He grabbed somewhere between 10,000 and 1.7 million documents and walked out the door with them. Then he turned them over to a journalist. If all of this material was about illegal programs, then why hasn’t he exposed it all?
Because it’s not all about illegal programs.
But legal or not, the fact that it’s gone makes most of it worthless: if a collection program is compromised then there can be no confidence in the information it provides. Why did Snowden break all this in order to expose a small handful of programs?
Greenwald addressed this in detail and I have links to the issue here:
The gist of it is Snowden doesn’t want to harm the United States by releasing non-vetted parts of the leaks without significant review. That takes time.
I am referring to is the documents taken by Snowden that contained information about other programs, not the metadata program. Whatever sources of information was detailed in those documents (sources, not information) is now highly suspect if not out-and-out worthless.
If the point of the leaks was to attack average Americans’ safety, then the releases would indeed be worthless. But, the actual point of the leaks is to spur a national discussion of mass, suspicionless spying and other gross, anti-constitutional overreaches concerning spying - which has been a stunning success.
Also, as far as the sources and information being suspect, much of it has already been confirmed to be accurate. The debate has mostly surrounded not the veracity of the leaks, but the content of the leaks and what they mean for a so-called free society with a US Constitution that gets thrown in the trash in the name of “safety”. “Safety” we don’t even get from mass, suspicionless surveillance in the first place.
