Snowden, *by law*, needed to do what he did.

[ProSense]

75. Ellsberg

"Sadly, as Daniel Ellsberg points out, some other bits of the the Constitution are routinely ignored by this White House, such as the right to due process and the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."

...didn't flea the country and never had make comments denying that he turned over information to foreign governments:

Snowden Says The Government Still Has No Idea What He Gave To Reporters

Edward Snowden snuck a little jab at the government into his appearance at SXSW Interactive on Monday.

Asked if it was just a matter of time before the government could decrypt even the best encryption, the former National Security Agency contractor held up his own case as evidence that encryption works to protect data from surveillance.

"The United States government has assembled a massive investigative team" to look into him and his leak of top secret NSA documents, Snowden said. "And they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalists, what they have, what they don't have. Because encryption works."

Snowden also suggested that encryption has kept the documents he leaked out of the hands of foreign governments, like Russia and China.

<...>

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/snowden-sxsw-documents-encryption

Direct quote:

Ed: Let’s put it this way - the United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with journalists and they still have no idea you know what - what documents were provided to the journalists, what they have, what they don’t have. Because of encryption works. Now the only way to get around that, is to have a computer that is so massive and so powerful you can work the entire universe into the energy power into this decryption machine and they still might not be able to do it. Or you break into the computer and try to steal their keys and bypass the encryption. That happens today and that happens every day. That is the way around it.

<...>

Ed: If I could follow up on that I would say the US government’s investigation supports that. We have both public and private acknowledgements that they know at this point the Russian government, the Chinese government any other government has possession of any of this information. And that would be easy for them to find out. Remember these are the guys that are spying on everyone in the world. They have got human intelligence assets embedded in these governments. They have got electronic signal assets in these governments. If suddenly the Chinese government knew everything the NSA is doing we would notice the changes. We would notice the changes, we would see official communicating and our assets will tell us hey somewhere they have a warehouse they put you know, a thousand of their most skilled researchers in there. That has never happened and it is never going to happen.
http://blog.inside.com/blog/2014/3/10/edward-snowden-sxsw-full-transcription-and-video

Snowden: The U.S. Government has no idea what I gave to journalists in Russia and China, but encryption has kept the leaked documents out of the hands of foreign governments, like Russia and China, whose media are state-owned.

Genius!

Ellsberg stayed, fought and prevailed in getting the charges dropped.

Snowden put himself in the position of having to plea bargain based on his actions that were outside the scope of simply leaking information about domestic surveillance.

Snowden Inc. ("The strategy: Attention = bargaining power&quot
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024640825#post188