While I agree with your overall summary, I find it odd that you skip the issue of whether he had special access/ability or is just just one contractor among a group of essentially all NSA employees and contractors given access to a library of all of this information (as stated in a previous article.)

Given the NSAs general behavior and the nature of the Snowden leak in comparison to Manning's, I believe it is more credible that they have virtually everything at a single (and lowest) clearance and compartment, so this:

> If I had to guess, the most likely outcome here is going to be that we are talking about someone with very serious mental health issues who NSA had no business putting within 1000 miles of the information he managed to hoard in his house.

Is simultaneously true and a deflection from how incredibly inevitable this was and how incredibly incompetent they are as an institution. I am all for splitting their capabilities across existing agencies where it makes sense and cancelling programs all together where it doesn't.