EDWARD SNOWDEN TRAITOR OR HERO

Regarding the Edward Snowden case there is a an very interesting ethical problem. Just to give us a bit of background context ; Edward Snowden was an employee of the CIA and NSA, who revealed details of several monitoring programs and American mass britanniques. For some peolpe he was considered like a hero because he has brought to light confidential information that deserves to be in the public domain and for other a villainous traitor because those put in danger his country, it is important to ask whether his revelations comes under the ethical or the legal fact.

Ethical :

We know that most people would feel betrayed by Edward because he released personal information about them but it was in order to prove that the US Government is recording the communications of its citizens. But it is Ethic to help other isn’t it ?

Ethics are moral principles that guide the way a behaves. It issued by a business is a particular kind of policy statement. A code of ethic issued by a company is some kind of policy statement. A properly framed code is, in effect, a form of binding legislation within the company for its employees, specific sanctions for breaches of the code. If these sanctions are absent, the code is just a list of piety. The heaviest sentence usually dismissal unless a crime has been committed.

Focusing on ethics, for those who feel that Snowden did was morally acceptable, calculating almost everyone has to weigh the benefits and costs. For them, the benefits outweigh the costs considerably. The benefit here is that there was a strong belief among the people who thought that Snowden was a good thing, that damage has been done to us by spying, a significant damage to the American people. There was the belief that it was very unlikely that this evil will never see the light of day without Snowden or someone else to do something like what was done. It is based on the mechanisms of power highlight this was based on the wrong source, and they point to things like the senators who kept saying that we see how the Patriot Act is interpreted and you should be worried public, and that is not going anywhere. And if the thought was, in significant damage was done to the American public and there was not the usual mechanisms by which that evil does see the light of day, then add to that the fact that Snowden had a responsibility he did sign pieces of paper that said, "I will not do it" So they do not ignore these facts, but they thought that was trumped by other things.

So we can say that Edward Snowden did is ethical because for him the aim to reveal this information about the American people was to help them and show the true face of NSA.

Legal :

We know that in the world of work today, and especially in the government's Americian we are obliged to keep secret internal organization to avoid putting people in danger. If this contract have broken the nation may be in danger.
It is important to realize ethics and laws are not the same. Laws are established to protect software developers (copyright and licensing) and users (privacy issues). Laws have penalties associated with them. If you don’t obey the law, you are punished. Ethics, however, are based on principles and values. In reality, there is no global punishment for ethics violation, although individual companies, schools, etc. may have rules that, if violated, have punishments associated with them.
It is not illegal for a person to go to buy a fancy dress or suit, wear it for a special occasion with the tags tucked in, then return it the next day; however, it is unethical. Sometimes laws are based on ethical principles, meaning ethics can be the predecessor of laws. Computer use escalated much faster than the development of laws and policies which protected the users, programmers, and developers. We relied on ethics to control people's behavior. With so many values, it was hard to decipher who was right and who was wrong. Laws have finally defined the parameters for everyone to follow, but laws do not exist in every realm of the information industry, so we still rely on ethics to control many situations.

We also know that he violated the trust the CIA, NSA, and his bosses had in him to keep this information a secret ! In addition, he also put the safety of the U.S. citizens in danger.
Whistleblowing involves the revelation of misconduct or illegality occurring in an organization. This necessarily involves disclosing secret information beyond the bounds intended by those trying to keep it secret, and often this involves publication and disclosure to the general public. By virtue of the fact that whistleblowers exist within the organizations they are exposing, they are almost always under some contractual or statutory requirement not to disclose the information they are disclosing. If one takes these obligations at face value then it would appear that whistleblowing must always be regarded as a breach of law, and possibly also a breach of ethics, at least insofar as it involves a breach of contract with the organization where the whistleblower is employed. Under such a view, whistleblowing can never be legally justified.

It is certainly true that people and organizations can enter into confidentiality contracts of this kind, and in the ordinary course of business these contracts create justifiable legal and ethical obligations for the parties involved. If a person agrees to confidentiality in dealings with an employer or client, and agrees to keep sensitive material a secret, then ordinarily this would be a legitimate and binding contract that would bind the person to make good on their promise. Failure to do so would be a breach of contract, and might also involve breaches of other legal duties (e.g., fiduciary duties).

In view of this fact, it is not correct to regard the ordinary operation of confidentiality rules as being either ethically or legally binding. Whatever contractual or legislative restrictions would ordinarily operate on Snowden’s employment, they cannot be regarded to be legitimate if they require him to keep secret his knowledge about government misconduct and law-breaking.-

http://rvhsavid.weebly.com/blog/treason-or-truth

http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/anglo-american/business-ethics-and-corporate-social-responsibility/what-are-business-ethics.html#ixzz3DAAV9lbz

http://mises.org/daily/6474/

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/edward-snowden-hero-or-traitor

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-edward-snowden-is-a-hero

http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/code-of-ethics/

http://tarlab.usu.edu/htm/et/law-ethics