The 2013 Man Of The Year is Edward Snowden, who sacrificed his life to expose the National
Surveillance Agency as a government sponsored operative that invades the privacy of ALL United States citizens and spies on friendly heads of state of countries like Germany and Brasil. This spying
has not only political objectives but also economic objectives since according to Snowden major German businesses were spied upon.
           When Snowden's findings were initially revealed the mainstream media was eager to label him as a "traitor" who has endangered the lives of United States intelligence agents around the world. It is ironic and obviously hypocritical that the former Vice President Dick Cheney actually did this to Valerie Plame and faced no consecuences whatsoever. Edward Snowden thusfar has not to been shown to endanger the life of anyone. What was revealed was spying on countries presumed to be our stauchest allies. German chancellor Angela Merkel had her cell phone tapped.
            What Snowden did was for the good of the United States citizen, who had no idea this blatantly illegal activity was taking place. Although Snowden was lucky to escape and find sanctuary in Russia he will have to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. If he returns to the United States there is no chance whatsoever he will get a "fair" trial. In spite of the barrage of negative comments initially made about Snowden by the mainstream press the number of people who see him as a genuine "patriot" continues to grow, infact Edward Snowden is now a viable candidate to win the Nobel Peace prize. To this point Edward Snowden is much better off than an earlier "whistleblower" Bradley (now known as "Chelsea") Manning, who was denied clothing while being exposed to extremely low temperature among other insidious forms of torture because he exposed outright murder of innocent people, including children in Iraq. Manning thought that revealing this outrage would bring the guilty to justice, but that was not the case.....the murderers were rewarded with varied amount of promotions. This just goes to show that there really aren't any real protections for whistleblowers who expose activity harmful to the image of The United States as a true democracy.