I'm sure the smearing of Snowden will start soon enough. All the things we know about Manning took months to come out. Manning didn't even get to publicly respond to the smearing until, what, years of solitary confinement? And when he did respond he sounded a lot more level-headed than the smears made him out to be. No man is an angel, especially the kind of man willing to buck the system like they have.

I expect that the NSA will make it their mission to dig up everything they possibly can on the guy to discredit him because they will see it as a zero-sum game, the more doubt they cast on his character the less justification for scrutiny of their billion dollar budgets.