I suppose a generation gets the whistleblower it deserves. Baby Boomers - they of the principles and artful protests - got Daniel Ellsberg.

Millennials - we of the irony and artful Instagrams - got Edward Snowden.

When, in 1969, Ellsberg surreptitiously photocopied a set of classified documents that revealed, among other things, how early the government knew that the Vietnam War would not end soon or well for America, he first attempted to have them read on the Senate floor by a sympathetic Senator. (Senators cannot be prosecuted for what is said, on record, on the Senate floor.) He also shared the documents with scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies and asked for their analysis.

Before that fateful photocopying, Ellsberg earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He acted as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and as a consultant to the White House and the Department of Defense. He spent two years as a State Department envoy in Saigon. He later returned to the RAND Corporation, where he worked on the McNamara study he would soon be compelled to reveal.

All of which is to say that Ellsberg intimately understood the documents and the war they implicated. It is also to say that, even knowing the documents intimately, Ellsberg sought other opinions on them and legal channels for their revelation. When he ultimately leaked the documents, henceforth known as the Pentagon Papers, to The New York Times and The Washington Post, he did so having exhausted his legal options for revealing what he knew to be illegal actions.

Edward Snowden is not Daniel Ellsberg - obviously. Snowden simply doesn't have Ellsberg's credentials or his air of moral supremacy.

I'm okay with this. Not all leaks can come from such unimpeachable sources as Ellsberg. And the Millennial impulse that drove Snowden to ignore traditional channels of authority when he leaked the NSA's surveillance to The Guardian would be a lot more irksome if the program itself weren't such an obvious infringement of that other traditional authority, the Bill of Rights.

The real problem with Snowden has been his post-revelation behavior. It's not just that Snowden didn't man up, as Ellsberg did, and face trial. Simply fleeing wouldn't indict an entire generation - cowardice knows no temporal bounds. But fleeing and then cavorting around the planet like a Bond wannabe is more than cowardice. It is cowardice that expects to be applauded.

Not content to be confined to history, Snowden is instead courting personal celebrity of the kind that rewards hourly update over summative achievement. In doing so, he has revealed - this time unintentionally - that his cause was never the rights of the American people. Edward Snowden's cause has been Edward Snowden all along.

This Independence Day, the most patriotic thing Americans can do is ignore Snowden, whether they agree with his (initial) leak or not. Consider, instead, the Fourth Amendment. A better whistleblower would have insisted we do so all along.

The author is an editorial intern with China.org. She is pursuing a journalism degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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