I don’t think we should discount the fear here. Unless Snowden had a fortune tucked away somewhere, blowing the whistle was a sure fire way to blow up your career and make yourself homeless.
I’m also sure he didn’t just walk into the bureau and get handed everything on day 1.
I’m also sure it took some time to exfil the data. Most companies have policies that can make it difficult to legitimately walk off premise with information, I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be to do that with anything government related, nevermind federal, nevermind something considered to be secret by the country…
Simply put, there’s a lot of hurdles to get over, and doing so carefully enough to not get caught until you have what you want to blow the whistle on, may take a very very long time.
I don’t think we should discount the fear here. Unless Snowden had a fortune tucked away somewhere, blowing the whistle was a sure fire way to blow up your career and make yourself homeless.
I’m also sure he didn’t just walk into the bureau and get handed everything on day 1.
I’m also sure it took some time to exfil the data. Most companies have policies that can make it difficult to legitimately walk off premise with information, I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be to do that with anything government related, nevermind federal, nevermind something considered to be secret by the country…
Simply put, there’s a lot of hurdles to get over, and doing so carefully enough to not get caught until you have what you want to blow the whistle on, may take a very very long time.