Edward Snowden felt a little bit of vindication Friday.

People said speaking up isn't worth the risk. Today, we can see they were wrong. Blow the whistle, change the world. https://t.co/GfwPn2ICYX — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 28, 2017

Before Friday, the NSA had a policy of sucking up texts and emails exchanged between Americans and people outside the U.S., with impunity, if those communications even mentioned non-American targets of NSA surveillance. The agency did not require a warrant to collect this information.

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But the NSA announced Friday that it would no longer participate in this form of collection. Snowden counted that as a win for whistleblowing.

Snowden is the former NSA contractor who leaked documents about the agency's spying programs and techniques to several journalists and news outlets in 2013.

The NSA's Friday announcement, as the ACLU has pointed out, is not irreversible. And it's not as if the NSA has come close to spying altogether. But it does show that the power of a government entity like this can recede.