I take issue with the statement that "Snowden was driven more by fears than by facts". Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting information about citizens (American and many other countries) indiscriminately, for example every call record, every internet search, every web page viewed, etc. The documents he shared show the NSA's mission to collect ALL data possible, terrorist or not. Additionally it showed that there was basically no oversight when it came to digging into people's private lives; an NSA analyst could type in an email or IP address, click a few buttons, put down a few words for "justification" and then get a live view of someone's internet activity, have access to all of their data held by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Skype, etc. This is all bad, and it's real, not just a fear.

BTW the ninth circuit court of appeals ruled that the bulk collection was illegal a couple months ago: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...