21 damaging documents than had Manning. He therefore would have been aware that by revealing state secrets that he had sworn to protect, he would be risking imprisonment unless, unlike Manning, he fled the country. His motives, no matter how noble they might be, would not spare him, anymore than it spared the other six, from determined federal prosecution. To be sure, the view of those on the Snowden side of the divide is not grounded in legal definitions, but in a broader notion of morality. Snowden‘s supporters do not accept that the law should be applied in this fashion to Snowden. They argue that Snowden had a moral imperative to act, even if it meant breaking the law. They fully accepted his view that he had a higher duty to protect citizens of all countries in the world from, as he put it, “secret pervasive surveillance.” That higher duty transcended him any narrower legal definitions of law-breaking. For example, Ben Wizner, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union who represented Snowden since November 2013, argues that Snowden’s taking of classified documents was as “act of conscience” that overrode any legal constraints because it “revitalized democratic oversight in the U.S.” And, without question, Snowden’s theft caused a much needed debate on govern surveillance. In this ends- justify-the-means view, any person with access to government secrets can authorize himself or herself to reveal those secrets to the world if it serves the public good and because doing so would be an “act of conscience,” he or she should be immune from legal prosecution. So for Snowden’s supporters, his “act of conscience” justifies his claim to being a whistle- blower even though the preponderance of the secrets disclosed by Snowden had to do with the NSA’s authorized activity of using its multi-billion dollar global arrays of sensors to intercept data in foreign countries and share it with some 30 allied intelligence services, as it did in 2013. Snowden, for example