To me Snowden's story looks like a ‘meta-issue’, arguably even more important. There might be more problems in addition to what he helped uncover, but whether

To me Snowden's story looks like a ‘meta-issue’, arguably even more important. There might be more problems in addition to what he helped uncover, but whether they are voiced might depend on what happens to Snowden. You wouldn't halt QA process until you fix a critical security issue in your production system, especially if the fix might take some time. You'd probably be paying even more attention to improving bug visibility after such an incident, to make sure other problems are noticed in time.