>He had the resources to leak information about the one or two programs that actually went so far over the line that it made him worried rather than everything he could get his hands on.

I can agree with you to a majority extent on this. The only reason I disagree is only because of circumchance. How things happened to play out - which is more and more incriminating documents being read/discovered within the files.

>Sure, maybe less gets fixed in the one go-round, but if the NSA doesn't take that as a hint to clean up their act, more whistleblowers would follow, especially if Snowden had actually earned trust for the idea by acting responsibly.

I disagree entirely that more whistleblowers would follow - especially with how government shills and a good chunk (although seemingly a minority chunk) of people condemn Snowden as a traitor full-through rather than a whistleblower. They don't even partially agree that anything should have been leaked. Full-stop they have no understanding of what a whistleblower is or how it benefits them, nor do they care. He did something the government thinks is bad, therefore he is bad.

Those sorts of people actively discourage future whistleblowers. Receiving death threats from "hardcore patriots" chugging from the jingoism juice is the last thing potential whistleblowers would willingly opt into.

A small group of people (can I safely include you in this group?) might consider him in a better light had he only leaked the programs/files that personally bothered him. That's a really, really, really small group, from what I've read/seen online. And yes, without the circumchance I mentioned above (how things "happened to turn out") I would agree that would have been a more responsible take on it. I also personally think it would have had less of an impact, received 2 weeks of media coverage and then completely died out. More responsible? Yes. Change anything? No.

Eventually he would have to sift through more documents to renew public interest (why the articles were published every-so-often rather than all-at-once). Eventually, he would need to find help to sift through more documents. Relying on the small possibility of more whistleblowers coming forward is naïve at best or unrealistically optimistic at worst. I do not agree with the reality you imagine had he only taken what he had problems with that other whistleblowers would have stepped forward. Nothing is stopping from additional whistleblowers from stepping forward now with programs they are uncomfortable with in a "more responsible manner" than Snowden. I do not agree that had he done anything differently that more people would be more willing to step forward.

Remember that this has been going on for at least a decade. Nobody, until Snowden, had stepped forward and gotten public discourse about it through constant media exposure. There may have been whistleblowers about the NSA in the times before him. I've never heard of them. And I'm pretty sure there have been others that have now stepped forward after him, not withstanding his irresponsibility.

>Thinking that people wouldn't believe the data he provided because there wasn't enough of it makes no sense.

It happens with media on a near daily basis. Why would this be any different?