> Many people believe Snowden's tradeoff was right. Any my assertion is that the people who believe that do not understand the trades that Snowden made, but in

> Many people believe Snowden's tradeoff was right. Any my assertion is that the people who believe that do not understand the trades that Snowden made, but instead think that because Snowden punched the boogeyman, anything else Snowden could be responsible for is mitigated completely. I'm not saying we should hang Snowden from the yardarm, but it would be nice if people would at least acknowledge the negative repercussions that we know of today, and the possibly much more negative repercussions that have yet to be revealed, and weigh that into their calculus somewhere. The fact is that NSA is still around, will continue to be around, will continue to collect information overseas, will continue to be able to collect information domestically (albeit under more policy controls), and all of this was completely predictable when Snowden flew out of Hawai'i for the last time. Was everything else that came with it worth it? Playing populist politics to try and drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. (just prior to Putin's heel turn with Ukraine, no less)... was that and everything else worth it? And someone please explain, why was it not possible to simply leak the civil liberties concerns such as phone metadata, AND NOTHING ELSE? He'd still have "started the debate", no? Why did he steal Tier 3 information that he's only leaked to China (and no other journalists) up to this point?