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When Edward Snowden first began leaking documents he purloined from the National Security Agency, he seemed to have a clear sense of purpose. He wanted to let Americans know that their government was secretly spying on the phone records of millions of innocent citizens, infringing on their civil liberties, and that it was demanding information on some of the Internet traffic flowing through American computer systems.

“The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to,” he told the Guardian earlier this month. “There is no public oversight.”

Mr. Snowden’s actions, though illegal, exposed programs that many people, including lawmakers of both parties, believed had gone too far. The leaks showed how the intelligence community had used the cover of secrecy to expand and abuse its domestic surveillance powers, surprising even people who had written the post-9/11 laws on which these powers were supposed to be based. They have spurred a useful and important debate on whether those laws should be changed.

In the last few days, however, Mr. Snowden’s leaks have taken a questionable turn. He told the South China Morning Post that the United States had hacked into many Chinese computer systems, including those at universities and businesses. And yesterday he showed documents to the Guardian revealing that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart had spied on politicians from around the world who attended the 2009 G-20 summit in London.



These documents are of a different and more dubious order than the first ones. Like all leaks, their benefits have to be weighed against their potential harm, and in this case, it’s difficult to see what the benefits are. The N.S.A. was created to spy on overseas communications, and there is no serious debate about whether it should be doing so. Revealing that it was monitoring the computer traffic of foreign countries, and listening to their leaders, sheds no particularly useful light on the N.S.A.’s mission, or what most people believed its activities to be.

On the other hand, it was not supposed to be doing domestic spying, which is why the collection of phone records, and the extensive demands for Internet traffic records, were so disturbing.

In an online chat today with readers of the Guardian, Mr. Snowden expressed outrage that the United States would hack into civilian computers overseas, which he called “nakedly, aggressively criminal acts.” And he came up with an odd formulation for what the N.S.A. should and shouldn’t be doing overseas:

“Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries,” he wrote. “The majority of them are our allies, but without asking for public permission, N.S.A. is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people.”

So apparently he believes that the United States shouldn’t engage in spying except for countries with which it is at war. Of course, we’re not at war with any countries right now, only with Al Qaeda and its allies, so that would mean shutting down all non-terror spying activities. The idea that we should unilaterally discard a practice — however distasteful — used for centuries by virtually every country that can afford a spy service is naïve. Every industrialized country spies on every other, in part to learn just how much they are being spied on. What exactly was it he believed the intelligence world did when he first started making money by working for it?