All whistleblowers exposing everything and anything should be executed for a crime?
First you have to realize the NSA has been collecting all electronic emissions worldwide since the 1950s. All - including US landline phone calls. Everything. Doing and finding things in all that traffic is another problem which the advent of computers in the 60s helped sort.
Eddy Snowjob was not a so-called whistle blower. He only ‘exposed’ what had been public knowledge for 45-50 years, had been written about in various articles and books. That people had forgotten or never knew is on them (you).
He worked for the Chinese. He exposed all the Methods, Means the US used for Intel collection offshore. He exposed the team names, duties, missions objectives, personal names, addresess of people working overseas to collect Intel - many were executed as a result.
When the Chinese were done with him, the kicked him out and he sought refuge in the Russian embassy in Beijing from were he was taken to Russia. He gave them the same info; that info was later distributed to Iran, ISIS, and AQ.
What damage he did to the US Intel community was incalculable - all the millions and billions used to create Methods, Means, and recruit the human operatives was destroyed; then more millions and billions had to be used to recreate as mush as possible. He is right up there in the top foreign spies with the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and Co. He effectively crippled critical US Intel gathering for years.
Do you think that the meta data collection exposure of your phone calls was worth all that destruction, when you could have learned about it all from a trip to the local library decades ago?