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Definitely about making Snowden an example. It's in the gov't's interest to make the cost of leaking high to discourage future leakers.

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Ironically, what they're actually doing is showing that leaking can cause them to make disastrous decisions. How many more Snowdens will it take before the US irreparably damages itself? From the looks of things, not that many more.

Obama saying on national TV "we only target foreign entities [without a warrant]" is enough irreparable damage to the US internet industry.

No non-US entity is ever going to give high-value confidential data to Google, GMail users, Android phones, AWS, companies hosted on AWS, Apple, iPhones, or Skype ever again.

Even if NSA swears up and down that they've stopped spying, how could we ever know if they're lying? (We already know they're more than willing to lie under oath.)

Yea, and this was just one Snowden. Imagine if another popped up with some other program we don't know about. They'd likely get even more frantic and take an even bigger gauge shotgun to their feet. I have to imagine that inspires whistleblowers at least as much as it scares them.

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