People sometimes forget that although espionage is indeed a crime, Snowden did not release these classified documents to an enemy of the state, but rather the American People. Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin also committed the act of espionage in 1772 when he exposed and printed letters from Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, detailing information about the revocation of civil liberties of the resistive American colonists. This act alone is one of the major linchpins that broke into the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary War.

Without American heros such as Snowden and Ben Franklin, this country would not exist.