[justcommenting]

Invoking the concept isn't out of bounds, but having watched a decent number of presentations, talks, and interviews by/about this particular person, the lack of nuance in describing someone whose views seem especially easy to find was frustrating and likely deliberate. It took me all of five seconds to find Snowden's last tweet on the particular argument Gladwell references, which was about a week ago (bold font): https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/805868198138703873

Gladwell's uninformed gee-whiz speculation seems like an excuse to parrot the claim that Snowden "may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service" without mentioning any evidence or even a clear argument beyond its appearance in a book. Maybe Snowden was that or worse, but the only argument Gladwell seems to construct to support the claim is that he was a dupe/fool because he didn't go Harvard like Ellsberg.