I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults become more extreme when their moderate members leave....
Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.
I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.
The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.
"I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.
Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years.
The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.