Whistleblowing is good.  Whistleblowing is important.  It is important that we know what the government is doing regarding our communications and the impact on our privacy rights.  I am happy for the debate, and I thank Edward Snowden for it.

But then there is this:

Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in “hostile countries” after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported.

Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services.

Snowden downloaded more than 1.7 million secret files from security agencies in the United States and Britain in 2013, and leaked details about mass surveillance of phone and internet communications.

Snowden and Glenn Greenwald are disputing this news story, noting:

The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them.

While Greenwald has a point, it doesn’t strike me as completely unreasonable that Russia and China certainly learned something about us that the they didn’t know from Snowden’s massive government document leak.  Of course, we’ll probably never know the truth.