That's because he's a flash in the pan. He didn't even work for the NSA, he worked for a contractor. Any information he's entrusted to that Glenn Greenwald that has yet to be released, the NSA is already aware of. The NSA monitors all contract agencies and delegate work to them which may be classified, but issues of national security remain within agency.
He's not a hero but I don't consider him a criminal either. He gave people a blurry glimpse into the NSA's activities and now he's stuck doing IT work in Moscow. He'll never be able to leave Russia for the rest of his life unless a future president offers him a pardon. I don't think I'm the only person who already suspected the information in the Snowden links had been happening for a long time.
Was it worth it, Ed? You haven't changed shit, you've only generated discussions and a recent federal ruling disapproving of NSA spying techniques. Here's the thing, no amount of legislation short of the FISA court has any authority in telling the NSA what to do. Even going through that channel is a formality, FISA normally approves all surveillance requests presented.
The NSA's intelligence programs saves thousands of lives every year, foreign and domestic, from dangerous situations that you'll never hear about. This doesn't mean I approve of domestic data collection but since it can't be stopped, I choose to focus on defending myself from it when engaging in activities that are legally questionable and given that I'm a citizen, there's not much to worry about.
I won't trade security for privacy, instead, I'll take the security while continually refining strategies to protect my privacy.
This is what everyone who is worried about the NSA should really be worried about:
Local police departments have access to something called a Stingray, a $400,000 device that collects "tower dumps", information collected by a targeted cell tower or towers during a specified time frame, providing data on all traffic relayed through the tower. Numbers, dates, times, speech, text messages. It can even set up a sort of honeypot cell tower, tricking all devices in a certain radius to connect to it by default before the signal is relayed to a real cell tower. The equivalent of multiple real-time wireless wiretaps. This is what I want to protect myself against, not the NSA.
I want to protect myself from 24+ font size.
