Cases like those of Manning or Snowden present an perplexing conundrum for governments. If you do evil, scummy stuff and want to keep it hushed up, you need to make an example of leakers, no matter how well meaning they may be, in order to discourage further leaks. However, by abusing what the public sees as whistle-blowers, you lend credence to their accusations (You wouldn't bother to punish them if they were just making this stuff up, would you?).

It's a catch-22. If you don't punish the leakers, you'll look bad when more whistle-blowers reveal more of the evil stuff you've been up to. If you do punish the leakers, you confirm your guilt. The only way out seems to be to not do evil, scummy stuff in the first place!

In a few hundred years Western civilization has gone from enjoying bear-bating and cat-burning as popular forms of entertainment to being shocked when somebody is strapped to a board with a wet cloth over their face. This is a fundamentally good thing. The public's steadily decreasing appetite for cruelty and violence is what has made things such as Gandhi's use of passive resistance possible. Had Gandhi been born a century or two earlier, things would have gone much more poorly for him!

The notion that the world is a cruel, evil place and that states must, at times, act without moral compunction is a popular one. However, this notion is out of step with the reality that the human race is gradually becoming less tolerant of brutality and that secrets are becoming increasingly hard to keep secret. It is not naive idealism to expect our governments to hold themselves to a higher level of conduct. What few gains the U.S. may have realized from NSA's surveillance program pale in comparison to the loss of confidence U.S. citizens have in their own government and the increased distrust of U.S. institutions and even private companies worldwide.

The U.S. government needs to become more open and more idealistic in order to regain the social license it has lost. The Stasi approach to enforcing citizen loyalty is less viable today than ever.