These revelations are too new to be from Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Bruce Schneier suspect a second leaker.
But one good thing is (and I've said this before in relation to the whistleblowers) is that it will encourage more whistleblowers.
One of the apparent requirements for working at many of these 3 letter agencies is patriotism. If you show patriotism, you are a good candidate. They will spend money training you technical things, but they can't train you to be a patriot and love your country. The "problem" with such patriots is that they actually take to heart things like "Constitution", "Privacy", "Freedom" and so on. The hope of the agency is that with enough brainwashing and threats of loss of job, imprisonment, etc., these values would move to the background.
The "pragmatics" on top understand that those concepts are just there for propaganda. It is the sys admins and other mid-level analysts that might actually believe, and might just pull a Snowden so to speak once in a while.
NSA understood this and immediately went into self-preservation mode. They probably never even thought along the lines of "OMG we have let the public down, we have screwed up, etc etc.", rather they saw it as, we are not threatening and controlling our employees enough. So instead of spying less on our own citizens, we should institute "no-lone-zones" (like nuclear silos have), so you are together with an accountabil-a-buddy who is supposed to snitch on you if you do something silly.
Not really convinced about that. What's important/exciting should be what we do about it, not how many messengers we have. We really have enough information by now to know what's at stake. Meanwhile, if you remember a couple of months back, the NSA sent out an internal memo stating that they simply intend to "winter the storm", and that seems to be what's happening until now (besides a few more or less symbolical proposals from the gov't).
> [...] it will encourage more whistleblowers.
Not convinced either. Again, we already know that deep changes would be needed. Also, whistleblowers, in this case, are obviously ready to die for their cause. There are not many people like that. And the World's support for people like Snowden has been completely absent or at least appallingly weak. And then, there's the fact that the NSA is currently in a huge lock-down process, which makes me think we won't see another Snowden, when this is done. That's why I believe, either there is change now or pretty much never.