Clapper & Feinstein finally admit that ALL phone records going back 7 years are being collected

[Benton D Struckcheon]

124. Too much huffing and puffing

The facts themselves are bad enough.
Snowden, however, is still a suspicious person. Telling the Chinese via the South China Morning Post about US hacking of China was a step too far. It pollutes the waters, and makes him a political actor. This won't affect the legal case being brought by the ACLU, but it does affect how effective his message will be to US citizens, who will now weigh his revelations against an act that clearly goes against US interests, and not just governmental - private interests as well. It also injected his revelations into the talks that took place between Xi and Obama re hacking, and not in a way helpful to the US. Why he would have done such a monumentally stupid thing is beyond me, unless he was acting as an agent of China. It's not like he was telling them anything they didn't already know, but the publicity of him saying it obviously would have undercut Obama. There was zero reason for him to do this. You can never be too cynical.
As to the actual substance, I didn't really appreciate the damage until I read the New Yorker piece on the usefulness of metadata. That's a real issue, and not something I'd thought of before. The New Yorker, as usual, manages to present the issue in a reasoned, helpful way. The ACLU, Grayson, and the Senators who kept warning on this will, one hopes, be able to put a stop to this via the courts. We'll see.
Obama should never have allowed this to occur. As a Constitutional scholar, I'm sure he found a way to parse the legalities in such a way as to make it Constitutionally viable, but what he doesn't seem to understand is that all that did was to make this stuff even more dangerous by giving it what I'm sure is a pretty tight legal rationale. We will now need an explicit SC decision to rein in the NSA and all the rest of the spy agencies.