I'm mildly surprised you can't process why many in the United States (including myself) praise Snowden. The United States is a country founded on distrust of p

I'm mildly surprised you can't process why many in the United States (including myself) praise Snowden. The United States is a country founded on distrust of power. Nevertheless, it is a state, and its function is to protect its citizens through monopoly of force. That tension is central to our political consciousness. Sometimes people argue that "secrecy" is required to fulfill the duties of the state. Secrecy is required, sometimes, but secrecy requires trust, and trusting the powerful is not something we do. If we 'must', then we demand checks to prevent its abuse. In the mythos of the United States, the government (county, state, federal, doesn't matter) is always viewed as a potential threat. America-worshiping morons notwithstanding, there is a deep moral undercurrent in this country that views the state as intrinsically corrupt, simply because it has power. Many felt that the Snowden leaks showed that whatever mechanisms were supposed to be in place to check overreach by a potential enemy were not functioning. People who view Snowden as a hero believe that he was fulfilling his duty as a citizen to his fellow citizens. If you wonder why someone might be paranoid about their own government in the 21st century, I think its sufficient to point out that governments killed several orders of magnitude more of their own citizens in the 20th century than they did foreign citizens in wars. I personally believe that a turn to an unchecked security state in the United States is a bigger threat to my children and children's children than a war with China (or wherever), and a vastly larger threat than "terrorism". I hope that helps clarify why a reasonable citizen of the United States might be at least ambivalent towards leaks. Also I hope its clear that this is a discussion about what is fundamentally a fiction: the people (myself in particular) have a bullshit narrative about governments and corruptions and heroes, you have some bullshit narrative about spies and the CIA. Both are very thinly connected to reality, because the reality we're describing is vast and overwhelmingly complicated. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have any well-researched constructive suggestions about what I would do to fix the mechanisms of verification that should be in place to check secrecy in our security apparatus. But this isn't a conversation about mechanisms and policies, it's one about narrative, and one compelling narrative in the United States is that we owe our duty to our compatriots not the government, and government is always the first and most likely place to look for something evil.