Your needlessly inflammatory hypothetical example is irrelevant in this case. Snowden did not; no matter whose rhetoric one accepts uncritically, perform an act

Your needlessly inflammatory hypothetical example is irrelevant in this case. Snowden did not; no matter whose rhetoric one accepts uncritically, perform an act of violence. And most people's moral calculus admits the concept of the balance of harms; whereby an acts benefits to the public at large or the victims of an evildoer outweigh the harms to the evildoer of having it's evil actions revealed to the world. That the US government is acting as we might expect rather than allowing a congressional investigation into these clearly unconstitutional programs and the legal smokescreen that was designed to prevent any challenge to their legality; is not an advertisement for it's good faith towards the citizenry.