> The fact is that anyone with half a brain should have known decades ago that the US government, like all governments, does all kinds of surveillance [...] Be

> The fact is that anyone with half a brain should have known decades ago that the US government, like all governments, does all kinds of surveillance [...] Before Snowden you could say that TLAs were surely reading everything, but no one took that seriously -- "what a tinfoil hatter" might have been their internal response. After Snowden we all know that TLAs are reading everything. > Also, while it's perfectly reasonable for ordinary citizens to question what level of surveillance is justified and what kind of information the public should get to see in order to hold the government accountable, it's not reasonable for an individual to just decide on his own that it's OK to violate the law [...] Indeed. Yet it happened, and now we have to decide if what Snowden did is good or bad, and that's not as easy as it is to determine that he broke the law. Another case like Snowden's that of the former head of the NSA, Admiral Rogers, who visited the President elect to tell him (many presume) that he was being wiretapped. Was that breaking the law? Almost certainly -- surely it must be illegal to tell the target of a secret FISA warrant that they are being monitored, though in this case it wasn't the President-elect, but someone in his campaign, but still, telling must have revealed things which it would not be legal to. Was it good? That depends on a great deal on your political views. And even if what Admiral Rogers did turns out to have been legal, you might still think it was bad. Snowden clearly broke the law, perhaps even committed treason as defined by the U.S. Constitution. But so did the Founders (they inarguably committed treason against the Crown). Breaking the law is not necessarily enough to make an action bad, and sometimes it's more than enough to make it good. As to Snowden, I think the metaphorical jury is still out.