I must be missing something with Snowden, because there are a lot of people on the left and right who are normally civil liberties advocates who despise the guy. We know the head of NSA has no problem looking into a camera and lying to the Congress and the public about what the agency is doing. We now know the CIA spies on Senators investigating past wrongdoing and is more than happy to delete/disappear documents that reveal wrongdoing. We know that going through the chain of command is futile. The Obama administration is brutally cracking down on leakers, and is as we speak threatening to jail journalists for failing to reveal their sources, in their prosecution of leakers who revealed illegal activity by the intelligence agencies.
So in a broad sense, without endorsing everything Snowden has done, I'm not sure what someone wanting to expose the extent of the police state in the U.S. is supposed to do? The NSA was simply operating without meaningful restraints, including gathering near blanket coverage of all electronic communications in the U.S., of everyone. And every check on their ability to sift through the data from non-terrorists (aka innocent Americans charged and suspected of no crimes) has been shown to be window dressing, ineffective.
I guess I don't understand how a person can complain about the near total police state we live under, with our government having nearly unrestricted access to ALL our communications, then demonize a person who took a huge risk to expose it all. Sure, he's imperfect, and undoubtedly has made mistakes, but the venom directed against him by civil liberties advocates is really puzzling to me. I don't like that he's hiding out in Russia, and before that China, but the U.S. makes it impossible for him to seek refuge in any other country, so we can't exactly complain that he's not traveling because the U.S. has made that impossible. And I don't expect him to be arrested and voluntarily go to solitary, never to be heard from again, which is what the U.S. did to Manning, for far LESS.