> And I’m not even that big a fan of him.

We are but vessels for our claim to fame.

You can see this with Nobel prize winners, rich tycoons, great writers, and so forth.

Often in mathematics, a thing is not named after the person who discovered it. I think that mathematicians as a joke even made a theorem about this and then didn't name it after the guy who pointed it out.

With Snowden, I think it was more the fact that he was the whistleblower. You could argue that he just did it for this reason or that reason. But he is now the vessel for that point in history.