The only outcome which would encourage future whistleblowers is being allowed to live in honor in his own country, like Daniel Ellsberg has been able to. Unfortunately it does not look like any branch of the US government is willing to offer assistance, nor does there appear to be any prospect that either political party will ever embrace that idea, no matter what happens in polls (which currently are slightly against Snowden).
If I lived in an oppressive state then a lifetime of exile would not be too unwelcome.
During the cold war, the USA was somewhere persecuted people fled to. Now it's somewhere persecuted people flee from. While it is not yet as bad as the USSR was, it seems to me that it is sleepwalking to authoritarianism.
Those facts are unlikely to change until we are much farther down the road to authoritarianism than we currently are.
No it's not. That's very melodramatic. A single person who hasn't even been persecuted yet has flown from the US. Maybe he (and others) think he will be persecuted if he returns, but that's something very different from what happened in the eastern bloc during the Cold War.
Also, compare that fate to what happened to Bradley Manning. Living in Venezuela is way better than solitary confinement.
