Here's Why Snowden Plea Negotiations Are Going Nowhere

[JDPriestly]

3. Al Gore understands the value of Snowden's actions.

The former vice president explained that while he wasn’t fully aware of the facts surrounding Snowden’s case, he said the government contractor didn’t appear to have much of a choice but to leak the information he had to journalists.

“It’s not clear to me that reporting what he discovered to his supervisors was a viable option for him,” Gore said. “But I think what he has disclosed has made possible an absolutely essential conversation.”

. . . .
“I wrote about this in my last book and had some of the revelations that Snowden put out really were put out by some other senior whistleblowers in the NSA who were kind of ignored. We had them. There were interviews with them. I talked with them,” Gore said.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/al-gore-edward-snowden-important-service-107652.html?hp=r2

Gore makes this point. I have said the same thing in different words on DU:

“Democracy is among other things a state of mind,” he said. “And if people are given the feeling that they have to be careful what they say lest it be misinterpreted because somebody’s keeping a record, that chills the First Amendment rights that are at the very core of what American democracy is all about. This is really dangerous.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/al-gore-edward-snowden-important-service-107652.html?hp=r2

I wonder how many of the Snowden critics have ever talked to someone from Eastern Europe about the surveillance under Communism.