I suspect bluff. The damaging revelations about surveillance are already done, unless he has document suggesting Putin is a CIA operative or the notorious Chinese hackers actually work for NSA, or has recording of Obama ordering assassination of Tea Party leaders, or something of that measure of insanity - I don't see what else could he reveal. By now everybody is pretty much sure NSA owns phone networks (at least in the USA) and the Internet (pretty much anywhere) and gets unreserved cooperation from every major provider. What else could there be?
I highly doubt that the information he has only contains the generics that have been disclosed so far. When you grab a bunch of data, you probably don't pick and choose what you need for whistleblowing, because the collection of the data is the riskiest activity before whistleblowing is actually acted upon. Instead you collect everything that may be of service and you dole out what is necessary to achieve your goal of whistleblowing. With that in mind, it's far more probable that he is heavily editing what is being released to only prompt discussion and oversight and not put specific people in harms way.
AFAIK none of the documents that have included specifics on the people involved and I highly doubt that documents circulate without metadata of the specific people responsible or with awareness of what's going on.
It's the release of specific examples and metadata identifying the people behind this and their actions that can be more easily construed as aiding the enemy. He really hasn't released any of this kind of information.
Suppose we learn that the guy responsible in the NSA for internet surveillance is named John Smith. What would it change? This is surveillance on US soil, not covert ops in some country in Latin America, how the names would change anything?
We already know they've been spying on politicians and tapping the underwater Internet cables, along with their friends from other continents, to get all the data. So how much worse could it get? Proof that US has been assassinating politicians (in recent times)? I think something like that would be a "worse nightmare" than it already is (don't forget Snowden worked for CIA before).
Now I almost want something bad to happen to Snowden, just so we find out what could possibly be "much worse". It's time for all US' power games to be shown in broad daylight.
Indeed, I think you're right. So far, the only justification we have in support of these programs is to protect from terrorism. If it can be shown that they were used to subvert democracy, there would be zero support left for them.
I dunno, I certainly get why he revealed the shocking surveillance state information, but I'm not sure I understand why he'd reveal something unrelated to it.
Is he just trying to say, "Spying is bad" at this point? I thought his focus was on who the US was gathering intel on and how.
