Schwartzesque

Yes! There is a lot to worry about here. Part of me thinks that Big Tech should be funding this stuff--they certainly make plenty of money on journalism that they don't pay for!--but that's a troubled notion if you look at how much money Big Tech spends to influence policy in Washington. Reporting is expensive and the number of institutions willing to put up the money to do it is shrinking--I am lucky to be working with the New Yorker, which is one of them. I can foresee three models under which this kind of work can continue. There's the opera model, which depends on patronage and a small, influential, highbrow audience. There's the model that the Swiss watch companies found after the invention of the Quartz watch, shifting away from mass-market utility and towards luxury, which isn't so different from the opera model, actually. And then you've got the Snowden model, where a private individual takes it upon themselves to speak out in those places where they feel that investigative journalists, and politicians, have failed to do so. There will always be people who want this information, and over time, supply will keep pace with demand, especially when you can cram so much supply onto a USB stick.

Well, if whistleblowers are come from within the US intelligence community (FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, DIA, etc.) they usually are criminals, under current federal laws against the release of classified information. A lot of recent protections that apply to whistleblowers do not apply to those who work within the intelligence community. The Washington Post did a good story on this, and how it applies to Snowden's case, here ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/03/12/edward-snowdens-claim-that-as-a-contractor-he-had-no-proper-channels-for-protection-as-a-whistleblower/ ... and my colleague Jane Mayer wrote about Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who attempted to blow the whistle, here ...http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer

Any devout Muslim who attends a mosque in a major US city, and/or travels by plane, is already "feeling the hurt" as you say.

People with high status and access to more resources generally do better under our current system of justice than those who do not. I think the Petraeus/Kim comparison is, in many ways, an unusually visible example of something that's been true of the US justice system for a long time.

I think it's too soon to say whether there's been a sea change or not. It's all still in play. To see where it winds up, you'd have to track what happens with the PCLOB's ongoing inquiry into Executive Order 12333, and you'd have to see whether the Supreme Court decides to weigh in on Fourth Amendment / NSA / surveillance issues. It already started to with United States v. Jones and if I had to guess, I would say that there will be more action to come on that front.