My take on Edward Snowden is that he's one of those guys who drank the kool-aid and wanted to do his part--very much like Dan Ellsberg. While doing it, he began to see the discrepancies between the narrative of the Land of the Free and the reality of what he was being asked to do by his government in order to "secure" that vaunted freedom. His conscience began to bother him. He decided to talk.
The government (the military especially) takes advantage of the energy and idealism of youth. On rare occasions, that energy and idealism can come back to haunt the powers that be. Every now and then, a G.I. comes back from the war and writes The Naked and the Dead. Every now and then, a Pentagon official decides to photocopy pages and pages of classified documents that contradict the official government spin. Even so, the risk to the government is really pretty low, considering the high degree of conformity that many Americans exhibit. But every now and then...
The price of democracy is access to information the government considers proprietary. The Bill of Rights was composed with that in mind. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" doesn't cut it. Read your Orwell.
Snowden is a hero in my book. I don't expect him to be a saint or a genius or anything extraordinary. In fact, I expect him to be quite ordinary. The more ordinary the better. When John Q. Public wakes up and begins to have doubts, real freedom has an opportunity to break out. I'm not holding my breath, though. As Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."
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