Prism

While there are problems with the actual surveillance programs themselves, I am more concerned with the bloated bureaucracy of the U.S. government and its various agencies. This guy wasn't even employed by the CIA directly. He worked for a contractor and made an inflated and likely unchecked salary. In essence, he was overpaid taxpayer money to collect and disseminate U.S. secrets, violate his terms of employment, contract and trust of the American people. What future is there when a government can't even vet their employees or contractors well enough to prevent the revealing of state secrets.

While he may have wanted the public to become aware of these programs, there were better ways to do it, there is no doubt that he wanted to be famous; he didn't even need to reveal himself. There were plenty of relatively powerful people that could act on this information, through the proper channels, Darrell Issa comes to mind specifically. He acted with impulse and irresponsibility, even the newspapers censored themselves by keeping some of the information back.

Now we learn he wandered into the Chinese territories and "disappeared"? I'm not sure what his exit strategy was, but I'm sure being detained and questioned by Chinese authorities, being bled dry of U.S. intelligence, was not in his plans. Of course, that is just speculation, but if I were the Chinese, that's exactly what I'd be doing, taking advantage of a poorly calculated attempt to be the next Julian Assange at the cost of my greatest foe.