Back in the real world …Snowden's actions were reckless, illegal and unwarranted. He should be jailed and then tried for criminal actions if he ever sets foot on American soil again.
The role of the whistle blower is to expose wrong doing - but in the context of top secret government action - whistle blowers must recognize that they do not have full knowledge about the impact of disclosing this secret information - and thus, a responsible course of action would be to expose this information to all members of congress cleared to view the information (some subset of which will almost certainly be receptive to taking responsible measures to curtail said action - even if motivated only by potential political gain).
if he’d done that , he’d have dithering, clueless congresspeople trying to work out their ‘angle’, whilst the NSA would have tracked him down as they dithered. The information would be suppressed, he would be thrown in jail sans key, and the US people would be none the wiser at the illegality and/or subterfuge of the mass trawling of their own citizens private lives and data.
Congress turned a blind eye on decades of overreach, Snowden sending the info to them would be… useless.
until you can come up with a different extremely high chance of success scenario where Snowden could pass on this information to US citizens, that doesn’t involve him being hung drawn and quartered due to the uselessness of others, then I’ll go with ‘snowden did the right thing, by doing it in the only way he could survive’
the ‘illegality’ started with the NSA programs, the ‘reckless’ came from the NSA finding they could do almost anything with zero oversight, and finally ‘unwarranted’ - yeah I’d say they probably obtained that information unwarranted…
with regard to the ‘foreign’ surveillance, then that’s generally fine and dandy, as everyone knows everyone else does it. It just usually involves a bit of chest thumping when the survielled finds out as a need for PR/looking tough.
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