I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," wit

I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article bad. I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off. "They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.