It is generally accepted that at least some of the activities Snowden was concerned about were in fact illegal. Now, Snowden isn't a judge, nor would he have h

It is generally accepted that at least some of the activities Snowden was concerned about were in fact illegal. Now, Snowden isn't a judge, nor would he have had complete knowledge of what was going on. He couldn't have known for sure that the activities were illegal. But, unless you take the view that Snowden maliciously revealed activities he actually believed were legal, he at least had reasonable suspicions that they weren't. The job of somebody to whom whistleblowers report is to take that seriously. Perhaps, in many cases, the reasonable suspicions are unfounded. Perhaps there is a byzantine legal framework in place that makes apparently illegal activity technical legal. Perhaps Snowden's concerns had already been raised by others through the proper channels, investigated, and found to be unfounded. Regardless of that, we know that in this case some of the things Snowden reported on were illegal, and that going by the "proper channels" did not result in illegal activity being detected and stopped. Unless we imagine that Snowden is lying about having tried to report it to the agency first, and that nobody else amongst the hundreds of thousands - speculatively: the true number is classified - of NSA employees and contractors had both the knowledge of illegal activity and enough concern about it to report it through the proper channels. Whatever the case. The part of the NSA that is tasked with detecting and preventing illegal operations hasn't done that for what appear to be some pretty big operations. Either it didn't care that the operations were illegal, it didn't know they were illegal, or it didn't even know they were happening. None of those possibilities reflect well on the watchdog.