Well, first of all, thank you for putting it this succinctly; I honestly hadn't understood where the "elitism" claims were coming from, but, sure, that makes sense.

Here's the thing, though: Gladwell is probably not wrong about this. Ellsberg was far better read in to the program he leaked about that Snowden is to the topics of his leaks. As you can imagine, most of my industry friends and acquaintances are broadly pro-Snowden, and an argument that I've seen from literally none of them is that Edward Snowden had the technical expertise to either vet his documents himself, or to build a process whereby they would be effectively vetted. Which you can see by the shitshow that was the original PRISM disclosures.