Personally I think that we should be talking about giving the NSA clemency, not Snowden (although I'm against it, it still merits debate). For Snowden we should be talking about whether to give him the Medal of Freedom, appoint him to the Supreme Court, or simply put him on our currency.
"Whistleblowers have large egos by nature" - "reference needed"?
So the author believes that a mass surveillance of Americans in America is wrong, but a mass surveillance of all other calls worldwide is absolutely fine, and that hacking into China's or every other country's servers is ok, and they massively tracking ALL internet communication to India and Pakistan is ok as well. Clearly, Snowden thought otherwise. US is defeated in this. People in other countries have reduced trusting Google Apps and Microsoft emails, and rightfully so. Even Google and Microsoft didn't know the extent to which the NSA had hacked into their internal servers.
Yes, the author does believe that surveillance of foreign nations is okay, as do many other people. The NSA is a foreign intelligence service - their purpose, by design, is to gather information on the capabilities and intentions of foreign nations. It's not just an American thing, either. As it turns out, just about every other nation on Earth thinks it's okay to spy on other nations[1].
"Nor did he go to North Vietnam and praise its leaders (as Snowden did in Russia)"
This is misleading and ignores the differences between Snowden's situation and Ellsberg's situation, the biggest difference being that we are not at war with China.
Snowden should not be given clemency of any kind. The content of his disclosure is not relevant to clemency. The act of disclosure itself is what justifies prosecution. Precedence and all that.
Having said that, my provisional opinion of Snowden is that he is a self sacrificing hero. Insufficiently judicious, as the Slate article well covers, but still heroic.
As far as I can tell the argument in this article is:
> Snowden exposed what the NSA was doing, and most of it is bad and everybody is glad we found out, but some was good! So he should be hunted down for the rest of his life.
> Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator
