You can blackmail all those in positions of power (politicians , judges, etc) into doing what you want? Who cares what the rest of the population (those low-life sheep) think.
(This is what most likely goes on in their minds.)
However, I don't actually believe it. This assumes competence above and beyond reasonable suspicion. It's much more believable that security was really just very poor. At some point somebody might have done a little less than possible to let him go, but that's about as much as I'm willing to believe.
In addition to embarassing the American political establishment, Snowden revealed JTRIG; he revealed acts of industrial and political espionage; and he revealed the undermining of public cryptographic standards by government henchmen. This to me is the big one, and it's why it's so unlikely for Snowden to be a limited hangout.
Prior to Snowden, if you weren't being paranoid, you were just sticking your head in the sand. You would be exposing yourself to the risks of parallel construction, backdoors in hardware, sabotage of public cryptographic standards, and the manipulation of online discourse if Snowden hadn't given people like me the power to credibly parry critics who are all too quick to discredit with terms like "troll" and "conspiracy theorist".
Snowden showed James Clapper to be a criminal, too. And the IRS claiming its own electronic paper trail of criminality could be somehow "lost" in this age of pervasive surveillance lends credibility to the idea of there being a clear divide between those who are above the law, and the rest of us. The Rulers and the Ruled.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/12...