"If you blow the whistle on an unethical practice or bring a problem to the attention of higher-ups, you should be thanked. You should be protected for doing the right thing"
Obama is a stasist. You have to be to be President. He believes in central authority and respect for the chain of command. What he is saying is you should blow the whistle inside the designated structure. When the structure says everything is fine then everything is fine. If the structure says you're right good job, only then do you get a pat on the back.
You don't get to be POTUS by being an anarchist or thinking everyone has equally valid opinions as you. Anyone can be President, but only a few people actually think they should be President.
In case you didn't notice, Manning was acquitted for revealing documents that proved government wrongdoing. She was also acquitted of the ridiculous charge of aiding the enemy. She was, however, convicted of leaking 700000 unrelated documents without a reason. Had she not been tortured, I'd say the sentence was fair (so long as she actually gets paroled in 8 years). However, her torture was substantiated by a judge and so she should have walked a long time ago as a result.
If Snowden had only ended up engaging in whistleblowing it that pardon might even be pre-signed and sitting in a folder somewhere so Obama can wow his base.
As it stands Snowden did so much more than whistleblowing that I figure Obama will be content to let him stay in his padded gulag with Snowden's FSB friends for years to come.
Interception of phone calls in Afghanistan is a very easy example. It practically by definition fails to implicate any domestic liberties concern for American citizens, and has completely defensible purposes to include counter-terrorism and military intelligence (it may surprise people to hear this, but the U.S. military is still fighting and dying in Afghanistan).
Likewise with intercepting the communications of foreign leaders (even allied ones): It's literally what the NSA is paid to do, it doesn't implicate domestic liberties concerns, it's not mass surveillance, and the U.S. government (and the American people they're to serve) has very real reasons to know what the leadership of the rest of the world is thinking behind their public statements. It's the same reason the rest of the world spies on the communications of American politicians and diplomats (e.g. the leaked conversation between U.S. and E.U. diplomats regarding Ukraine during the Automaidan revolution).
The only outcome that possibly could have come from Snowden leaking that information is the outcome that actually happened: Justified outrage by the German population which significantly strained relations between Germany and the USA, and at almost the worst possible time for that to happen.
Even PRISM I would argue went beyond the pale. It didn't help that initial reporting about PRISM was simply inaccurate, but PRISM, if you look at it objectively, actually represents nothing more than a Web-based automation of a legitimate and legal government function. The only thing PRISM is, is computer-automated warrant/subpoena compliance.
Again, PRISM isn't mass surveillance (as it needs specific selectors), it's not even warrantless (even when only an NSL is used, an NSL is still more than is Constitutionally required for foreign citizens), and it's not unilateral on NSA's part (companies receiving NSLs or warrants via PRISM still have to have their own legal teams review them and sign off, and if they don't agree can have the orders reviewed by FISCR).
What's more, it's an incredibly useful tool for one of the few functions of NSA that most people agree is legitimate... or it was, until Snowden told the jihadist world that Skype and Facebook were unexpectedly unsafe. It's not Snowden's fault that jihadists were under that mistaken assumption, but it is his fault for splashing awareness in their face in such a manner, and for not ensuring that Greenwald and WaPo's coverage of the technical aspects of PRISM were correct in the initial stories.
Finally (perhaps most ironically) Snowden leaked private information about many targets of NSA surveillance to a group of people ranging between journalists and activists. Hopefully all such recipients were as careful with that cache as the Washington Post was, but to quote The Week:
> Is it chilling that The Washington Post now has these [160,000] intercepts? Yes. Does it represent a huge failure by the NSA? Debatable. The person who obtained them originally, Edward Snowden, spent more than a year, with very high clearances, trying to figure out how to steal them without triggering alarms. To say that they weren't protected by the NSA is to blame your grandmother for keeping her purse in a simple combination lock safe the kitchen, and not the thief who broke into the house to steal it. (In this case, the thief cased the house for a long time and had to figure out the combo to the lock.)
Even though the WaPo piece in question is intended to be damning of the NSA, even they noted many things that the NSA had been claiming all along: "fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks". The double-dealing one is especially intriguing, as it explains why the USA might be spying on German leaders in the first place, due to long experience with double-dealing by allies.
Likewise, the WaPo reported "Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali." The inescapable conclusion is that Snowden leaked operational details of successful operations to apprehend no-shit actual terrorists who no-shit actually killed people (and presumably were working to kill more). This intelligence didn't implicate crimes by the U.S. government so it can't be called whistleblowing with a straight face. How would that news article read on its own: "NSA whistleblower accuses NSA of tracking down Bali bombers"?
All of this is the more damning IMHO given that Snowden made sure to distinguish his behavior from Pfc. Manning's, with Snowden saying he made sure to be selective about what he took and passed into the hands of others. But his actions prove his words a lie; 160,000 intercepts taken for no better reason than they were intercepted is no more selective than Manning taking a database of years worth of Army operational logs just because they were there, not to mention the 1.5 million other documents scraped laboriously from NSA servers.
Far from being "more selective than Manning", Snowden used even more breadth than Manning (who after all, really "only" took the helicopter video, Army theater daily operational logs and diplomatic cables).
I hope you take this in the spirit it's intended. Whistleblowing is vitally important to the health of our nation, but disagreeing with legitimate (and legal) government policy because it's not libertarian enough is not the same as whistleblowing, and that gets conflated in the Snowden discussion all the time, usually to whitewash the excesses of Snowden's actions.
> Again, PRISM isn't mass surveillance (as it needs specific selectors)
I don't agree with this assertion.
If recording as much as possible that everyone does via a computer is not mass surveillance, then what would be? That is what is happening, and it is mass surveillance.
Why is mass surveillance bad? Because of the chilling effect it has on freedom of speech and freedom of association. These things still apply even when the government promises not to read the data until you come to their attention. So even if you deny the term "mass surveillance", then this conditional surveillance is bad for all the same reasons.
"If you blow the whistle on an unethical practice or bring a problem to the attention of higher-ups, you should be thanked. You should be protected for doing the right thing"