Comment Re:At which point (Score 3, Interesting) 504
He'd be kept quiet one way or another.
Agreed. To fix Feinstein's quote: "He’s done this enormous service to our country, and I think the answer is no clemency."
I understand why he can't be offered clemency by the overseers of the system he has revealed. But the state is insular, the security apparatus more so. To suggest that whistleblowing within the ranks would have produced the sort of system review that's been going on is intentionally naive on her part.
Snowden did what any honest president with a backbone could have (legally) done upon learning about the overreach of the US security apparatus. Reveal the key abuses, start a public dialog about how the abuses came to be, and initiate reforms to correct the abuses. It's hard to remember, but this is the course of action you would have expected from Obama's pre-election rhetoric. He was for transparency and reigning in the constitutional abuse brought on by the war on terror.
The difference between a president and an underling doing it is that the underling is not authorized, and therefore by definition is revealing state secrets, and his mechanism is solely public pressure. Snowden has accomplished the first two objectives (reveal and start a public dialog). It's up to us to push the third.