The strategy one employs to deal with being punished for revealing wrongdoing has nothing to do with how "genuine" the activism is. To suggest that Snowden, who has given up his life to alert humanity to the worst surveillance program in the world's history, isn't a "genuine" activist is, frankly, ridiculous.
It's worst in breadth and likely quite bad in terms of depth given their resources (and the ability, IIRC, to listen through landlines and cell phones). Surveillance depth will likely get much worse in the future, however, as they strongarm more companies into baking surveillance capabilities into mass-market devices (although they'll be competing, in this regard, with foreign manufacturers who will be/are also doing the same thing).
