“I absolutely think he should get the presidential pardon because he did a huge public service for this country. He took an incredible personal risk … to expose something that was really wrong and was illegal and now that we know it, we are a better country for it, and actually they’ve scaled back that program as as result. So he did a huge public service, and if you think about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, he did something very similar, people were angry and upset with him at first, and then he became a national hero, so I really hope Obama pardons him.”

“I definitely think that Edward Snowden should be pardoned. One of the reasons is because we can’t have transparency and accountability if you’re hiding facts and file … It’s [now] way easier to spy on Americans and I think the important thing to see is that there is some racial profiling, and there is also a great risk for activists to be targeted as well. I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of loyalty versus disloyalty because when does the government decide if someone
is disloyal?

“I definitely think he shouldn’t be [pardoned]. I do thank him for leaking the information [that] he did because that way we do know what is going on – they were lying to us, the government was definitely lying to us. But that being said, he also leaked a lot of other information, financial information as well, that pretty much compromised the U.S., different countries got that information, and the government had to backtrack, kind of undue all of the things that he did. So there was a lot of good, I guess you can say from the leaks [but] I think the bad outweighed the good.”

“I think Edward Snowden should be pardoned because what he did was he gave an awareness to something that was going on that the government was, you know for the most part, maybe not trying to hide, but didn’t tell the people about. . I think that he was just doing his civic duty to tell the world, indeed the world, because they were doing [that,] not just [to] Americans, but other countries too, and I think that he did the right thing.”