I thought I was done, but...

I can't get this Snowden thing off my mind lately.  Now, granted... it isn't Snowden so much as it is our own government willingly pushing aside our individual and collective rights to better "protect" us from real or imagined harm... but I'll continue to call it the "Snowden thing" for my own personal convenience.

In one of F Ryan's previous posts, he wrote:

" I can not separate the man into EITHER a genuine whistle blower OR a traitor. He is absolutely both. The former for revealing domestic abuses, the latter for revealing legitimate foreign operations. So again I ask this point blank - why did he collect and leak the details of the NSA's legitimate foreign operations? The people targeted in Pakistan (or even Merkel for that matter, if you want to be technical), are not protected by the 4th Amendment. The NSA committed no abuse and certainly no crime in going after those intercepts. So why'd he leak it?"

When I said I didn't know the answer to questions like this, and that I frankly didn't care, either... it was a legitimate response and not simply a lazy answer or an attempt to piss off F Ryan (which it did...).

The long version is that the details of "why" don't matter to me because I am more and more convinced that far too much has been sacrificed in this country to the altar of "security".  If something has to be lost in our continuing national quest for a world without fear, violence or hatred... I'll keep the personal freedoms and liberties that made us what we are today and risk losing the "edge" in our trade war with China, or Germany, or Israel, or (even) a perceived threat from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Africa, et al.  If the fundamental principals that made this nation great don't matter anymore, then what do I care about possible threats from Islamabad or Tehran?  Our own government says that I am 7 times more likely to be killed by a local policeman than I am a terrorist, and tens of thousands of times more likely to die in an accidental plane crash than in a terrorist-caused plane crash... but it is an absolute FACT that every text, email, phone call, internet search, video download, et al, is being monitored and stored for future reference to help keep me even safer than I am now.

Even my short answer... the "pat" answer that F Ryan seemed to have wanted... is valid, I think:  I am forced to assume that the "whistle-blower" info that should have been leaked was inseparably wrapped up with the "legitimately secret" info that should not have been leaked.  That actually being the case, I still think it was the right thing to do.  If the left hand is stealing flour so the right hand can make bread for the hungry, is the bread not still ill-gotten?  Is the baker not still a thief?

And yes, of course I see the parallel here.  Snowden broke the law.  He did it with intent and full knowledge that what he was doing was illegal.  My point all along is that what he did was illegal, but not wrong.  What he did does not fix what was wrong, and it might very well make things worse in the short term... I do not argue that possibility at all.

My question now becomes:

Is this nation, as the bastion of freedom and personal liberty in the world, better today because of what he did, or is it not?  I'm not asking if there was another alternative path that could have been followed... there always is, when looking back through hindsight.  I'm asking if the country (and, frankly, the world) is better off NOW than it was BEFORE Snowden released what he did.

I contend that it is better off now than it was.  He did the right thing.