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Your previous post stated it best:

Best to be neither a KGB tool nor an NSA tool.

Snowden had quite a few legitimate concerns. If you have worries about the militarized super-state being used against its own citizens, one only look at Nevada to see the latest example. The irony is though, when Snowden left the USA, did he realize he would become a tool of another nation's vast intelligence service?

The irony is though, when Snowden left the USA, did he realize he would become a tool of another nation’s vast intelligence service?

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Does it matter?

If he had come out with it here he would have been at best buried in the Bureau of Prisons and forgotten in three news cycles.

If he ‘disappeared’ himself he would have been hunted down and again, buried under the prison - at best.

He could have shot himself or similar. To what purpose?

He had two real choices. Be a continuing part of the domestic secret police, which most have chosen, or go rogue. Once he went rogue, he became dependent on the kindness of strangers.

He traded masters, but in the process revealed a great conspiracy within the Washington government. Now it is out, and cannot be concealed.

A Phyrric victory instead of an utter loss. But Phyrric victories cost everything too.

Your previous post stated it best:

Best to be neither a KGB tool nor an NSA tool.

Snowden had quite a few legitimate concerns. If you have worries about the militarized super-state being used against its own citizens, one only look at Nevada to see the latest example. The irony is though, when Snowden left the USA, did he realize he would become a tool of another nation's vast intelligence service?

Yes, that was his only protection for his life.

The US government, especially the Treasury, State, Intel and Defense Depts, work for global elite finance.

The number one priority of the elites to maintain their hold over government so that it does not print its own money and thus not need to borrow through their banking services.

Intel (espionage) is an essential tool for elite finance to use in controlling government actions. Thus they can not have the truth come out about what they have been doing all along and continue to do. So when some truth occasionally leaks out, they mitigate the problem, clouding up Congressional testimony, telling half truths, etc. It looks terrible, the papers, led by by CIA's own Washington Post, run the engineered stories, America gets mad, then gets over it and moves on. And the elites switch programs around and continue.

When Snowden confirmed William Binney's and others' assertions, and then some, it was a huge revelation, especially when combined with evidence of NSA backdooring that has been publicly reported on since at least 2006. With Snowden, it was the extent of targets (heads of state and American citizens en masse) and the level of penetration (stored history of continuous full sweep of data traffic) that was publicized.

The government's first preference would have been obviously to have a complete refutation of the revelation, i.e., get a retraction from him, brand him as a lunatic, drug user, etc.

Clearly, this was so big, his life was guaranteed to last only until the retraction could be constructed; at that point, they would want his story to permanently end, with no possibility of opening the book again.

As most espionage agencies cooperate with UK/US intel to a surprising degree, i.e., even former enemies are now friends, I guess the best option he had was to go to the one country where the old theatrical idea of them being an "enemy" is being kept alive in order to have some semblance of a significant adversary left to actually give the CIA/NSA a reason for even existing. If Russia just relented and forked over such a prized intel public figure to their "adversary" the US, Russia and the US would, by implication, be acknowledging that they are, in effect, a single police state mechanism. The illusion of an epic struggle between good and evil would be shattered.