Thanks to another one of the cornerstones of our democracy, Freedom of the Press, here is an article to refute your point.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden...
>Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden’s communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.
>The trove of more than 800 pages [see the pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the U.S. government’s long-running narrative about Snowden’s time at the NSA.
In short, it would seem that there is pretty ample evidence that some significant conversations took place between Snowden and the NSA.
You can even view the FOIA requests that revealed this information at the end of the above article.
Snowden was not the first who tried official channels.Seeing what happens to Thomas Drake, I think Snowdens reaction was warranted https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...
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He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided 0 evidence to back it up. Considering he says that he only leaked information because internal methods had failed him, you'd figure he would have saved at least a single shred of proof that he tried to handle things internally, but he didn't.
He's already admitted during interviews that he applied for the job specifically to gather information to leak, and the majority of the information had nothing to do with the surveillance program in the USA. He's far from a patriot, and anyone who believes he leaked all of the sensitive information out of the goodness of his heart is just being naive.