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There are whistle blower protections at every level of the federal government.

You do realise you just provided a link to the website of a non-profit organisation that was formed specifically to aid people being persecuted by the government?

Not one of those points is accurate, but truth isn't what people are interested in here.

1. Snowden never attempted to go through proper channels.

From Wikipedia: In May 2014, U.S. officials released a single email that Snowden had written in April 2013 inquiring about legal authorities but said that they had found no other evidence that Snowden had expressed his concerns to someone in an oversight position. In June 2014, the NSA said it had not been able to find any records of Snowden raising internal complaints about the agency's operations. That same month, Snowden explained that he himself has not produced the communiqués in question because of the ongoing nature of the dispute, disclosing for the first time that "I am working with the NSA in regard to these records and we're going back and forth, so I don't want to reveal everything that will come out."

There are whistle blower protections at every level of the federal government.

The U.S. doesn't torture its citizens. We're not talking about citizens who've traveled overseas to join ISIS or Al-Qaeda and were captured during war. We're talking about a U.S. citizen who would have faced trail in a U.S. court.

Lastly, if Obama is such a stand-up guy who everybody on the left appears to revere, how is it that he's so absolutely wrong on this point? I'll tell how: he's not. Snowden exposed some useful information and also did incalculable harm to the U.S. intelligence community. Is Obama supposed to set a precedent that's it's OK for low-level government employees to release top-secret documents to the press as long as those employees don't like what's going on?.

There was no right way. This is what happens to you when you go through the appropriate channels.

Public knowledge is not declassified.. the US gov in court would be reviewing classified material.
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-center/save-tom-drake shows some of what can happen.

Thin Thread

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe

Binney.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2013/06/takes-the-nsas-surveillance-programs.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william

http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/

Reinstate him as DNI.

Because this THIS is revealing state secrets for personal gain, which is worse, much worse than what Manning, Snowden Tice , Drake , Klein, Binney , Kiriakou

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

Tice,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/21/687340/-Exposed-NSA-Watching-Everything-on-Anyone-Illegally-Updated-x3#

Drake,
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-center/save-tom-drake

Kline,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135645/The_NSA_wiretapping_story_nobody_wanted

Kiriakou
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/

Conclusion: you have to be extremely naive or engagged in a career enhancing self-serving thinking process to imagine that universal spying on ordinary Americans won't be used to in the basest way control the internal political trajectory of the nation by the next group of people like Cheney PErle Rumsfeld and Bolton.

Yes something very bad could and probably will happen . Yes we will lose relevant information by not constantly tapping all Americans , The but alternative path is worse. When bad actors get involved, there are often no good paths left.

the NSA does whatever policy makers tell them to do without getting all "philosophical" or "speculative" about whether it's exactly or even slightly legal or not. That's what we know for certain. Anyone able to worm themselves into a position of power - from the analyst level on up, has God power over The Database Of Guilt. Unelected officials - Perle Rice Rumsfeld Abrams Bolton Cohen etc can and will commandeer that database for their own illegal purposes and the NSA will comply because that's what they do. It may already be happening.

This is 100% unacceptable. This is no-go no-matter-what territory.

Kiriakou is the sole CIA officer to face jail time for any action involving the federal government's torture program. Ironically, Kiriakou, the whistleblower on the program, will go to prison, while the agents who implemented it will not.

http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/44-2013/2554-ciatorture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-reports-to-prison-today

This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg

-----Unauthorized Book Review-----

Privacy on the Internet can easily be a life or death proposition: whether it was Yahoo and Jerry Yang outing a Chinese pro-democracy activist to the Chinese government, the secret police of Bahrain disappearing protesters, or the extraordinarily long incarceration and sleep-deprivation torture of Bradley Manning, the outcomes can be enormous!

When events work positively, lives are saved and movements flourish in Myanmar, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Andy Greenberg's monumental book, This Machine Kills Secrets, delivers mightily. Greenberg has exhaustively researched the story --- and the back story --- providing the reader with the ultimate bird's eye view of the unfolding story of WikiLeaks, Internet privacy and the corporate and governmental battles waged against them --- this is one kick ass book --- and Greenberg gets everything right!

This is no David Wise or Eamon Javers misinformation trope, this is the real deal, my Wolfen friends.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525953205

For those who wish to stay current, the sites below may be of interest.

I-Sites:

http://www.privacysos.org/blog
http://cryptogon.com/
http://www.narconews.com/
http://www.globaleaks.org/
http://www.cryptome.org/
http://www.whistleblower.org/
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/

From the 1987 LA Times article:

And for that, there was an additional private cost: resentment on the part of those who had been hoping to avoid, at least in part, official blame. It came from corporate executives, and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Morton Thiokol's biggest customer. And it came from colleagues fearful that too much exposure of truth might hurt business and cost them their jobs.

"If you wreck this company, I'm gonna put my kids on your doorstep," grumbled one. Someone finally dubbed the engineers "the five lepers."

This is the sad reality: Whistle-blowers are often the target of ostracism from their contemporaries, while usually unanimously admired later in historical context. It's still not easy to be a whistle-blower, if anything, it's harder than ever.

This is what the source of the information should have done. Instead of burning a CD and sneaking it out, he should have gone to the Inspector General at the level above the unit that had the illegally classified information and reported its existence.

You are so, so very naive: After word leaked that one soldier (presumably Winfield) had spoken to military police, several platoon members retaliated. They confronted the informant and beat him severely - punching, kicking and choking him, then dragging him across the ground. As a last warning, Gibbs menacingly waved finger bones he had collected from Afghan corpses.

In his report, Geer blows the whistle on the dangers of a Microsoft monoculture. As we know all too well, whistleblowers are often rewarded for the efforts with firing, blacklisting, ect.

Here's a snippit from an article discussing the space shuttle disasters, which displays a few parallels with the current situation:

It is often said that whistleblowers are like miners' canaries, warning of impending tragedies that others cannot sense. Experience also shows that, particularly in "can-do" workplaces like NASA's, whistleblower complaints reflect otherwise hidden or unrecognized agency pathologies. For example, in the early 1990s, senior officials at NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) -- the guardians of an agency's correctness -- were themselves the targets of accusations that they were asking their employees to lie about illegalities they witnessed in the inspector general's office. The NASA OIG also was accused of "signing off" on a $1.7 billion contract so that a contractor would have reduced oversight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These and other revelations were brought to light by whistle-blowers, often at considerable risk to their professions.