets, beatings and imprisonment (in some of the world's worst prisons) is just a little more 'radical' than filling out an online poll on your mobile from the Student Union Bar, in order to be considered 'daring and dangerous'!!!
Bless 'em!
Bless their little cotton socks...on free education and generous pot noodle banquets to save their bursary for the Uni bar......
Feb 19th, 2014 - 02:24 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Power to the People.....
Well ...until they become the people....
And how many dirty Russian secrets he got from working at the NSA has he leaked? Oh yes. He knows to whom he pays the rent, just like Assange.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 02:24 pm - Link - Report abuse 0@ 11 GFace
Feb 19th, 2014 - 03:22 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Assange, Assange who?
@12 Gosh you're right. He's not the “It Girl” anymore is he. And it must burn him up.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 03:53 pm - Link - Report abuse 0The old quote often attributed to Churchill reads as true today as it ever did:
Feb 19th, 2014 - 05:08 pm - Link - Report abuse 0““If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain?”
Once these students graduate and enter the real world their politics will take a noticeable shift to the right..usually around the time they receive their first paycheck and see how much the government takes from them to fund idealistic nonsense for the underclass.
Even though he exposed what was already known since the immediate days after 9/11.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 06:08 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Nobody can take away that what Snowden did takes balls and a real civil conscience.
Be under no misapprehension. Snowden is NOTHING. But then he always has been. A little man trying hard to be mediocre. “Balls”? Doesn't have any. If he did he would have stood up in his own country. Instead of running and hiding around the world. Ditto “civil conscience”. Just a puerile coward.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 06:46 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Honest security forces around the world. Shoot! Blow this toerag's skull apart!
@15 I've had far more mixed feelings wrt Snowden than with the creepy Assange who gladly sold out the Belarus democracy movement to stick a fork in the US's eye. But it still is hard for me to have much TOO sympathy for him. I am not keen with the NSA collecting “metadata” or such but I am not naive enough to think that no one else forsakes it. Likewise If NSA crossed legal lines in doing what they did (and I am of the opinion that they did, because well... that's what spies everywhere do) he should have reported it BUT by using channels that whiseblowers who handle confidential data are supposed to use. As we know, he uh.. didn't. You don't blab to the press, then run to another country and then ingratiate yourself to your new hosts by saying something that everyone suspects happens (the US *gasp* spying on China when they do the same) to give them some red meat over which they can pretend to be indignant. He then promised to his advocates in the US legislature to not embarrass the US any more and well... and as we know he uh... didn't because Putin wants him to perform for him (or Snowden anticipated the need to be “useful” so he can stay there). And on that subject, while in Russia, who are certainly no saints with respect to spying on their own people and worse, he is pretty quiet as to how THEY do business, as is “poor” Julian (heck! those poor consular employees) with Ecuador, stuck in the cramped consulate of a country that is likewise hardly a saint when it comes to transparency.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 06:54 pm - Link - Report abuse 0It's easy to be brave and speak truth to power when it doesn't shoot back (or “disappear” you or give you a polonium mickey finn). And I guess, he's an easy kind of brave guy.
17
Feb 19th, 2014 - 07:50 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Well if I had to disclose to the public something that I consider alarming and a absolute trespass over private life and liberty then yes, I think I would have done the same. I’m not going to judge him as a patriot or a traitor, that’s up to the American public to decide. Sure I see your point, but it’s likely that he will never set foot in the US ever again. He might be under the umbrella of the Russians but let’s face it, there are not many countries in the world that would extradite him or trade him over to the US. And much less countries that are safe from a black ops capturing him and taking him out of the country by the break of dawn. This is a reality that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
I would think the same way for a Russian FSB deserter who flees over to the US and exposes Putin’s crimes.
Most of the hard stuff was released to the press in Hong Kong, not in Russia. Having also said this I think that if the Russians are being spied by their gov’t, it should be a Russian equivalent to Snowden that exposes it, not Snowden himself.
According to RT Snowden’s attorney said the guy is learning Russian fast and has found a private employer, his private security is paid by himself, only that the FSB or whatever inland security services have arranged a home in some secret location in Russia.
I will also add that In fact Putin wasn’t very happy at first when Snowden arrived in Moscow airport last year. They really did not know what to do with him
The Russian president said something like he can stay here in Russia as long as he doesn’t keep on leaking stuff against his US “partners”.
The most shocking point in this whole saga is that people are shocked that spies spy and that we don't all play by some imagined Queensbury Rules of national security.
Feb 19th, 2014 - 08:49 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Feeling proud to be Scottish with this result and glad to have played a small role myself =) A fitting birthday present from my country to Cristinita =)
Feb 19th, 2014 - 11:52 pm - Link - Report abuse 0#6, #7 Rubbish, most students in Venezuela are with Chavismo against the far-right opposition, and the “regime” there is one of the least oppressive, and the most elected, in the world
#11, #12 Assange the hero - Galloway was right to stand in his corner even if a lot of the trendy left (and the ultra-left SWP which turned out to be led by a real rapist itself!) shamefully deserted him. Lady Gaga visited him in the embassy you know and just recently MIA got him to introduce her New York concert via Skype so he's not going away, however much you want to gloat
#15 We might not agree on much Cabeza but on this we're at one =) And Snowden himself is a libertarian and has been (maybe still is) a conservative. While I'm unashamedly socialist there is a right wing case for freedom and against America's surveillance state, and I respect those who make it rather than joining in the gutter Sun approach of Conqueror (surprise surprise!) here
@20
Feb 20th, 2014 - 12:09 am - Link - Report abuse 0You are the most complete and utter fool to ever post here.
I hope your mother is proud to have raised an idiot.
Euthanasia was invented for people like you.
Your comments are incredibly asinine.
Please go away and die quietly somewhere very remote.
21
Feb 20th, 2014 - 12:13 am - Link - Report abuse 0Its Stevie..
#21 Tell me one thing I say in #20 that's factually wrong? Or even an opinion I express that you disagree with, and why?
Feb 20th, 2014 - 12:41 am - Link - Report abuse 0#22 No its not actually. But I take it your not so happy to be agreed with by me?!
Oh I don't bother with Stevie any more. Or Voice or think. They are time-wasters.
Feb 20th, 2014 - 07:53 am - Link - Report abuse 0I really do have more important things to do
# 20 you are right Assange is not going anywhere soon, unless of course the lease runs out on the Equadorian embassy or a new government is elected in Equador that is not pro sexual assault.
Feb 22nd, 2014 - 12:25 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Commenting for this story is now closed.
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