He put his life on the line to let other people (us) know about what was happening. He gave us the option to choose our fate. That’s more than anyone in the government did for us.
We chose to do very little, but that’s in us.
If the people in power don't like people like Snowden shining a light on their crimes, maybe they shouldn't be committing those crimes to begin with. There needs to be proper congressional oversight of these things. When that doesn't exist, it becomes the duty of the individual people involved in the government to inform the people about what the government is doing, and that's exactly what Snowden did. Not eagerly, and he paid a heavy price for it, but he recognised it as necessary and did what needed to be done.
I guess we watch different Bond movies when you have guys like Kim Jong-un running some shows out there, having concentration camps and killing their brothers with nerve agents on the airports
Building an informant culture in your populace and threatening collective gulagging on the rebel's family doesn't quite have the same flair as tying the rebel to a table with a slow moving laser aimed at his junk. Do you expect me to talk? No Mr Bond! I expect you to die!
I think given how it affected the public debate, he should certainly be given leniency if not pardon. But that is not to say he did nothing wrong.
When the head of the organisation commits federal crimes without reproach(he was not prosecuted after the details were revealed), who are you supposed to report to except the public?
But he had already been taking documents by the time Clapper got in front of Congress according to the unclassified house intelligence report on Snowden.
The intelligence services have a difficult task, they need to be on top of their game so they need to know everything and try to prevent problems snowballing unless its not particularly harmful and could be quite educational for future improvement. You have a blank sheet of paper, what would you do to maintain or reduce harm to society?
I say this as someone who has met Andrew Parker, Stella Rimmington and Jonathon Evans and is wise to their ways but not someone who has signed the official secrets but has arguably an "autistic" interest in secrecy and quantifying all walks of life.
A) Please don't use autism as a slur, and
B) Please don't imply that if someone cares about privacy, it's because their brain works differently. Hold yourself to a higher standard of argument.
That's not how modern democratic society can and should work though
The punishment of Snwoden cannot be determined as long as there is no consequence and assesment for the misbehavior of agencies. You cannot determine whether it was justified to leak the info if the crimes committed were not investigated. It is a basic protection allegation to focus the discussion on the misbehavior of Snowden.
This is the same in every case government abuse. Don't defend Snowden, accuse the agencies in question instead. Because that is the topic. The defense will build itself. Other approaches will fail as they did so often before. It doesn't matter if justified or not. So the question about leniency is the wrong one.
In Brazil what we now have I can't describe another way if not societal insanity, all the real problems are probably "too much", too complex, people have decided to stop facing them and decided regressing to fetish, cliches, downright modern superstitions instead. Some weeks ago an Avengers comic with a gay kiss panel generated more commotion than a 8 year old shot by police(which in itself would be a sign of the obvious much bigger systemic problems we're not properly dealing with. We're all fucked.
This is addressed in the book.
* Removed the target from his back. At this point, all his value is "to be made of an example" not "a former operative with incredibly sensitive information, potentially worth neutralizing"
* Recused himself from being a political player like Assange wanted to be.
Also, who says he is a good judge to make the right call for each document?
Journalists can do a far far better job of responsibly handling the material, with enough time, resources and expertise to investigate the material, even get in touch with the government, etc.
Doing it personally would've been incredibly irresponsible and actually a power-play for personal gain not whistle-blowing for the better.
One might argue that any damage to intelligence interests is superceded by the public's interests in learning about abuses, but had he made a more targeted leak collateral damage might not have been an issue.
Trusting journalists to do the job is a cop out. He took the action of taking the documents, then foisted responsibility on someone else. And make no mistake, intelligence services spy on journalists and have compromised journalists. Snowden had no way of knowing whether other intelligence agencies could get to what he gave the various media outlets. Even some carelessness on their part could have revealed secrets to others.
It was Chelsea Manning who a did dump without reading them first.
Imagine that the year is 1942 and someone leaks you a stack of bookkeeping records from some german labor camp in poland. In it, the records account for gassing prisoners by the truckload, but to your eyes it's all just just the cryptic numbers and administrative filler of any complex bureaucracy. To make any sense of it, you need many layers back of the surrounding documentation-- not just to establish what you're looking at, but to establish what you're not looking at. Communication that shows that the data is real, not an exercise, that the prisoners are being killed rather than that the accounting is just covering deaths from natural causes, that it's really a big intentional program sponsored from on-high and not just a fluke where a local administrator or two went nuts.
Without a wealth of supporting material it would be easy to dismiss Snowden's reports as "sure well, there was some overreach here and there. It wasn't officially sanctioned and the relevant parties have been sacked, James Clapper had no idea and did not perjure himself and we haven't been systematically lying to the public for a decade." In a world where the NSA was accountable to the public, Snowden would only have to reveal enough to force them to account and disclose and continued inquiry would unearth the rest. But we do not live in that world: The NSA's actions are not open to public inquiry. One shot is all we got for any real transparency into the mass surveillance apparatus. Consider the byzantine dismissals that Jewel v. NSA experienced. ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-... )
It seemed pretty obvious to me that Snowden purposefully obfuscated what documents he took by accessing everything-- a fact you seem to have exploited in a number of posts to exaggerate the scope of the documents he took, according to our best understanding of his actions per the journalists he worked with-- in order to create a situation where the administration's ability to tell additional lies to cover up the situation would be limited by the risk that somewhere in the stash Snowden had a document which blew the latest lie apart.
For another example: There is an absurd number of patents filed on most of the technical tools being used for the mass surveillance on the internet-- and their feature sets often end up leaked in product documentation and internet standards. They're not even particularly well hidden, some with co-authors who's linked in pages brag about their TS/SCI and work in intelligence... Yet, pre-snowden, people pointing to this wealth of details even combined with first hand accounts of how it was deployed, were just treated like kooks. Without the ability to open a real inquiry it isn't enough to prove that something suspicious is up, the proof must be utterly overwhelming to have a meaningful effect.
Norwegian newspapers backtracked and apologised for writing articles exposing Norwegian participation in illegal metadata monitoring, arguing that the monitoring that for all of the other parties involved was about domestic monitoring in Norway's case for some reason was about Afghanistan.
Had it not been for the amount of surrounding context, the lies would have been believable. Even then it took the then head of military security to step up and make claims about operational issues in military security that they never talk about, to draw attention away from the vague denials of the police security service.
But the sheer amount of data, coupled with the revelation that the US itself captured full recordings of the same conversations that Norwegian surveillance supposedly captured valuable metadata about made it stand out as a ludicrous cover-up.
And still the newspapers did not dare challenge it even with all the extra details.
As it stands, Snowden released too little - even with all the material he did provide, it was still something that proved possible to sufficiently deflect from that it had shockingly little impact.
A way to store information outside, and maybe think about it and how to use it to have an effect on policies without causing the source to suffer. Stealth hack in a way.
Whether or not you feel that is feasible or appropriate is, ultimately, going to require insider knowledge and experience. While I do have some experience with BAH (painfully apathetic[0]), I've never worked for the NSA so I can't say whether that is a plausible alternative to Snowden's action.
[0] - FWIW, we had a number of employees passing out promotional religious literature around the office. I'd raised some concern about it, basically should we be worried about legal trouble, and was told to keep my concerns to myself. Among the reasons I didn't last a month in that circle of hell.