Secondarily, you're not understanding the leaked documents. The leaked documents showed that the NSA believed that the phone metadata program was legal. Once there is a court ruling that it is illegal, its lawyers cannot justify the program.

Thirdly, your phrase "another whistleblower" shows that you do not know what a whistleblower is. Leaking thousands of programs where just one of them happens to be illegal but not obviously so (to the point where Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/lawye...

As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court (in which DoJ faces no opposing counsel) in order to jury-rig a fig leaf for the ongoing destruction of personal liberties. I'm made my peace with the fact that the authoritarians to whose whims we are subject will occasionally overstep their bounds in public. When they do so, the public may protest and eventually conditions might improve somewhat. When the unsupervised services harm us, their putative employers, we have no recourse.

Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower". You guys make a great team!

Snowden's documents themselves showed the legal justification for the phone metadata program. It nakes sense that Snowden would claim otherwise in the podcast because he is barely literate and hasn't actually read most of the documents he leaked.

> As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court

You don't "lobby" a court. You have lawyers justify a position.

> Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower".

You're the one making a bizarre definition of "whistleblower." Is it whistleblowing to leak all of your company's documents if you don't know they are doing anything illegal so long as somebody can later find one thing that is illegal? Obviously not.

The public outrage was due to various top officials denying that anything like PRISM was going on, when in fact it was.

So either the program was illegal, the false statements made by officials about them, or the classification of the process that prevented democratic oversight. One of the three had to be illegal, it's not really relevant to split hairs over which was one actually was.