Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf highlights the absurdity of the Obama administration’s treatment of Edward Snowden,
The Obama Administration has no plans to punish the people who undermined a core civilizational norm, let prisoner abuse trickle down the ranks into the military, needlessly subjected shackled humans to extreme physical depravity, and gave al-Qaeda leaders the most useful propaganda and recruiting tool imaginable.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials have gone so far as to ground the plane of a foreign leader in their zealous pursuit of Edward Snowden, who revealed truths about U.S. surveillance practices that have caused no demonstrated physical harm to anyone, that a majority of Americans wanted to know, that revealed previously unknown violations of the law to congressional overseers and the public, and that have prompted at least two legislative reform efforts in the United States alone.