I don't feel one bit sorry for snowden. he's not a whistle blower, he's a double agent bought out by the chinese government.     trust me, china will hand him over -- otherwise if a chinese defector ever comes to the US with classified information, they would not be getting them back, and would not know the full extent of what they divulged. china can't afford to take the risk of protecting snowden if they ever want any renegade from the chinese government back to punish them. Many people in china would dive at the chance to become a US citizen.    the irony of all of this, is china has had a PRISM like system for years, in fact, they control or spy on pretty much everything that goes on in their internet. I'm not saying it's right, but going to the chinese looks silly. it's like a north korean defecting to iran because north korea is building nukes.     snowden didn't come across something, in fact, he deliberately got himself transferred to the hawaii branch, which just so happens to be where all the surveillance on china is done. look at snowden, he doesn't look like he gets much sun, so obviously he wasn't in hawaii enjoying the weather. snowden deliberately wormed his way into the NSA, to get close enough to the documents he intended to steal. he didn't have near the clearance to access those documents, but he was close enough to break in to steal those documents.     PRISM wasn't his target, it was his cover. what snowden's real mission was, is to steal all information the US gov had on china. China wanted to know what the US knows about everything, ranging from the mundane to troop movements, and how accurate that information was. That's the real story here.     But china will throw snowden to the wolves once they are done with him. sooner or later, he's going to end up either miserably poor for the rest of his life or dead in a gutter.    snowden wasn't even done with his mission, but he knew the NSA was on top him. in fact, they were building a case against him for espionage before he even defected. he knew they were getting close to catching him, so he grabbed what he could and fled. his real mission was to CONTINUE spying on the US for china as long as he could. but with about to be caught, he fled to china, and in a very public way in order to do damage control on the situation under the guise of a whistleblower.