> I want him to continue leaking this information.
Hasn't he repeatedly said that it's already all leaked? His friends on the outside would be able to hold the threat of that against the U.S. government, especially if he were mistreated in prison.
> One of his main goals for leaking all this is that the public had no idea of our laws because they were created in secret courts.
The public may have no idea of the laws, but it's not because they come from secret courts. The law itself has given the executive the power being used here. Metadata collection itself is legal (for decades), and so is collection of foreign surveillance (again, for decades).
The only difference now is that the extra controls added to the modern equivalents of ECHELON, Carnivore, etc. have convinced the FISC that they comply with the public law where previous versions did not, but the FISC did not create any law by themselves.
I think you far overestimate the give-a-shit of the public at large to things like this. The public is accustomed from years of wiretaps, pen registers, cell phone tower searches, TV shows, subpoenas, and the fact that the NSA and CIA have existed for and been doing stuff like this for decades into assuming that there is some way for government investigators to get their hands on exactly this kind of data.
Just look at the arraignment for Aaron Hernandez. Why should people be shocked that the government can get your Facebook likes given what they were able to find about the murder of Lloyd within only a week.
At this point Snowden is only hurting his cause by making the story about himself and not about how the government has surveillance ability that is different in scale, if not actually in kind. The longer he drifts in with organizations that the public you're referring to feel are threats and enemies, the less likely it is that the same public will trust the message he's trying to convey.