The parliament in Russia has little oversight over FSB operations, and you’d have to be stunningly naive to think that they aren’t spying on their own people. They’ve got a huge terror threat, one which could have reared its ugly head during the Sochi games but didn’t. They had several major attacks in the months leading up to the games, and the Russian security forces have routinely rounded up suspects and gone after terror groups inside Russia using all the means at their disposal.

To think that Russia doesn’t have the means to carry out mass surveillance is naive, and Snowden’s response shows he’s a tool of the Kremlin (as he’s been from the get-go).

Wikileaks too has been uncritical of how the Russian security services operate, even though they do so with far less oversight and far more brutality than their opposite number in the US - especially when it comes to operations that involve citizens of their own countries residing within their own countries. That’s not exactly a surprise either, since Wikileaks has done all it could to get all kinds of sensitive documents about US intel operations and internal workings released, but has shown no interest in going and digging into the FSB and what they’ve been doing.

That willful blindness is not without purpose. It’s meant to hamstring the US and undermine US national security, while giving the Russians a strategic and tactical advantage in the spy game (the Russians get all kinds of dirt about US spycraft, means, methods, and operations, while the US sees those operations and spycraft disrupted, resulting in costs to replace, update, invent new measures).