After completing these readings and in my opinion, I fully believe that Edward Snowden is a traitor. To that end, I believe that the US Government should wholeheartedly pursue extradition to try him for his crimes against the United States and our allies. In Snowden’s working with the CIA, he had access to many classified documents and programs that our government was employing to keep both the United States and our allies safe from terrorism and other threats. With Snowden leaking information regarding the NSA and CIA collecting data from the public in order to scan for threats and attempting to gain a better understanding of the people of this world, this operation is now completely useless. This operation would now be completely useless because, with its running now public knowledge, the people that this operation was intended to monitor will now not communicate over these channels and might now not pop up in the US intelligence agencies’ radar. Through his exposing of this information to the media, the people that the United States want to monitor might not be seen now. Putting aside the legality of leaking this sensitive and classified information to the media, I do not believe that what Snowden did was ethical or moral. I believe that because of the role he played in the CIA and the information that he had access to while he spent time at the CIA. He had direct access to sensitive and classified information that our government was using to try and keep us and our allies safe and undermined our government’s attempt at doing that by letting the general public know about our covert and classified operations geared towards keeping our citizens and the citizens of our allies safe. I believe that this is completely and wholeheartedly wrong and neither ethical or moral. Because of these actions, he has undermined our intelligence agencies’ classified operations and, potentially, put our citizens and our allies in harm’s way. With these covert operations remaining covert, we may have been able to detect possible signs or rumors of an attack on our country, but now with this operation being public knowledge, this possibility has gone by the wayside as the people that could have potentially committed this attack would not use these channels of communication anymore due to the possibility that their covert attack would be uncovered by our intelligence agencies. In releasing this information about our intelligence agencies to the public, Snowden has potentially put American citizens in harm’s way and allowed an avenue for a surprise attack on our country. Obviously, putting American citizens, and the citizens of our allies, in harm’s way and exposing them to potential terrorist attacks is not ethical or moral and is detrimental to the public. For anyone trying to argue that Snowden is a hero, I would like you to consider the possibility that our intelligence agencies do not pick up a potential terrorist attack that may have been picked up through these leaked spy programs and think about the loss of life that could have been saved. This is why our classified programs need to stay that way.