The Washington Post said Edward Snowden does not deserve a pardon from President Obama.

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The Post said in an editorial published Saturday the question over whether the former National Security Agency contractor deserves a presidential pardon is "complicated" but the answer should ultimately be no.

It says those who defend Snowden don't deny he broke the law when he "copied and kept 1.5 million classified documents."

"They argue, rather, that Mr. Snowden’s noble purposes, and the policy changes his 'whistle-blowing' prompted, justified his actions," the editorial said.

"Specifically, he made the documents public through journalists, including reporters working for The Post, enabling the American public to learn for the first time that the NSA was collecting domestic telephone 'metadata' — information about the time of a call and the parties to it, but not its content — en masse with no case-by-case court approval."

The program, the Post wrote, was a violation of federal surveillance law.