I Am Going to Say Something Controversial

To those who say: "the government isn't allowed to spy on its citizens and that's more important (than the lives of our agents abroad):"

That argument can certainly be made - except that Snowden and Assange didn't have to release the part about our agents abroad in order to release the part about illegal spying on our own citizens. Nor did they have to release it in a form that put our agents at risk. They chose to be hasty and careless because they thought the same way that you do - that their cause was so important that it trumped all other considerations, including the lives of hundreds of people who were risking everything for a cause larger than themselves. There's a word for taking that kind of my-cause-at-any-cost perspective and putting it into action at the cost of other people's lives - it's called being a fanatic.