Time.com, By: Michael Scherer, 06/24/2013
The President calls them a threat to national security. The Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets. The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.
"The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," said Edward Joseph Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who admitted on June 6 to one of the most significant thefts of highly classified secrets in U.S. history.
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