I'm OK with whistleblowing of illegal actions performed by secret services (enough of this sh*t!). Though I don't know whether he's right regarding the illegality of NSA's actions.
This is public knowledge but never spoken about, Snowden was looking for years [0] to find something to leak. He didn't stumble across this and have an overwhelming moral urge to do "the right thing."
I'll take the very unpopular opinion: I have a very strong feeling he is almost completely wrong in what he thinks he knows. [1]
[0] If you read the timeline you will see this. I'm looking for better sources, as I read it directly, but can't find at the moment. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/timeline-edward-snowdens-life/...
[1] This tone of feeling wronged and spied upon is borne of complete ignorance. http://news.yahoo.com/edward-snowden-completely-wrong-104432...
I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint and I think the entire reporting by The Guardian/Greenwald has been shit. Greenwald does not appear technically competent in the slightest and there's no mention in the reporting I've seen of anyone with any technical knowledge being involved and so we simply have no idea what is in the 'thousands' of documents that Snowden has taken. And neither does Greenwald.
The complete lack of any standard for evidence here, so long as it confirms preconceived notions, has been stupefying. People trotting out his high pay as proof of competence, when in any other context such an argument would be considered so stupid that it's beyond need of retort. His flimsy and dubious claims about being able to expose every secret of the entire intelligence community sound so unbelievable that no competent engineer could accept them. And the slides themselves -- for fuck's sake they say, at a maximum, almost nothing actionable. Do we even know if those were created by the NSA, or by Booz contractors?
A sober, rational look at his claims would have to yield the conclusion that he's confused about what he thinks he knows. He certainly sounds like it.
This is intelligence, where misdirection and outright deception are ways of life. Why should we take anything he--or what anyone involved in this--says at face value?
An excerpt from this article (http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/edward-snowden-is-co...):
> Baker says the government built in as many controls and oversights as it could think of. “Two different presidents from two different parties with very different perspectives. Two different Intelligence committees led by two different parties. A dozen judges chosen from among the life-appointed judiciary. None of them thought this was legally problematic,” Baker says. “And one guy says, ‘Yeah, I disagree, so I’m going to blow it up.’ If the insistence is, ‘It only satisfies me if it’s out in public,’ then we’re not talking about intelligence-gathering. We’re not even talking about law enforcement. We’re talking about research. And I’m not sure you can run a large country in a dangerous world just by doing open-source research.”
> Other advocates of the NSA operation say the sheer vastness of the program is what helps shield citizens. “Individuals are protected by the anonymity granted by the quantity of information,” says Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor. “It’s just too difficult to spy on such a vast number of people in a way that’s meaningful.”