Which is odd, because I personally have not found any of the Snowden publications off topic or unnecessary. When I press these people about what they think shouldn't have been published, they always give me vague answers about "military secrets" and the like without citing anything specific.

So, when Snowden leaks those things, he's leaking national secrets we used to maintain an edge over the competition that America was fine with. That's not whistleblowing as it reveals legal stuff Americabs implicitly agreed to supporting foreign spying. Just a crime that sets us back while others continue their espionage.

I hope that was more specific. Such leaks are shy Snowden is partly a traitor who damaged our country. For domestic and some foreign leaks, he's a whistleblower that helped our country out a lot. I'm for lenient treatment, maybe immunity, given that. He should've learned from Manning that Dump It All (TM) was a terrible strategy with high consequences and inconsistent voter support. Future whistleblowers should focus on clear violations, corruption, and incompetence that everyone wants to stop far as voting public. Rest hurts credibility.

It's a problem that the internal whistleblowing mechanism isn't working, but contractors shouldn't be picking reporters that then filter national secrets.

Anyway, Snowden could have made sure to personally review everything he turned over. It's certainly an open question if such a leak could have been as effective, but it would obviously be an improvement in some ways.

And yes, I do think that the person with security clearance minimizing their leak is a better than a reporter doing it.

Isn't that what happened? Snowden didn't give Greenwald access to the NSA network. He chose a subset of the information. Even that subset was more than would be prudent to make public, but filtering it further is a labor intensive process beyond the capacity of one individual, so he chose people he reasoned could be trusted.

It's not like the government would have provided a team of researchers with security clearances to help him sort it out.

Further, argument falls apart when he hands it over to journalists clearly unable to stop nation-state opponents per the very leaks. Of course someone hacked into them or bribed/coerced a copy. It should be assumed even without evidence given what we know.

This isn't speculative: it's been done by other whistleblowers and he had time/resources to do it himself. He didn't. That's an evil or crime he has to own up to that's not whistleblowing.

Concern trolling, obfuscation. Ignore them.