It is amazing how many people don't know this (that he did not just leak everything indiscriminately).
Before the downvote button is spammed: He simply did not have time go go over every single one of the 100,000+ documents he claimed to leak, and give them to journalists in an intelligent manner. There simply was not enough time between him leaving the country and the documents being revealed for him to have done that.
So yes, he did very much indiscriminately leak them.
You are either lacking context comprehension skills or intentionally splitting hairs to make Snowden look bad...
But I've never received a straight answer to that question and I guess this is no exception.
> Snowden didn't decide which document's to publish - journalists did. He handed over a trove of information, among which was damning evidence that our government was/is doing something they shouldn't, and gave journalists the responsibility to publish relevant documents appropriately.
Had he pre-selected which documents to hand over to the journalists, how would this be any different than if he just published them by his own? Snowden knew that he was not supposed to handle this task alone by passing his judgement on these documents by himself, and that he needed someone to help him judge what to disclose and what not to disclose, so he delegated this responsibility to journalists with a reputation he could trust. IMO he was as responsible as one could be: he didn't handle this trouble all by himself, he didn't let any biases he might've had affect the decisions, and he delegated the task at hand properly to american citizens (this is important, he was dealing with national security after all) he judged to be trustworthy. It just boils down to teamwork.
Selecting only the documents he thought described wrongdoings would put too much of his perspective and his biases on the end result. Too much for a single man to decide.
There was enough the NSA did that was OBVIOUSLY wrong that he could have stayed well clear of the things too close to the line.
Going through all the files by himself would be a daunting task that would take years. There are literally 1,000's of documents. Raising the alarm now rather than 8 years from now is important.
Given the circumstances, grabbing everything and handing it over to a team of respectable journalists (who have a team of lawyers) to find out what is against the Constitution/not in favor of the people (seeing as journalists represent the people to an extent) to allow them to only leak the relevant ones that were crossing boundaries seems like a best decision act.
The journalists can leak documents over the course of years and slowly investigate each one to determine if it crosses boundaries and the alarms should be rung for the public.
Snowden would have had a single release of a handful of documents and gone on a very long vacation in a place nobody has ever heard of had he released a few documents himself. It's expensive to pay for a vacation for an entire group of journalists and lawyers.
Grabbing everything because you don't have time to sift through the data and passing them to so-called "respectable journalists" doesn't make it right. In the same way that people claim dragnet surveillance is wrong to catch terrorists if it's violating the privacy of everyone else.
Greenwald worked for The Guardian for the initial release, and works for The Intercept now. The Guardian, although somewhat ad-supported, doesn't appear to be quite as dependent as most US papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#Ownership_and_fin.... The Intercept is definitely weirder than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept
With respect to The Intercept, I submit that you're technically correct (their motivations and Snowden's aren't identical), but that Snowden's motivations are probably closer to The Intercept's staff than they would be to any other news outlet, even NPR.
I would only add that in the end, the specifics of what should be released are usually going to a subjective judgment call. Everybody is going to draw a slightly different cutoff line. In US tradition we have used journalists as a representative of the people to make that decision, and Greenwald et al have been incredibly careful in how they released pieces of the Snowden archive. Too careful, perhaps, but I can certainly understand the desire to take it slowly and carefully.
Also, as more documents are released, it's important to remember that Snowden is not the only source. ( https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/counting_the_... )
Journalists will be tempted to publish regardless of the original intent, let's hope they are not desperate for a story.
