I see the argument that people need to be accountable for leaking secrets.

I also see that if a organization holding too many secrets gets too big, something is going to leak. If you drive from BMI airport to Washington DC at the wrong time of the day you might encounter one of America's worst traffic jams when everybody gets off work at the NSA headquarters.

I remember reading a non-fiction account of certain intrigues from the early 1970s where a private eye says: "If I know something there is 1 chance it leaks out, if two people know it is more like 11, if it is three people, like 111, etc" and given that increasing difficulty of keeping secrets, if you really want to keep something a secret you really have to keep it a secret.

The author of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Company-Diary-Philip-Agee/dp/0...

was faulted for revealing specific names, dates, etc. of CIA personnel that directly put them in danger. I wasn't surprised at all that the NSA was doing the stuff that Snowden "revealed", in fact it would have been a scandal if they weren't doing that because the whole reason the NSA exists to do exactly that. Snowden can be faulted not so much for revealing the big picture, but revealing lots of details that affected specific activities and programs.

Of course, without all those details people wouldn't realize what a house of cards a non-encrypted internet is. Back around 2005 I turned on a Wi-Fi packet sniffer on an academic network and immediately saw email passwords for about 15 people (I deleted them right away) It is not just the NSA hoovering up data but governments like France, Israel, Iran, Russia, China not to mention high school hackers, organized crime organizations, etc. People never seem to take security seriously enough and unfortunately it took Snowden to wake up to the possibility that the NSA can do that but so can everybody else.

Funny thing is the CIA never includes this book in their lists

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Company-Diary-Philip-Agee/dp/08...