A hero does not run away to a foreign power and hide behind their skirts. Mr. Stone is exactly correct: "I don't doubt that Snowden was courageous and did what he did for what he thought were good reasons. But I think he was unduly arrogant, didn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge and basically decided to usurp the authority of a democracy." Snowden is all three of those things. If he had stood up and said "I have information and I believe this is wrong" then maybe he would be worth praising. Instead he stole reams of data, ran away, and only admitted what he had done when the media had already outed him. Pathetic. As for irony: "Snowden explained his actions saying: "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things [surveillance on its citizens] ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded ..." and yet he ran to China and then Russia. I guess since he is special it doesn't matter what those countries do to their own citizens.

Except for the fact that Northrop had no space business to speak of until they bought TRW a couple of years ago exactly for that reason. And that was for satellites. The others are right. It is a new market and Northrop wants a big piece of it. This is made more obvious by the fact that they had a 40 percent stake in the company originally.