You've made friendly comments about my comments here on HN before, so I'll make a friendly comment here about yours. I have noticed that you consistently view Snowden as a hero, but I respectfully disagree. It would take more electrons than the margins of one HN comment could contain (and more time than I have with my work responsibilities today) to explain how I think Edward Snowden could have revealed the same key facts more responsibly, but even though I largely agree that it's good for the public to know more about what NSA was doing and how NSA was characterizing what it was doing to Congress, I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure ("whistle-blowing"). I think Snowden over the last year has been just as sincerely but ultimately mistakenly misguided as Kim Philby[1] was in the 1960s. Snowden appears to think that he has made the world and his native country a better place on a net basis, and he may even be right about what will happen to his native country as a result of his disclosures, but I think he is mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole. That's all I have time to say about this at the moment, but I want to put that out there as an American who has lived under real tyranny[2] before and has observed how tyranny is overcome by people power.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720