Edward Snowden
Does anybody like to be watched? At face value, nobody wants other people to know their secrets and possibly use those secrets against them and surely nobody want all their online information recorded and their phone call wired. So why is the National Security Agency (NSA) carefully taking down everything we do with their giant yeottabyte-computers deep in the Utah Desert? We know about this NSA scheme because of the leaker Edward Snowden who has been recently granted a one-year temporary asylum by the Russian government. Why Russia granted the asylum and why Snowden is even there can be tied to three basic concepts of intercultural communication, those of culture & social group, perspective, and cultural relativism.
Edward Snowden was a “security contractor at the NSA for the last four year, employed by several private contractors” (Economist 8840, 23). After announcing that he leaked the information that the NSA is using a program code-named PRISM, which collects an unknown quantity of e-mails, internet phone-calls, photos, videos, file transfer, and social-networking data from the technology giants such as Google and Facebook, Snowden boarded a plane flight to Hong Kong. According to his followers, Snowden first fled into the arms of the Chinese and then the Russian because of the harsh treatments Private Bradley Manning, the leaker of military secrets to WikiLeaks, received. On August 1, Snowden “finally managed to break free of his confinement at the transit zone of Moscow's international airport” after he received his asylum on Thursday. In theory, this event is deeply connected to three concepts of communication: culture & social group, perspective, and cultural relativism.
The three concepts are all concepts that are based on an intercultural point of view, because they all represent our culture and the differences it has with other cultures. Our culture is as distinct from other cultures as two different people, they think differently, and interpret and
Edward Snowden was a “security contractor at the NSA for the last four year, employed by several private contractors” (Economist 8840, 23). After announcing that he leaked the information that the NSA is using a program code-named PRISM, which collects an unknown quantity of e-mails, internet phone-calls, photos, videos, file transfer, and social-networking data from the technology giants such as Google and Facebook, Snowden boarded a plane flight to Hong Kong. According to his followers, Snowden first fled into the arms of the Chinese and then the Russian because of the harsh treatments Private Bradley Manning, the leaker of military secrets to WikiLeaks, received. On August 1, Snowden “finally managed to break free of his confinement at the transit zone of Moscow's international airport” after he received his asylum on Thursday. In theory, this event is deeply connected to three concepts of communication: culture & social group, perspective, and cultural relativism.
The three concepts are all concepts that are based on an intercultural point of view, because they all represent our culture and the differences it has with other cultures. Our culture is as distinct from other cultures as two different people, they think differently, and interpret and