1. Removing plausible deniability. "Well we might be deeply involved in domestic surveillance but we certainly don't do it outside the US!". The laws that enabled the NSA to do the surveillance were attributed to accessing data that traveled outside the US.
2. Demonstrating the power and reach for legitimacy/plausibility.
I'm sure I can come up with more than the first 2 minutes it took to assemble this post.
2. No one was really questioning the plausibility or legitimacy of the documents Snowden released (there was some challenges on the interpretation of those documents) and revealing unconfirmed and unrelated intelligence operations does nothing to confirm the information about the domestic operations that he released.
Your assurances that you know what the NSA (or proxy) would reason is laughable, for example. You have a view that he's a bad actor and it doesn't matter to me, other than it's a trivial thought experiment to justify his actions. GL
Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights. If he leaked documents about operations against Americans, and then also about operations against foreigners, in my mind he did the same thing twice.
If there was another difference, like spilling the location or identity of a person likely to be at risk, please spell that out. I have yet to see an example.
That is what I am talking about as a "perfectly acceptable political opinion", but it is not an opinion that is based off any laws. Almost no mainstream political figure would share that opinion and therefore if that is the basis of Snowden's arguments, it isn't a wonder why he was treated harshly by the mainstream political system. Foreign spying is an accepted aspect of modern life. I totally understand if you think that spying in unethical. But Snowden would have been received much more favorable if he simply focused on the domestic spying operations which are largely unpopular rather than also revealing the foreign operations which are mostly accepted as necessary by the general population.
Snowden’s leaks clearly benefitted adversaries of the NSA:
* domestic global powers such as goog and fb were able to lock down their customer data, which has the downside of shifting unchecked power to those entities
* foreign powers of the us now had confirmed intel on usa’s global intelligence gathering playbook and adjusted accordingly
Additionally, we can perhaps gain insight to any potential upsides or downsides of the proliferation of civil libertarianism that is directly attributable to the actions of Ed Snowden. I do believe personally that the first global superpower (whether the CIA and Google, China, etc) that obtains a way to break all current encryption (and has all of the pcaps) will have a huge upper hand in understanding social effects of this movement of the late 2010’s.
They said the same thing about Chelsea Manning, then in her trial the prosecution finally admitted that they couldn't actually point to any casualties.
Because many of the spying actions were against Americans. Did you not read the leaks?
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/13/snowden-nsa-sy...
Ok, but many were. Therefore it is a problem.
And spying on Americans is something that many people have a problem with.