Americans look favorably on whistleblower’s actions.

Contradicting a previous Pew poll which found that a majority of Americans support the NSA spying on telephone records, new surveys find that most Americans decry NSA snooping and view whistleblower Edward Snowden as a patriot for exposing the existence of PRISM.

As we reported on Tuesday, many reacted with shock to a Pew Research Center poll which found that 56% of Americans supported the NSA “tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans,” suggesting that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – who sacrificed his freedom to expose the existence of PRISM, a program under which the NSA is pulling private data “directly from the servers” of major US service providers such as Google and Facebook – had acted in vain.

However, a new Gallup poll conducted this week finds that “More Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the federal government agency program that as part of its efforts to investigate terrorism obtained records from U.S. telephone and Internet companies to “compile telephone call logs and Internet communications.”

“What can one deduce from this discrepancy? Perhaps it is nothing more complex than polling bias, most recently observed during the 2012 presidential campaign, and which shows that sometimes it is more important who is doing the polling than who is being polled and what questions are being asked,” writes Zero Hedge.

Just as in the Pew poll, more Democrats than Republicans (49% to 32%) are likely to approve NSA snooping, underscoring once again how leftists abandon their concern for privacy and civil liberties when a Democrat is in the White House.

The Gallup poll correlates with a separate CBS News poll which found that 58% of Americans disapprove of the government “collecting phone records of ordinary Americans.” The Gallup poll also shows that 35% of Americans would be “very concerned” about violation of their own privacy rights if the government had computerized logs of their telephone calls or Internet communications, while 22% said they would be “somewhat concerned.”

A slight majority (44% to 42%) believe Edward Snowden was right to leak the information to the press.

In addition, following Snowden’s quote to the South China Morning Post, when he remarked, “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” a Reuters/Ipsos poll confirms that most Americans look favorably on the whistleblower’s actions.

23% of those surveyed viewed Snowden as a traitor, while 31% said he was a patriot. 46% said they don’t know, suggesting that the narrative behind the story has a way to go before it fully unfurls. In addition, 35% said Snowden should face no charges while 25% think he should be charged to the full extent of the law.

Only 6% of those surveyed had no objections to the PRISM surveillance program, while 37% said it is completely unacceptable. A majority of 45% said PRISM was acceptable under some circumstances.

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