Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
The lesson in all this? Stay in school.
Haha. Tell us another one. I don't have enough comedy in my life.
To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.