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POLITICS

25% Favor Pardon for NSA Leaker Snowden

Edward J. Snowden, the man who exposed the federal government’s surveillance of millions of innocent Americans in the name of national security, is the subject of a major new film and a growing effort to have him pardoned for revealing some of the nation’s top secrets. Voters still aren’t convinced Snowden is a traitor, but they’re not ready to pardon him yet either.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 15% of Likely U.S. Voters consider Snowden a hero for leaking information about the National Security Agency’s phone and e-mail surveillance programs. Thirty percent (30%) say he is a traitor who endangered lives and national security. Forty-eight percent (48%) believe Snowden is somewhere in between a heroic whistleblower and a traitor. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on September 20-21, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

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