The news headline from Thursday’s live chat with Edward Snowden, on the Free Snowden Web site, was that he wants to come home—but he wants the laws changed first, presumably so he doesn’t have to go to prison. Asked by Jake Tapper, of CNN, about the conditions under which he would return to the United States, Snowden said,

Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately not possible in the face of current whistle-blower-protection laws, which through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like myself. The hundred-year old law under which I’ve been charged, which was never intended to be used against people working in the public interest, and forbids a public interest defense. This is especially frustrating, because it means there’s no chance to have a fair trial, and no way I can come home and make my case to a jury.

The really big news of the day, though, was that Snowden has been vindicated. Whether by coincidence or not, the live chat occurred shortly after it emerged that a federally chartered privacy watchdog had declared illegal one of the big N.S.A. domestic-spying programs that Snowden revealed—the Prism program, in which the agency routinely sweeps up hundreds of millions of telephone records. In a long report, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress beefed up in 2007, said that the bulk collection of telephone metadata violated the statute that the Obama Administration has cited to justify it, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and called for the program to be halted.

The online conversation, in which Snowden typed answers to questions posed by reporters and others, covered a number of areas. Throughout it, the former contractor, who is living in Russia, referred to the new report to back up his points. Asked about President Obama’s speech last week, in which he claimed that the N.S.A. hadn’t abused the mass-surveillance programs, Snowden pointed to the watchdog’s finding that there was no evidence that collecting phone records indiscriminately had identified or prevented a single terrorist plot. Snowden said,

When even the federal government says the NSA violated the constitution at least 120 million times under a single program, but failed to discover even a single plot, it’s time to end “bulk collection,” which is a euphemism for mass surveillance. There is simply no justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0% success rate.

And he also quoted directly from the new report:

Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations.

It’s hard to argue with that, although defenders of the N.S.A. would doubtless try. Under President Obama’s proposals, the bulk data would continue to be collected and held by a third party that is yet to be determined, with the N.S.A. having to get approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to access it.

Snowden was rightly dismissive of such reforms. He called the FISA court “a rubber-stamp authority that approves 99.97% of government requests.” He went on, “Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.”

One questioner asked Snowden to identify the worst harm that the domestic-spying programs had caused. In an answer that is worth quoting at length, Snowden cited two: