I wonder what Snowden will get once he is captured.
You might want to look at the decision from
Daniel Ellsberg's (Pentagon Papers) Espionage trial.
Due to the gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11, 1973 after the government claimed it had lost records of wiretapping against Ellsberg. Byrne ruled: "The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case."[23]
As a result of the revelation of the Fielding break-in during the trial, John Ehrlichman, H R Haldeman, Richard Kleindienst and John Dean were forced out of office on April 30, and all would later be convicted of crimes related to the Watergate scandal. Egil Krogh later pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and White House counsel Charles Colson pleaded no contest for obstruction of justice in the burglary. "
If you're not familiar with the
Pentagon Papers, here is what the New York Times had to say.
A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers "demonstrated, among other things, that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance"
...
Nixon Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold later called the Papers an example of "massive overclassification" with "no trace of a threat to the national security". The Papers' publication had little or no effect on the ongoing war because they dealt with documents written years before publication...
In Southeast Asia, blind trust in our political leaders produced a war that we lost. And a war where 50,000 plus American died.
History has demonstrated that that trust was misplaced. And that the politicians in the White House had systematically lied to Congress and to the American people.
And that documents were classified not to protect national security. But to keep concealed the politician's lies.
You are welcome to be unsympathetic to Manning and Snowden.
But history has shown that documents can be classified not to protect national security but to protect lying politicians. And that those lies can produce substantial American causalities.
In time, more information will become available. And as more information becomes available, peoples perspectives will evolve.
While I can't say how Snowden will be perceived in the future. I can say this. Danial Ellsberg is now considered a hero. Even if he did release 50,000 pages of classified documents.
Uno