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> WRONG - He has stated many times that he did approach all manner of "Oversight" people who basically told him to shut up. What happened to Tomas Drake and the others who tired the insider approach - nothing ever came of it.

Then why not bring proof? 1.5 million documents and he can't bring the emails he sent? No, we saw the emails (that is to say, one email: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...) that were sent to OGC, and nothing in them indicated he was raising any concerns.

> How do you verify this? you can't

He took 1.5 million documents and we've seen what, maybe 100-200 documents and slides over the course of three years? What's the other 1,499,800 million classified documents about?

> Meanwhile the NSA was illegally infringing the privacy of almost 310 million americans

Fine, if he had only taken documents pertaining to his qualms then there would have been a much greater chance of him being labeled a whistleblower or at least be met with some leniency even if he didn't in fact follow the proper channels.

> the activities were NOT lawful (as in legally defensible when challenged in a court), they were not overseen by anyone and some of them were unrelated to intelligence.

1,499,800 documents that likely have absolutely zero to do with what he was supposed to be blowing the whistle on.

Have these documents been released? Do you know under what extenuating circumstances he was under when he collected these documents? What's your point?

My point is how do you pardon someone for whistleblowing when literally 99.99% of what they took from a classified space has nothing to do with what they were supposedly blowing the whistle on?

If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.

In any case, it's already been established that he broke the law in order to expose a much greater law breaking, but many if not most people believe it to be OK because we also believe that it was impossible to expose the information in any other way. Considering all the miss-steps most whistleblowers made in their activities, Snowden was remarkably careful and clean. He made some calculations on what he needed to collect to successfully expose the crimes he witnessed, and the accuracy of those calculations is up for debate. I could easily come up with several reasons why he might have thought that he needed all those documents while under duress. For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working. Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.

> If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.

The dude planned this for years, he said it himself. He had plenty of time to simply take evidence of what he was going to blow the whistle on. I don't understand your argument.

> impossible to expose the information in any other way

Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.

> For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working.

If I understand your argument correctly, it's: "it's possible something here is illegal so let's just take all of it." I shouldn't have to explain why that doesn't jive.

> Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.

None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.

> Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.

That is absolutely not true. There is plenty of evidence that he tried to report to several superiors. Read the accounts yourself.

> None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.

If he was looking to dump documents on china and russia for fun and profit, why exactly would he go through the rigamarole of working with the guardian, making an ethical issue out of it, spending tons of time meeting with various celebrities and dignitaries, doing talks, writing essays, and crafting a remarkably coherent and complex false narrative. That sounds about as far fetched as most things that get labeled conspiracy theories. He'd have to be one serious double agent to pull all that off.

It's not reasonable to expect him to look at 1.5 million documents individually to only take what he needs.

Also, access to file repositories is not the same as access to email servers.

"Doublespeak" doesn't mean "statements I disagree with" or even "statements that are incorrect". There is nothing vague about the language in this letter.

Conflating "lawful" with "impossible to prosecute" definitely qualifies as doublespeak.

Does anyone know who signed that? Those signatures are impossible to decipher.

There are 22 members of the committee (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/HLIG), but I count 23 signatures. Did Paul Ryan or Nancy Pelosi sign it as well?

From a quick check, it appears that every member of the committee signed it. I don't know who the 23rd signature is from.