It's a pity for him though that his situation doesn't seem to be negotiable. The de facto stance of America is that the revelations were not shocking enough to

It's a pity for him though that his situation doesn't seem to be negotiable. The de facto stance of America is that the revelations were not shocking enough to alter the status quo. So post-hoc one could imagine that the exposed NSA could have just been a transparent NSA from the start. But the way the story unfolded, despite not shocking the system deeply, he's still left playing the part of the traitor. He probably did make life more difficult for the NSA though, as I'm pretty sure a lot of people ramped up cybersecurity.