Having read Barton Gellman’s book that describes and alludes to some of the details of what were in the actual (never published) Snowden files, I do not believe that the US IC would let him continue to live, even if he were fully pardoned.

I doubt it will ever be safe for him in the US again, despite his legal status.

Sounds like fascism.

No, it sounds like a rogue IC agency. The textbook definition of fascism doesn’t apply here. This word keeps appearing on HN without any reasoning

In the modern zeitgeist anything authoritarian or that can be interpreted from the center-left to be slightly right of center is being called fascism as shorthand for "bad policy I disagree with". The conflation of authoritarianism vs policy difference is where some danger lies.

What makes you consider them “rogue”?

They wouldn't kill him, that would be an amateurish mistake, you would have a martyr. Destroying his reputation, pressure friends and family...

If the US didn’t freak out when they found out the 4th amendment was simply smoke and mirrors, they wouldn’t freak out if the CIA assassinated one of their own. They’re not freaking out while the CIA slowly tortures a journalist (Assange) to death in prison, in full view of the press and international media.

I think most Americans don’t know or care who Ed Snowden is. The Last Week Tonight segment with him was rather instructive.

Snowden does not have the files. Did not have them when he arrived in Russia. That's why it took so long for the Russians to let him in. They could not believe he did not take any intelligence with him.

what kind of things does the book allude to?

Apparently the documents that he provided to the press had specific descriptions of names, cities, places, and events that had occurred that Gellman didn’t find specifically newsworthy but that the IC really, really wanted kept secret.

The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.)

Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed.

I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.