Let's see.
Snowden has revealed that private US companies are supplying metadata - metadata that tracks effectively all citizens - to the NSA, and which the NSA is then using for analysis.
Is this a violation of the 4th Amendment? This is highly debatable. We freely give our service providers information about ourselves. They freely repackage and sell this data to other companies. And now we learn they apparently offer it to the US government as well.
This is, arguably, the good that Snowden has done.
What else has he done?
He stole information from the US about intelligence programs that the US is running on Red China, Russia, EU countries and others.
He fled with this data to Red China.
He then provided a Red Chinese newspaper with independent confirmation of US hacking of China, a perfect propaganda victory for Red China.
Then he was allowed to leave Hong Kong - and do not imagine he was allowed to leave without China copying all of his data.
He then went to Russia, where you can be sure he was not allowed into the country without transferring all his data to the FSB.
At that point, he released more information about US intelligence operations in Europe, creating more damage for the US abroad.
Now he is threatening to blackmail the US with further disclosures unless he gets a free pass on the crimes of theft and espionage he has already committed.
His partner in all this is the anti-American Wikileaks organization.
Unless one is allowing President Obama to live rent-free in one's head, a normal person would have concluded by now that Snowden is a spy, in the employ of foreign powers, blackmailing his own country and embarrassing the US over a domestic surveillance program which may not even be illegal in order to cover his tracks and evade capture.
Look if any agency in our government needs to run Spook Ops it should be one with the highest accountability, no political agenda meaning politically neutral, and the ones operating it under the strictest disciple which exceeds any civilian alphabet agency. The Pentagon specifically the military {not the civilians} should be running INTEL gathering operations and discern then act upon actual threats.
Do I trust political appointees in positions like this? No! Do I think alphabet agencies leak like sieves and are highly political agenda motivated in nature? Yes. If the program was so darn critical to national security WTH was it doing being ran in such a manner?
The GOP-E must oppose the data collection period.....
They are too busy shouting “security” and “traitor” to hear what many of us are saying out here??????