Actually, no. Snowden was the only one willing to sacrifice anything to reveal the truth to the public - and he wasn't even an official NSA employee. We can gnash our teeth and pull our hair about how the agency was "co-opted" but the fact remains that precisely zero of the NSA's ~40,000 employees stepped forward with anything like this. So what can we infer from this? Many things, of course, but that the organization was whole-sale "co-opted" is rather a stretch. 40k people doing something horrible for 12 years and a trickle of ineffective attempts to do something...

There is, perhaps, a more "innocent" explanation - or at least one that reflects better on the rank-and-file at the NSA: that it took someone like Snowden, not just idealistic and willing to sacrifice, but his intelligence and unique collection of technical skills, to make something like this happen. The NSA is a frightening adversary, the best funded, best equipped, most sophisticated intel organization on the planet. One could be forgiven for thinking twice before burning them... But is that fear enough to keep 40k people quiet for 12 years?! I'd say that we can only infer that the rank-and-file are massively in favor of the steps the NSA is taking, and probably mostly for noble reasons of wanting to "protect" us all. And what we can infer from that is that clearly the NSA selects for loyalty over principle, every time. Well, maybe they failed that once.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's such an inevitably fail-prone approach to protection, as it requires massive numbers of people to keep a secret in perpetuity. And now the big reveal: it has materially damaged us all. American technological trustworthiness is (rightly) at an all time low. My only hope is that this failure has been dramatic, so memorable, so horrible, that it will spur all computer technologists to learn more about security, the details of cryptography and random number generation, and to stop assuming that US authorities will show anything like common sense when it comes to restraining themselves and their power. They are drunk with it, self-righteously drunk with it, and we must work to take that power away in every possible way: politically, technologically, and indeed, philosophically. I mention philosophy last, but it's really the most important: are we a nation of principles, or are we a nation that takes shortcuts, sacrificing principle for pride of protection? In addition to testing for technological prowess, we need to test our intelligence staffers for high ethical intelligence: they need to be willing and able to rebel against illegal orders just as Snowden has done.

Under what definitions of "foreign" and "domestic"?