>The fact that part of the government did something illegal in no way justifies undermining national security goals if those two are not related. If a governme

>The fact that part of the government did something illegal in no way justifies undermining national security goals if those two are not related. If a government does something illegal and actively works to prevent itself from being held accountable, it is justified in my opinion to make them accountable even at the cost of intangible inconvenience. You're operating under the assumption that a government should operate in secrecy, which in my opinion is bullshit - even for military and CIA activities, we should be transparent on non-granular scales. Obviously not releasing "hey we're going to mortar this coordinate at this time" but you probably get the idea. >He did release documents selectively, therefore he could have chosen to not release the foreign surveillance information. He released 200,000 documents. Millions of pages of information. I don't see how it can be argued he alone could have thoroughly vetted these documents to prevent unintentional leaks. And in his situation, I am sure he had to weigh the advantages of revealing illegal activities to the intangible and temporary inconvenience of only slightly less morally reprehensible spying programs. >In case you handn't noticed, other powerful states have no qualms about cyberwarefare. We shouldn't make our standards by comparing us to other countries. There are some pretty fucked up laws out there.