This takes no less courage than what Edward Snowden or Julian Assange did - the scale of actions may be different, but the amount of danger they put themselves into, in order to do what they believe is the right thing, is absolutely admirable.
Similar to Snowden was case of Alexander Litvinenko. Unfortunately Litvinenko was not hiding from USA but from Russia and is now dead.
As another poster mentioned, they may have started that way but they became compromised and their motives now are not so clear. Self interest has become more prominent in their decisions and perhaps it was always that way.
This protestor on the news however has courage.
His last tweet hit me pretty hard, and I started worrying about his general safety after that. I don't wish being in an authoritarian state as a foreigner during a massive external and internal conflict and I'm very worried for his safety (and I mean that both in and outside of Russia)
[0] https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1498049577131208705
"I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong."
I'd be curious to know what makes you say that, but beyond that, even the people here who believe their intent was not so pure cannot deny that the actual effect of the Snowden revelations has been a widely increased awareness about privacy, and much increased legitimacy for the products and ideas that attempt to improve the privacy situation for the average user (not sure if Assange/WikiLeaks revelations have had any material effect apart from shock at the scale of corruption being even beyond what people assumed).
Far from the "Snowden revelations changed nothing" cry of despair that was popular for a while, it's becoming clear that they changed the conversation around privacy from hypothetical situations from tinfoil hatters, to something everyone can and does talk about.
I don't doubt the leaks from Snowden increased awareness of privacy.
Snowdens early justification statements were "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building. "
He was either a pawn or naive. Perhaps at the time we all were.
Snowden then went to China and then Russia. These are hardly the bastion of human rights, privacy and freedom that he supposedly fought for.
At some point we have to admit that all countries of any significance likely have intelligence and monitoring programmes. Maybe (in countries with some semblance of freedom) these are there to protect us from those countries that work against those same principles Snowden claimed to support.
I can't fault him for that. What would you suggest that he should have done instead?
Both of them are working FOR Putin
Assange likely started with pure motives, but became compromised as WL ran out of money. He (claimed he) was about to release a pile of intelligence against the Russian govt & oligarchy, then never did, and was soon doing spots on RU.
The vast bulk of Snowden's pilfered haul had nothing to do with his stated aims, and definitely put agents in danger. And of course he ended up there. Notice he's not said a word since the RUS invasion of Ukraine. He hasn't got enough courage to be worthy to lick clean the soles of Marina Ovsyannikova's shoes.
Snowden, I think, somewhat blinded by the overwhelming US propaganda machine and the fact that he's stuck in Russia, made an honest mistake. He admitted as much on his Twitter. Nobody's perfect, that doesn't mean they're working for Putin.
For reference on what such a machine actually looks like, go look at Russian media this last two weeks.
Read what people who were actually in the intelligence agencies said; this [0][1]should have enough details and links to start you off.
You might also note that while the progressive Barack Obama had no problem pardoning Manning, he did no such thing for Snowdon. This was after the US House Intelligence Committee — not intelligence agency people, and both parties — UNANIMOUSLY voted to approve a report on Edward Snowden finding that he "did tremendous damage" to U.S. national security [2].
Perhaps you can explain how the whole airport fiasco and taking on Snowdon could have happened without Putin's direct approval - and why he'd do such a thing if it is "only" US civil rights issues at stake from Snowdon's theft.
Perhaps you can also explain how among the million+ documents Snowdon stole, only a few actually have anything to do with the headlines touting the civil liberty cause - e.g., exposing details of Israel’s killing of senior WMD proliferators in Syria [3]. Seriously, how does that improve anything in the US?
If you actually bother to look, without the hero-worshipping glasses and Qanon-level suspicion of anything related to government, you find that his massive story is a fraud.
Seriously, stop being fooled. I was similarly fooled, until I started trying to find actual experts on what had happened, and not just going along with the utter Kremlin line pushed out by popular trolls like Greenwald, and picked up and repeated uncritically.
[0] https://observer.com/2016/09/the-real-ed-snowden-is-a-patsy-...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200606111426/https://20committ...
[2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-intelligence-committee-rel...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200226232346/https://www.jpost...