Chris Berg wrote an interesting opinion piece at the ABC: Secrets and fears of a paranoid government

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Nobody believes the disclosure of classified information should be legal. Any organisation, private or public, needs some degree of confidentiality to function. As the Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald points out, Snowden “made his choice based on basic theories of civil disobedience”. He will bear the consequences.

But an Espionage Act charge goes well beyond that. Disclosing information about the actions of a democratically elected government to the media is not the same as secretly undermining national security for the benefit of the hostile foreign powers – not on any practical, ethical, or philosophical grounds.
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It was embarrassing, but not damaging, when the world read America’s diplomatic cables in 2011. It is embarrassing that the world knows the US government is listening to its phone calls. But have these embarrassments materially hurt American security interests? Not likely. Were they done in the service of a foreign power? Quite the opposite.

People may wonder what gives an individual the right to question the actions of his government? If you are in the military, you are actually required to make the decision whether or not an order is legal.

As a result of the war crimes trials following World War II the Nuremberg defense, ‘I was just following orders’ is no longer available. After the decision in United States v. Keenan, members of the military cannot follow orders that are obviously illegal. Of course, there is no real definition possible of ‘obviously illegal’, so the individual in the military has to do a reality check on orders that don’t seem right. If the order was illegal, you get dinged if you obeyed it, but if you don’t obey the order and it is determined to be legal, you get dinged for insubordination. [If you think this is confusing, just read Catch 22.]

Congresscritter Alan Grayson [D-FL] explains why he thinks the surveillance is illegal. He is an attorney who has made a lot of money winning cases in courts. I agree with him, that the military and CIA have no legal right to do these things inside the United States. Within the US borders, the FBI and DoJ handle these issues.