As the National Security Agency begins to digest the changes announced by President Obama Friday, some within the government intelligence community are expressing some violent discontent with their former colleague, responsible for the biggest leak in U.S. history.
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” a former special forces Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human being’s life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” an analyst for the NSA said in the report. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“His name is cursed every day over here,” according to a defense contractor’s account on the website. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”
An Army intelligence officer interviewed by BuzzFeed went as far as describing the way in which they would do away with the former NSA contractor, from a poisoned needle in the street to a sudden death in the shower.
While media outlets, lawmakers, defense officials and privacy experts have taken to every available medium to either praise Snowden as a hero or condemn him as a traitor, the opinion of the intelligence community has remained virtually unchanged – and if anything, has grown a little more violent.