Heh, well usatoday is mainstream media. If you're going to find anyone who thinks all this NSA stuff should have stayed secret for "the good of the nation", that's where you'll find 'em.
I'm just glad that a mainstream site like usatoday is bold enough to give this award to him.
Most of the anti-Snowden stuff seems to get a fair amount of push-back. Agree with what others have said though, in choosing him as Tech Person of the Year isn't a high enough "honor".
Tech? I don't want to diminish Snowden's doings a single bit, but I think what he did was only remotely tech-related. It's somehow like nominating a great journalist, who writes about modern research in physics, as a scientist of the year.
I don't think that's right. I'm sure people would be willing to accept, for example, Elon Musk as tech person of the year — because what Musk's companies are doing is actually interesting technically. What Snowden did is copy a bunch of files that contain information which is interesting politically and societally.
The fact that technology is somewhat involved in the story doesn't make it a technical advancement. There was technology involved in Watergate too (e.g. tape recorders), but I don't think anyone looks back at 1972 and sees Carl Bernstein as a good candidate for tech man of the year.
He's completely changed how people in the non-elite-security world view computers.
Certainly his influence isn't limited to tech, but I think his impact on tech, at least IT and communications (god I hate the term "ICT"...) and startups and software and hardware... has been beyond any other single person this year. Or any company (2013 didn't see a lot of interesting products, IMO).
I guess a better way to put it is that Snowden released the tech story of the year. But the story of releasing a story is a story of journalism and politics, not itself technical.
Maybe if we had a figurehead in the NSA to point to who approved PRISM et al., it would make sense to call them the "tech person of the year", because of their being in the tech story of the year.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 42.8 ms ] threadI'm just glad that a mainstream site like usatoday is bold enough to give this award to him.
Snowden was a publisher of the technical work of thousands of NSA staff.
He isn't being lauded as a creator, but as a whistleblower.
Would it not be absurd to thank McNamara for the work of Ellsberg?
The fact that technology is somewhat involved in the story doesn't make it a technical advancement. There was technology involved in Watergate too (e.g. tape recorders), but I don't think anyone looks back at 1972 and sees Carl Bernstein as a good candidate for tech man of the year.
Certainly his influence isn't limited to tech, but I think his impact on tech, at least IT and communications (god I hate the term "ICT"...) and startups and software and hardware... has been beyond any other single person this year. Or any company (2013 didn't see a lot of interesting products, IMO).
Maybe if we had a figurehead in the NSA to point to who approved PRISM et al., it would make sense to call them the "tech person of the year", because of their being in the tech story of the year.