There was no "legal" way to discuss mass surveillance. Wyden tried time and time again.

[JDPriestly]

26. And the surveillance issue is a political one that needs to be discussed by voters.

I believe that Snowden's conduct and speech on the surveillance program are protected by the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is, with treaties, the prevailing law of the land. The First Amendment supersedes the Espionage Act or FISA or the Patriot Act.

Snowden's speech and the speech and writings of those who have assisted him or discussed the information he released are protected AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT by the First Amendment.

The First Amendment imposes limitations, prohibitions on our government, and those prohibitions should be followed by courts.

Snowden's speech was political.

When used for specific purposes, such as finding a ring of pedophiles or drug dealers, the NSA program is permitted under the Fourth Amendment and therefore legal. For that reason, it is legal, it is constitutional when used to monitor specific accounts and specific individuals. But the NSA does not have the right to get and no court has the right under the First Amendment to obtain court orders that permit the blanket, fairly comprehensive collection of metadata or other such information such as the content of our personal communications.

This goes beyond Snowden. If I write something anonymously on a computer that belongs to me, I am exercising my First Amendment rights. My writings are especially protected from government interference if what I am writing has political significance. The government has no right to reach into my computer and find out who I am even if I publish my writings or place them in the public by posting them on the internet.

That's my view. My personal information becomes public only when I decide to share it with the public. And my personal identification when I submit something I write to a website anonymously remains protected by the First Amendment.

Using my computer to hack into someone else's computer is not speech and is not protected by the First Amendment.

In Snowden's case, he made documents public that belonged to a private contractor of the government. It can be argued a) that he had to make the documents public because there existence proved massive violations of First Amendment rights by the government that endangered our democracy and our Constitution, and b) that the documents did not really belong to the government, but belonged to the communications services and us and were not obtained by the government within the legal limits of the Constitution.