Snowden most likely was a modified limited hangout.

I switched my point of view on this several times but after all the time i spend with this incident, i believe that much of the info he published was an effort to bring people and sheeple to self-censor more.

The reasoning behind this seems simple: It is much more cost efficient to nudge the masses into self-censorship than invest the same kind of money into breaking and entering into some very sophisticated FOSS-tools. Fear is a nice tool according to Machiavelli. It is really hard to fight or offset with a rational approach.