Fred Kaplan presents a cogent argument at Slate that he went far beyond blowing the whistle on NSA domestic intelligence with all of the data he’s revealed. I agree with him. Snowden’s actions seem more like he doubts the legitimacy of any intelligence gathering or at least in the United States engaging in it.

But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

That doesn’t seem like a heroic action to prevent illegal domestic surveillance to me.