Yet we accept this because the alternative means a strong precedent for prosecuting whistle-blowing.

Snowden literally exposed a massive spy campaign and moved it from conspiracy status to truth. Just because you didn't do shit about it doesn't mean it was 0 gain :)

There was zero gain. Everyone found out and yet we moved right along, your woke outrage has done nothing, still is doing nothing, while two men who put countless lives at risk go on their merry way. It's only a truth to you, to everyone else its treason.

I wonder if people who think this would have the same opinion of someone who revealed classified documents about government surveillance or ethnic cleansing in China. Or is it only bad when it's our government's misdeeds that are being exposed?

I wouldn't call revealing the extent of illicit NSA surveillance "zero gain".

If nothing else, it pushed Google to close the security hole the UK was using to harvest inter-datacenter data.

It nothing else, it pushed the governments to bury their secret programs even deeper. Nothing changed. The NSA is still spying on Americans, American technology companies are still working with governments to thwart human rights and spy on citizens, and Russia has just rewarded its best spy with residency. Net result zero.

How is revealing systemic domestic surveillance at zero value in your mind?

Not to mention this formerly secret mass surveillance program has been making its way through the courts and the Ninth Circuit court of appeals found it to have been illegal, that the NSA has been lying about it for years, and that they were additionally lying when they said it helped convict several terrorist supporters.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/u-s-court-...

> Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.

> Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program’s exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.

> U.S. officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s telephone record spying, but the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”

IIUC, this case would have never been possible without Snowden's evidence that the spying program existed. You can't stop a government program that doesn't exist.

(playing devil's advocate) you could make the argument that the suspicion that domestic surveillance was at that level was almost as high (if not higher).

Except that people saying this was happening were labeled as conspiracy theorists by many. This is what people always forget when they pull out the "Yeah but we already knew that" no you didn't, you might have suspected it but there would always be plenty of people ready to shout you down saying "We don't know that for sure", "That has not been confirmed", "Take off your tin-foil hat".

I'd wager that the people clutching their pearls now talking about people being put at risk due to the leak are pretty much the same people saying it wasn't happening before the leak.

Clinton's "we were already having these discussions" had me tempted to vote for Trump in 2016. Until Trump gave his position on the matter, which managed to be worse.

I was going to vote for Trump until he decided Snowden might get a Pardon. That is enough to flip my vote. Say no to treason.

> Both put lives at risk for what has apparently achieved zero gain.

So, future impact affects your assessment of the righteousness of an act of conscience? How does that work?

Maybe that looks like a gross "argument from final consequences"...

...but if we could get this police state going and everyone would shut up about it we'd all be 100% safe right?

Hee hee, that's like when I tried changing a makefile to speed things up and it compiled the library in question in zero seconds.

I can't tell the future, can you?

Don't blame the messenger. The risk was created and perpetuated by a mafia style government on both counts.

If there was a gain would you feel differently about pardoning Snowden?

A pardon is off the table. He committed treason, regardless of Monday morning quarterbacking and saying the ends justify the means. He broke the law. Either it's the law or it's not, and the fact he and Manning broke the law, regardless of what "good" people might see in it, they still broke the law.

Reporting someone else breaking the law should never be illegal. The law that says it is, is an illegitimate law. That is just playing into the hands of corruption and despotism.