What Greenwald said vs Reuters summary of what he said:

[woo me with science]

49. Your perseverence is noted

in attempting to make this all about "Bad, Bad Snowden" instead of the outrageous, unconstitutional mass surveillance of its own citizens by the United States of America.

By the way, that's Talking Point #13 on PSPS's excellent list.

It's a hoot how the very same people who pooh pooh the US government's mass surveillance of every single American citizen by claiming that "everyone knew," and "it's old news," do not hesitate to exclaim with breathless urgency that telling the Chinese that the American government has spied on them is in any way a surprise or by any stretch of the imagination a critical breach of national security.

It's absurd, is what it is. To qualify as espionage under the law, the information provided must be shown to be damaging to the country. There's no evidence whatsoever that what Snowden chose carefully to give rises to that bar. He exposed illegal behavior by the US.

Meanwhile, the United States of America, the beacon of freedom and democracy to the world, has assembled a surveillance architecture whose capabilities surpass that of any totalitarian government in history, and they are sweeping up data in real time, from every single American citizen.

Snowden is a hero. Every single whistleblower before him who tried to use official channels to report this authoritarian nightmare was summarily silenced by our own government. Whereas Daniel Ellsberg was released on bond the same day he was arrested for revealing the Pentagon Papers, Snowden knew that he, like other whistleblowers, would face swift and fierce retribution from the US government today, including imprisonment, solitary confinement, or even torture. This is how far the United States government has fallen, how authoritarian it has become, and how deeply, deeply corrupted.

We are lucky that Snowden learned from the mistakes of previous whistleblowers and has taken steps to protect himself and ensure that the truth about what our government is doing to us reaches the American people.