I personally think setting up the kinds of mass surveillance systems in the United States that both the Gestapo and the STASI would have salivated over is funda

I personally think setting up the kinds of mass surveillance systems in the United States that both the Gestapo and the STASI would have salivated over is fundamentally un-Constitutional and the people who did it and lied about it deserve serious investigation and probably prison sentences. Also the whole "Russia fixed the 2016 election" line is nonsense. The real issue was that the neoliberal economic policies championed for decades by Team Clinton devastated this huge region of American now known as "The Rust Belt" and it was disenchanted voters in that region that flipped the election to Trump (not that he did anything to reverse those policies, of course). Without the Rust Belt flip, Clinton would have easily won. Incidentally Obama's diehard 2016 TPP promotion was a major factor in that outcome, not that any Democrat wants to admit it. As far as why the Democrats pushed "Russia did it" so hard, it's because in normal politics, such a devastating lost to a reality TV clown would have led to a shake-up in party leadership, and that would have meant FDR-style Democrats taking over leadership positions, but that's not what the financial oligarchs who control media and the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party wanted, hence Russia nonsense. Of course the 'intelligence community' got on board, because conflict with Russia is good for keeping the bloated budgets intact. Also, the USA neocon crowd on the Republican side has been pushing for war with Russia since about 2003, when Putin rejected joining the petrodollar recycling club, as per Saudi Arabia. If he had, i.e. if Russian oil money was banked with Wall Street, there'd never have been the 2008 Georgia war or the 2014 Ukraine coup, and if Russia had invaded Ukraine, it'd have been treated just like the Saudi war on Yemen. Notably the one thing Snowden couldn't get from his position is the budgetary outlay of the NSA, i.e. just how much money went to all the private contractors and their hangers-on. Pork city no doubt. Snowden exposed a lot of gross corruption and un-Constitutional behavior within the US government, that's undeniable. He deserves complete amnesty and a medal for good citizenship.