| Snowden was even willing to burn his future career, as he took a job with Booz Allen Hamilton with the sole purpose of leaking as much information as he could get his hands on. As an admin at BAH he was using his colleagues' passwords for discovery. He was willing to burn their careers to hack access to more leaks. So much leaks that he could not vet these all. This was no Ellsberg tasked with copying some confidential papers and reading lies in them. It was wholesale collection of all Snowden could get his hands on. Then, instead of making his point with his own whistleblower findings, he went to journalists and handed them over all the documents, instantly making them available to intelligence agencies all over the world, burning all NSA/CIA analysts with records in the dump (for instance, everyone who contributed to Intellipedia, which had zero reason to be in a dump meant for whistleblower purposes). Then instead of facing justice (and there are whistleblower protections for doing the right thing), he cooperated with Wikileaks and fled to China and Russia, causing a permanent PR disaster for US intelligence with his new public speakings, book deals, and social media influencing career. The reason Snowden's leaks got a lot of attention is that they "proved" (we never got confirmation that they were real) that data on Americans is being collected. We already knew, by law, that the Americans are allowed to fully spy on European civilians. That's how they are able to warn on impending terrorist attacks and improve their buy-in with European countries leadership (or how they are able to perfectly copy Germany-invented motors or Belgium-invented speech-to-text technology before these countries are even building it, because a strong US economy is a matter of national security). |
I think it was pretty well understood at the time that the Obama administration could not be dependant on upholding whistle blower protections.