There's a lot of crazy stuff being posted here about Snowden. I might be able to help you sift aside the conspiracies and platitudes. On two levels I can help you understand him; I'm in his field of work and I blew the whistle on a bad government agency practice. What "I" didn't do is sell the information to media outlets and enemies of The United States. I went through proper channels. When I see the media that calls him a "genius programmer" I kek. He was a flunky in charge of data backups. What he found was of concern, but he could have gone through the proper channels and had the same effect without compromising our security. You might say "but waitasecond pede!.. if he went through proper channels it would have caused a cover up!"... you really need to turn off your TV if you believe that. The checks and balances aren't weighted at both ends with unpatriotic megalomaniacs. General Jack Nicholson isn't going to clear out his wall safe to hire Jason Borne to take out the whistleblower. Seriously... these are normal people doing normal jobs... most of which love their country. Another thing he conveniently left out is that the data backups he snooped had no PII data attached... like names or phone numbers. It was de-identified metadata, protected at row level. All you could see was connections from one unnamed record to another... you need a serious court order to attach names and phone numbers to those records.. or open any files. Do I disagree with collecting the information of American Citizens? You're damned strait I do. Not because I think it was being misused, but because I think it could be misused by future bureaucrats. Anyone who wants to use second hand knowledge and talking points to argue with me... just please... don't make yourself look silly.