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WASHINGTON — Edward Snowden is a courageous American hero and will be remembered as one long after the “war on terror” is replaced by some other pretext for violating Americans’ constitutional rights and the rest of the world’s national sovereignty, privacy and, sometimes, security.

He won his first major legal victory on Dec. 16 when a federal District Court ruled that the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records that Snowden first exposed was probably unconstitutional.

It’s unfortunate that even most of the critical reporting on our national surveillance state still frames the abuses that Snowden revealed as a result of over-zealous efforts to protect Americans from terrorism.

Even ignoring the industrial espionage and phone-tapping of foreign leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff that obviously had nothing to do with terrorism; the surveillance state at home is much more than a violation of our privacy.