I wonder to what degree Wikileaks held Snowden's hand through all of this? For those who remember, Assange's organization distributed a large encrypted archive through bittorrent around the diplomatic cable leaks, presumably with a dead-man's switch [1] set up to reveal the key. I'm sure that Snowden had some procedures in place before departing to Hong Kong, but I also recall Assange saying they were trying to reach out to Snowden a week or two ago, and perhaps (hopefully!) they were able to give him some insurance tips, including potential pitfalls that Snowden may not have thought of.
Not saying it goes back that far, but referring to more recent times. Like over the past couple weeks. I don't think anybody in the world other than Snowden himself knew of his plans to penetrate BAH. But even if they did, who cares? As long as they didn't help him, I do not believe that knowledge of an impending crime is in-and-of itself a crime (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). What are they gonna do? Trump up some sexual assault charges?
Well it would be conspiracy to commit a felony for starters. And how do you think the American people would handle the idea of a foreign-born spymaster using his acolytes to infiltrate the national security apparatus, however angelic he claims his motives to be?
Plenty of other countries around whose residents are happy to find out in what kind of ways we rightless non-residents are being informationally manhandled by you.
Then feel free to try to spy on us like all the other foreign countries do. In the meantime if you have better ways to detect and track violent extremists that could be literally anywhere in the world without accidentally scavenging data belonging to our allies then I'm sure the NSA is all ears; you could probably make your suggestions on any web forum, in fact.
Perhaps there's an RFC forcing AQ to set the "evil bit" on their IP packets? That's a feasible technical solution, I suppose, as long as AQ is RFC-compliant.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch