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Obama vs Snowden: The PR Battle continues...Snowden facing 30 years in jail

Obama is going after Edward Snowden (the man who leaked NSA information) with the full force of the US Justice Department, charging Snowden with espionage, a crime which could see Snowden serve 30 years in prison.

Snowden is currently... somewhere. He has left Hong Kong and is currently in Russia on his way to ... somewhere (rumors say Iceland or Brazil).

In the PR battle for the hearts and minds of the world, I'd have to say that right now Snowden is winning (despite a recent poll showing that 53 per cent of Americans think he should be prosecuted - and yet at the same time 54 per cent say what he did was a 'good thing').

While Snowden may not have won over the public yet, the fact that 54 per cent approve of his actions gives him time to do so.

The main reason Snowden is winning, in my opinion, is that the establishment is rallying around Obama. And while that may make for a consistent messaging strategy (which is usually a good thing), it also makes for very strange bedfellows... when you can't tell Obama apart from Dick Cheney you've got a serious branding problem.


On the other side, you've got folks like Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) praising Edwards.


In addition, Glenn Greenwald, the UK Guardian reporter who broke the NSA story has been doing the media rounds and punching his media colleagues in the face (metaphorically speaking) in their attempts to frame Snowden (and himself) as criminals.



Then you've got Russell Tice, a previous intelligence agent with the Air Force, come out and say that Obama and the NSA are outright lying.


Loretta Sanchez, a Democratic member of congress who sits on the National Security council, came out and said what has been revealed by Snowden is merely the 'tip of the iceberg'...


In the end...

In the end the reason why I give Snowden the upper hand in all this is that there are still more 'leaks' to come. So in that regard, unless Obama and the NSA have been totally truthful about the extent and parameters of the Prism program, odds are there will be more incidents where they end up with egg on their face (and that's assuming that no more whistleblowers come forward in the months to come).

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has already been caught lying to congress...


What Obama has going for him however are two things:

1) That Americans are still afraid of terrorists and as such many are ok with Big Brother tactics being implemented by the government. It reminds me of TS Elliot's phrase "The world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper" - this seems to be the general American attitude towards the country's founding vision statement if you will "Home of the free, land of the brave."  Americans now seem ok with "Home of the surveilled, land of the secure."

and

2) It seems that no matter how many scandals the American government gets into, people essentially forget about them two weeks later. The level of non-participation of the American people in the actions of their government is at a level we've perhaps never seen before.

Here's what we do know however, at some point this story will evolve to where Americans pick a side... are they for 'security over privacy rights' or 'privacy rights over security'. Obama is betting on the former, Snowden is betting on the later.

In the end I don't think this issue will get resolved until the 2016 presidential elections, but in the mean time the PR battle for liberty over security or security over liberty wages on.

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