The whistleblower personality is rarely an attractive one. Whistleblowers tend to be the difficult ones, the sort who tend to feel freer to speak out precisely because they don’t fit in. So perhaps it is not a surprise that the biggest whistleblower of all time has an unpleasant personality to match. And personality would not matter — at least it would not be so grating — if Snowden’s behavior were more upstanding and his actions more justified.

On behavior, if Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions?

The harder question, because the cost-benefit analysis is inherently both opaque and subjective, concerns the actions themselves. Is Snowden’s massive theft justified by the degree of governmental intrusion he unveiled; the importance of the public discussion he provoked; the systemic shortcomings, if not outright failures, that both eroded adequate oversight and short-circuited the possibility of public debate absent his intervention? On the other, even more unknowable side of the ledger is the lasting damage to U.S. security from having its capabilities exposed for the United States’ enemies to see.