The hearing was dealing with the wider topic of whistle blowing both in relation to governments and multi-national corporations. Snowden was offering testimony on his specific circumstances and on what protections should be offered to whistle blowers. The committee memo is here http://whistlenetwork.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/as-jur-201...

Interesting that Pieter Omtzigt, the Dutch committee member, seemed to suggest in his comments at the end that technical problems with the video link to Snowden might be related to interference by an outside party. He also commented that the committee had tried to facilitate Snowden's attendance in person but seemed to imply that the UK and Germany had blocked the attempt.

There was also a member of a whistle blower's support organisation (I forget the name) who had some interesting comments at the end about the challenge of protecting whistleblowers at multinationals who may not have protection in their own country but who may be releasing information of importance to another country's citizens eg: say a German company poisoning a river in South America but the German employee does not have whistleblower protection in their own country.