regarding Edward Snowden, the point is being missed I suspect...

[stevenleser]

145. There is no need to paraphrase, POTUS words speak for themselves. And your last sentence misses the

point completely.

Here are the bolded portion of the President's words from my above post;

But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance that we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.
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With a decade of experience now to draw from, this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions -- about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them.
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So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. But what we can do -- what we must do -- is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. And to define that strategy, we have to make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom. That begins with understanding the current threat that we face.

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The President said as much that there are questions about whether NSA Surveillance conflicts with our privacy values and says this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions and define the nature and scope of the struggle.

Your last sentence asks if this is supposed to make us feel better. That isn't the point. The point is, one of the justifications for Snowden's actions, the main justification in fact, is that we supposedly had no idea that NSA Surveillance was going on to the point that it might conflict with our values of privacy. When the President says so two weeks before hand in a public press conference, that justification for Snowden does not work because it is obviously not true. Absent that justification, what Snowden did becomes simple illegal acts.