That’s because they were spies. Spies aren’t typically talked about. SOME of the programs he detailed in those releases were within the scope of what he was trying to expose, but many were not. He dumped THOUSANDS of documents related to humint sources that absolutely got people killed, burned other active contacts / projects and cost years worth of work. There was a huge shuffle of personnel after those leaks as intelligence agencies TRIED to get their people out, but there were a great number who couldn’t get out. Andrew Bustamante speaks about this, at some length, to just name the most well known talking head.
The majority of what he exposed had nothing to do with domestic surveillance programs, and the way he exposed that information was WILDLY irresponsible.
Yes, the illegal surveillance he exposed was a big deal, but again, was done in a really shitty way that compromised active investigations. He neglected to do anything through proper channels, and instead betrayed his country rather than try to fix the problems through whistle blower channels where he would have actually had legal and tangible protections. Dude was an actual shit bag and a Russian asset.
Bro, by definition you’re not gonna get “evidence” of top secret programs and sources that were compromised. It just doesn’t even make sense to think you would.
If you look at the things that were happening overseas in the immediate aftermath of those releases, You’ll see what I’m talking about. As much as I’d love to spend a bunch of time digging up all that information again, as you can tell by the voting patterns here, people are clearly not interested in the facts or intelligent discourse so I’m not going to waste my time. You can easily look up the articles about how we and our allies were scrambling to recall people, and how people didn’t come home. You can dig up plenty of information from a whole host of analysts and security related personnel who aren’t affiliated with the government who can verify the carelessness of his disclosures and how they did more harm than good.
Yes, Patriot act was an absolute travesty and shouldn’t exist. Yes, the domestic programs Snowden exposed were illegal and needed to be stopped, but they also were widely misunderstood in their scope and danger to US citizens… In fact, they still exist to this day in more or less the same capacity for that reason.
No, he didn’t do it the right way, and I wish he had because he could have actually done good things instead of just serving his country’s enemies. The things he exposed in the US were pretty trivial, in the grand scheme of things, and were widely misunderstood. He could have shut those domestic programs down without compromising the foreign intelligence sources, but he chose not to. He was irresponsible, and flat out was not a good guy.