Everyone should take a deep breath. For those tempted to lionize Snowden for partially unshading totalitarian "turnkey tyranny," as he has dubbed it, a word of caution seems in order. For those who are panicked about the revelations, some calm's in order, too. We don't yet have a clear sense of how the programs work -- and even less of a sense of Snowden, who has taken refuge in Hong Kong with more national security secrets than Barton Gellman of the Washington Post thinks it's wise to disclose to the public.

What Snowden did took extraordinary conviction and great personal risk.

But there's much we still don't know about the NSA contractor, who has worked most recently for Booz Allen Hamilton but also, according to The Guardian, for Dell and the spy agency itself.

How much more information is coming from Snowden's leaks? Why did he bypass all the other channels available to a whistleblower from going to the Inspector General to Congress? (To be fair, William Binney, a 40-year veteran of the NSA said he got no help from the congressional intelligence committees when he went to them with complaints about surveillance programs sweeping up American citizens.) Above all: Why on earth is he in Hong Kong?

Snowden seems to have mistaken Hong Kong's vibrancy for safety, its plucky determination to preserve freedom under the "One China, Two Systems" with the reality of Beijing's strong hand--something he surely could have discerned using an unclassified program known as Google. The timing of his releases and the U.S.-Chinese summit could be mere coincidence. But try imagining Daniel Ellsberg popping up in Belgrade at the time of the Pentagon Papers, days after a Nixon-Brezhnev Summit, when Yugoslavia was Communist but stood outside the Warsaw Pact and you get the idea. Obviously, the analogy is inexact -- but it gives some sense of how bizarre the choice of Hong Kong is.

We don't know when Snowden decided to go down this path. We don't know if he was encouraged or helped by others to do it. There should be consideration of Snowden's worldview if he really believes, as he said in the video released on the Guardian's website, that he might be harmed by "triads" -- Asian criminal syndicates. The idea that the U.S. would risk delegating the capture of Snowden sounds more than a little far fetched. It's even harder to believe that the U.S. government would be in the business of murdering two-time Pulitzer Prize winning American journalists, such as Gellman, on American soil, as Snowden darkly warned.

The China question has raised suspicions of a Chinese role in the leak. But that seems implausible, for a number of reasons. "It seems wildly unlikely to me, only because it would be an incredibly inventive Chinese handler who would dream something like this up," said Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network. "Presumably if China designed it, it would not have designed in it such a fashion as to have the guy show up in Hong Kong.... Now they're going to have to extradite him to the U.S. -- for an intelligence operative to have set it up that way is not good tradecraft."