Originally posted on 06/24/2013:
Government officials also take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and they almost universally ignore this oath as soon as they're sworn in. If Snowden had knowingly leaked details of an operation against a legitimate target, it would be another matter entirely...but he didn't. Instead, he made the public more aware that the government was targeting its own citizens without due process in the blind hope of being able to stop crimes from being committed.
I agree with you that a nuclear detonation would be bad, but I can't fathom why you keep bringing it up when what he leaked wasn't connected in any way to a dirty bomb and none of the Orwellian techniques used by our agencies seem to have prevented any such thing. We didn't have nuclear bombs being detonated before we started mass surveillance programs; what makes you think we'd have them in the future? Nobody wants to be blown up; but I also don't want to give up personal rights to agencies with such abysmally ineffective track records of, and who can't even be bothered to tell us the truth. Just because it's nothing new doesn't mean we should be alarmed. and take action.
Google, Facebook etc do have quite a bit of information on people...but the big difference is that information is given voluntarily with the person's consent. If I give you a piece of cake, that's my right to do so; if you take it from me without my consent, it's theft and a violation of my rights...same principle applies (at least as far as the government is concerned; right to privacy between individuals is a trickier subject).
Snowden violated his contract, but he did so to expose a greater evil and evidence of the government violating their contract on a grander scale....can't really fault him for not playing by the rules when he discovered his employers subverting the Constitution. While it's been noted all he did was expose what our politicians voted into law, he still exposed the lies of the NSA and showed us yet another instance of the government misusing the power we give it.