I think the parent is claiming that whistleblower protections don't apply to Snowden. A vigilante's actions can be both morally right and blatantly illegal. There are people that are glad he did what he did, but also believe in the rule of law, and feel his actions might have carried more weight if he turned himself in and accepted the legal repercussions.

Personally, if I were the judge I'd give him a light slap on the wrist because of how hard he worked to bring the information to light in a responsible manner so nobody got hurt. It's hard for me to imagine him not getting absolutely fucked in a real court of law however, and I'm certainly not going to judge him and say, "You should have been willing to throw your whole life away over this, or not done it at all."

He would have been executed.

What peacetime charge carries the death penalty for espionage or related?

Do any of the relevant laws specify needing to be at war? Both the treason clause of the Constitution and the Espionage Act specify helping "enemies," but I'm not sure they specify needing to be at war.

The Rosenberg's were executed despite the US never officially declaring war on the USSR or even North Korea.

> I'm curious why you brought that up?

It’s a direct quote from the article.

Right. I just didn't see the significance of his fitting a specific definition of whistleblower.

Most of the article was discussing the illegal secret data collection he exposed and the worldwide response to those revelations in the ten years since.

I wasn't sure what difference it made that the official government whistleblower processes didn't work for him. Someone else mentioned he therefore lost legal whistleblower protections. I don't think that the public worried about big brother, the tech companies like Google who promptly encrypted all their traffic, or allies like Angela Merkel that were spied on, cared that Snowden stepped outside the government's whistleblower process when it didn't work.

I didn't know if this is what you meant, or if you thought that what he did (double cross the government) was worse than what the NSA did (double cross the public), or if he should have kept his mouth shut when the official process wasn't working, or something else.