One of the most popular arguments I’m reading online about people criticising Snowden for blowing the whistle on the NSA data gathering program is that he’s not a whistleblower because the program was “legal.”

The people claiming this are forgetting one thing, and this exposes much more than just Snowden’s justification for leaking the documents. That is that the NSA program clearly violated the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, no matter how you try to defend or justify it.

Technically, yes, the NSA program is legal because it was passed in a regular law (as opposed to a Constitutional Amendment) and held-up in court. But let’s remember some other things that were once legal in this country: Slavery, Child Labor and private “Expeditionary Forces” (private armies that would, in essence, invade other countries for various purposes). Be careful you’re not on the wrong side of history this time, folks.

Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s Constitutional. Our system is so broken that it’s now possible to circumvent the Constitution as long as our politicians can scare us enough so that we actually support it. We’re so far gone now that being “legal” is not anywhere in the same realm as being Just.