Unfortunately, the crimes Snowden revealed may well not have seen the light of day without him, which suggests we don't have enough whistleblowers. And beyond that - even the bits of PRISM, XKeyscore and whatnot that were legal are simply not authorized by a democratically elected government; you cannot claim electoral legitimacy while keeping essential parts of your program not only secret, but even publicly paying lipservice to principles in opposition to your very own secret programs. To the extent various US administrations participated in creating these programs they thus necessarily acted without a democratic mandate; after all, they lied about it in public. That's not democracy; that's conspiracy.
Had the programs been discussed at least in general terms, or the quandaries of trading which freedoms exactly for security been acknowledged by the US government, you could make the argument that the technical details must remain secret, but the principal was supported by the electorate. But as is; the whole thing - up to and including the participating judiciary - is no more legitimate than any other stolen election won by lies, propaganda, and misdirection - the kind of principles the US clearly rejects (e.g. https://www.usaid.gov/democracy/supporting-free-and-fair-ele...).
I mean: I completely agree that likely snowden is a criminal. There's little reason to assume otherwise. However, that's kind of besides the point, isn't it? Much, much more important than any one criminal is the responsibility a government, especially one that claims to uphold the ideals of democracy to actually protect its subjects as it claims to. For a sense of scale - consider the fact that governments routinely accept the legality of war, despite the fact that it's essentially akin to accepting mass murder. And I'm not trying to make the case that extreme pacificm is the way to go; but rather the opposite - if we acknowledge that even some of the most serious of crimes are potentially acceptable in the defense of proper governance, then clearly, clearly mere whistleblowing should be a no-brainer, even if that means overriding normal laws.
So the question isn't whether Snowden is criminal, it's why is he criminal? I'd say the party at fault here is the democratically elected US government, not Snowden. The law on this matter is wrong, and should be fixed.
