Five Years Later, Many Say Snowden is Neither Hero Nor Traitor
It’s been five years since Edward Snowden exposed the federal government’s surveillance of millions of innocent Americans in the name of national security, and voters still think he falls somewhere in between the lines of hero and traitor, though they still want him tried for treason.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 14% of Likely U.S. Voters today think Snowden is a hero for leaking information about the National Security Agency’s phone and e-mail surveillance programs, while another 29% think he’s a traitor who endangered lives and national security. Nearly half of voters (48%) think he falls somewhere in between the two. This shows little change from 2016. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on August 8-9, 2018 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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