Other commenters have voiced objections to various bits of this argument which I won't repeat, but I want to highlight a point that is extremely important in ca

Other commenters have voiced objections to various bits of this argument which I won't repeat, but I want to highlight a point that is extremely important in cases like Snowden; we agree that his action was unlawful, but this says little about it being immoral when the relevant laws are condoning immoral behavior. He certainly did things that in general people shouldn't do, and that the law doesn't allow for; but he did them for reasons that, we'd contend, outweigh the reasons he shouldn't have. Absolutely, the law doesn't work in a "does the good outweigh the bad" fashion, but morality often does (namely, if we ascribe to the view of moral utilitarianism, which is extremely popular both in everyday intuition and academic philosophical circles.) So morally speaking, there isn't necessarily a serious problem with Snowden or Manning's grab-everything approach, either- the damage from what they shouldn't have released can be judged less important than the benefit from what they wouldn't have made available if they were going more carefully. Snowden getting pardoned would be an individual act of some politician(s) intervening on the legal system, and different from institutionalized whistleblower protection as discussed in the article. The latter is an attempt to get the law back into sync with morality, both directly and through allowing a legal channel for individuals to spur changes to existing immoral systems. There's definitely a tension between whistleblower protection programs that would satisfy both the demands of morally-minded government agents and also the necessities of secrecy-centric government capabilities.