> Snowden used journalists (really just greenwald) to vet the documents.
It's a form of vetting, yes, but useful? Hard to say. It's also trusting a lot of information that could get people killed in someone's hands. Who's to say someone didn't pay Greenwald $10 million for a copy of all of it? You'd never be able to prove this happened unless they were really stupid about it.
> He did attempt to use internal channels.
The only thing I found regarding this was that he emailed a few "district heads" which, last time I did work in the area, don't really do anything. There is an actual, official channel to go through to reporting stuff like this (there are actually multiple; one for the NSA and one for the DoD in general). There are also more appropriate people he could have emailed.
Now I'm not saying internal channels would have worked but I haven't seen anything that showed me Snowden really tried hard to go through those channels in the first place.
> His original intent was not to go to russia, it was a last resort.
China is also not the greatest place to go. Honestly anywhere outside of a SCIF and you could get picked up by interested parties. But since he did go to China and Russia we have no way of knowing if both of those countries have a full copy of his data or not.
"Snowden used journalists (really just greenwald) to vet the documents."
But isn't that the crux of the problem?
Let us assume the best about Snowden: that he did do this for noble reasons, that he was acting on his own initiative, that he did attempt to restrict the documents he took to those dealing with unethical or unconstitutional espionage that a fair and impartial Inspector General or similar authorized party should have reviewed.
What happened if something completely unrelated (but classified) was also in the dump (say, information about Russian nuclear forces or Pakistani cooperation with a terrorist group) that ended up being vetted not by him (in an authorized facility prior to his flight) but by Greenwald or another journalist (out in the wild)?
At that point, regardless of his intentions, he has disclosed classified information to a non-authorized party and has broken the law.
At that point, whistleblowing has nothing to do with it.
Note, I'm not arguing against a pardon for Snowden-as-whistleblower. I simply think that such a vetting argument doesn't hold water.
It's a form of vetting, yes, but useful? Hard to say. It's also trusting a lot of information that could get people killed in someone's hands. Who's to say someone didn't pay Greenwald $10 million for a copy of all of it? You'd never be able to prove this happened unless they were really stupid about it.
> He did attempt to use internal channels.
The only thing I found regarding this was that he emailed a few "district heads" which, last time I did work in the area, don't really do anything. There is an actual, official channel to go through to reporting stuff like this (there are actually multiple; one for the NSA and one for the DoD in general). There are also more appropriate people he could have emailed.
Now I'm not saying internal channels would have worked but I haven't seen anything that showed me Snowden really tried hard to go through those channels in the first place.
> His original intent was not to go to russia, it was a last resort.
China is also not the greatest place to go. Honestly anywhere outside of a SCIF and you could get picked up by interested parties. But since he did go to China and Russia we have no way of knowing if both of those countries have a full copy of his data or not.