Following 9/11, government intelligence agencies were mandated to share SAPs and intelligence to create more unified intelligence front, which 9/11 was falsely used as a pretext for.
Snowden was CIA before transferring to NSA in Hawaii. At the NSA, he used patriotism as a front to not only rightfully expose the NSA collections that were/are unconstitutional, but also to dump details of the SAPs (Special Access Programs). Given the CIA likely failed to comply/was exempt from sharing their SAPs, this left the US gov without secret tools needed to gain intelligence on foreign adversaries, while the CIA kept theirs.
This was internal sabotage of non CIA intelligence gathering methods.
Fuck snowden.
Assange on the other hand simply performed the kind of journalism needed in this world, with the highest degree of integrity.
Given that left/green parties here in Germany are "against surveillance" and that a movie about Snowden ran in the middle of Berlin some years ago without Antifa intervention, I also came to the conclusion that being "against surveillance" is some deep state method to protect own wrongdoing such as drug trafficking, human trafficking or election fraud. Recently I also had the hypothesis that NSA and CIA must be on opposing sides in the battle for power and that's why there are only books about exposing the NSA such as "Der NSA Komplex", even a best-seller in the far left magazine "Der Spiegel": https://www.amazon.de/-/en/NSA-Komplex-Edward-Snowden-totale-%C3%9Cberwachung/dp/3421046581
Also see my sociological explanation. Hypothesis: CIA must be a tool of the modern "clergy" while the NSA is not: https://thedonald.win/p/11Q8XTiXDw/sociological-explanation-of-what/