There’s a slight irony in your comment about his performance reviews - how did that get out? Apparently leaking isn’t always a problem :)
Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.
For the same reason, I don't believe Assange was a rapist.
Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.
Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).
Say you exfiltrate not enough and are fired. You're shit out of luck, and there is no way to infiltrate someone else to your position to get the rest out.
I doubt you can honestly see his actions as reckless or revengeful.
That's the problem.
He didn't/couldn't bother to filter out unrelated documents? So he just stole a bunch of shit and leaked it all to the media and hoped they would find enough outrage in it to justify his behavior?
This isn't whistleblowing, it's reckless espionage, and fruit of the poisoned tree as well-- you wouldn't want the authorities doing this to you (the irony of him exposing the gov doing this by doing the same thing himself...).
Whistleblowing would have meant he caught wind of something illegal, secured enough evidence to prove it and leaked that to the media. Everything exfiltrated beyond that is not in scope.
I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism.