Thank You, Edward Snowden!
Since November, advertisements featuring the face of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have been wrapped around several city buses roaming the streets and avenues of Washington, D.C. The can't-miss ads featuring whistleblower Snowden's goateed visage cover most of the outside of the buses.
The ads are part of the Thank You, Edward Snowden campaign headed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a left-leaning public interest organization that focuses on defending activists' free speech rights. According to the group's executive director, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the ads were funded by donations from some 30,000 citizens.
In a November Washington Post article, Washington Metro General Manager Richard Sarles noted that the courts had ruled that public transportation agencies are a public forum. "So we have to accept anyone who wants to put up an ad," said Sarles. "Obviously we don't support, necessarily, what the opinions are that people express in these advertisements."
The ads bluntly inform the political and bureaucratic enablers of the domestic surveillance state that many Americans think that it is they, not Snowden, who have betrayed their oaths to defend the U.S. Constitution.