Others have said as much. Here is a quote from William Binney, another NSA whistleblower, on advice that he has for Snowden:

> I would tell him to steer away from anything that isn't a public service — like talking about the ability of the U.S. government to hack into other countries or other people is not a public service. So that's kind of compromising capabilities and sources and methods, basically. That's getting away from the public service that he did initially. And those would be the acts that people would charge him with as clearly treason.

The whole interview is a great read: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

The US public has a legitimate interest in knowing about NSA's hacking abilities, because vulnerabilities used by the NSA abroad can just as easily be used domestically by foreign or criminal attackers.

Against a well-prepared adversary, a vulnerability can only be exploited once -- a zero day. After disclosure, or evidence of an exploit in circulation, such vulnerabilities become useless towards the agency's mandate, whether or not you agree with that mandate. Realpolitik? Definitely.

Have you considered that the public interest and the national interest are not one and the same?

But shouldn't it be? At least USA has this weird motto for its government: "of the people, by the people, for the people".

The affected public is not just in the US, considering us citizens of (even) allied countries are fair game. The motto you cite probably refers to just US citizens.

Do you realize that Snowden never leaked single documents? He just delivered over 100,000 of documents to Glenn Greenwald last year, and he published them continuously over a long time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they said some time ago that only 1% was published. So it would be impossible for Snowden himself to read everything and choose if it should be published.

as you said, he leaked 100k documents to Glenn Greenwald. My point is that it was his responsibility to vet them himself and not rely on Glenn and whoever Glenn chooses.

Specifically which leaks harmed "national interest" without benefit to the public? I ask non-rhetorically, as GCHQ at least have shown themselves not to be above "leaking" carefully selected titbits and attributing them to Snowden, just to muddy the debate:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-...

and the Guardian's "haha what":

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-gove...

Note that this "leak", as well as NOT coming from Snowden, isn't really in the domestic public interest, is an activity that a far larger percentage of people would support, and presumably is already known by the target anyway. The clear intent is to make people read the article and go "huh, this Snowden ballyhoo is very overblown". I wonder why the so-called "Independent" played along.

> if he had stopped at revealing the domestic surveillance he would be an undisputed hero/patriot. but with all of these unnecessary leaks that does nothing but harm to national interest

It's also important the public realize the NSA is more than just the National Stalking Agency.

I think with the domestic surveillance revelations that became abundantly clear.

I'd say it's safe to assume all 1.7 million documents, including the secrets his bot scraped that Snowden didn't want released are in the hands of the Chinese MSS already. I find it hard to believe they didn't set up shop beside his room in that HK hotel to use state intel agency methods to grab his keys, nor do I believe that his hasty destruction of his standard laptop wear-levelling flash drives in the airport before departure to Moscow actually destroyed all the data.

I bet there's a room stacked to the ceiling in printed US secret military documents in Beijing that they trade to Russia for cheap oil+gas imports. I realize Snowden never wanted that to happen but there's a reason why state's have strict methods to store and transport top secret data and they don't include using questionable XTS container software and staying in a HK hotel with the entire secret US archive stored on a commercial device.