Edward Snowden: traitor or hero?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover story

His revelations about government surveillance programs shocked many Americans. With those programs now under attack, debate is growing about whether or not Snowden's actions were justifiable.

Facing the possibility of life in prison if he returns to the United States, Edward Snowden remains holed up in Russia, where he fled last year after exposing a National Security Agency (N.S.A.) program to spy on Americans and foreigners.

The 30-year-old high school drop-out and computer whiz from North Carolina may be the most famous fugitive in the world-hailed as a hero by some, denounced as a traitor by others.

But now that President Obama has acknowledged that the data collection programs Snowden revealed may have gone too far, some are asking whether the U.S. government should treat Snowden leniently.

"I absolutely think the tide has changed for Snowden," says attorney Jesselyn Radack, an adviser to Snowden who works at the Government Accountability Project, a Washington group that protects government whistle-blowers. "All of these things taken together counsel in favor of some sort of amnesty or pardon."

As a computer systems contractor working for the N.S.A., Snowden collected hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents about a variety of classified surveillance programs. Troubled by what he saw, he decided to make them public.

Last summer, he leaked details of the programs to journalists, reigniting a national debate about how much privacy is worth sacrificing to prevent more terrorist attacks on the United States. Civil liberties groups immediately hailed Snowden for revealing what they say is government spying run amok. Many lawmakers on both the right and the left branded him a traitor, and federal prosecutors charged him with two violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Monitoring & 'Metadata'

The most controversial surveillance program Snowden disclosed involves the bulk collection of the "metadata" of millions of Americans' phone calls--in other words, records of what calls were made to whom and when, but not recordings or transcripts of the actual calls. Snowden also revealed that U.S. spy agencies had monitored the cellphone conversations of dozens of world leaders, including close allies like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.

Last month, President Obama announced a major overhaul of how U.S. telephone data is collected. He's ordering intelligence agencies to get permission from a secret court before tapping into the data to investigate terrorist threats; and to stop monitoring the phones of allied leaders.

"America's capabilities are unique," Obama said in a speech announcing the new restrictions. "And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do."

President Obama also promised to ultimately move that phone data out of the hands of the government. That raises the question of whether Americans will feel better knowing that the data is in the hands of private companies. Telecom providers like AT&T and Verizon and Internet companies like Google and Amazon already collect enormous amounts of information about Americans' daily lives--too much, Web privacy groups say.

The courts so far have been divided over the spying program. A federal judge in Washington, D.C...