Edward Snowden released the info on the NSA phone spying. Is he a hero in the "civil disobedience" framework or a simple traitor to his country?
If Martin Luther King planned civil disobedience in Alabama and instead of going to jail fled the country to hide out in communist China would he be considered a hero? No way. Much like any criminal, his fleeing shows his civil disobedience against an unjust law (or governmental action) to be cowardly. King was a hero.
If Gandhi did the same? He didn't. Gandhi is a hero.
Or the fathers of the American revolution? What if these people stood up, made great speeches, preached revolution and then fled to Mexico? They didn't. They are heroes.
What of our early labor union leaders? Tell everyone to stand up to the coal mining industry and then run when the company brought in their goons? They stayed and took their clobbering. They were heroes.
These individuals advocated civil disobedience and took the consequencies. That is the whole idea behind such disobedience. By the way, civil disobedience does not mean polite disobedience. Certainly when the civil rights workers refused to leave segregated lunch counters, they were not polite. They just said no.
Had Edward Snowden stayed in America, allowed himself to be arrested, used his defiance of what he thought an unjust policy of the Federal government, then there might be some justification in labeling him a hero of the civil disobedience philosophy. Running away means he knew he did wrong and he fled his country because of his wrong-doing.
Heroes are not made of such stuff. Cowards are. Traitors are. NSA may be wrong in what it is doing, but Snowden is no hero for exposing it. He merely exposed himself.
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