I'm suspicious of his primary motivation being a distaste of global mass surveillance. This passage is especially damning: > Snowden would later publicly claim

I'm suspicious of his primary motivation being a distaste of global mass surveillance. This passage is especially damning: > Snowden would later publicly claim that his "breaking point" - the final impetus for his unauthorised downloads and disclosures of troves of classified material - was March 2013 congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. > But only a few weeks after his conflict with NSA managers, on July 12, 2012 - eight months before Director Clapper's testimony - Snowden began the unauthorized, mass downloading of information from NSA networks. Given that Snowden claimed his motivation was seeing Clapper "lie on oath", there's some irony in seeing Snowden caught in a lie about this claim, as at that point not only had he already downloaded and exfiltrated much of what he later leaked, but had already been in contact with Greenwald and Poitras for two to three months.