Huffington Post’s Ali Watkins with the scoop: former NSA director Keith Alexander this morning told a Washington DC audience that Edward Snowden shouldn’t have disclosed “millions” of documents to journalists, but suggested Snowden was justified in leaking the Verizon court order revealing the government’s dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records.

“If he had taken the one court document and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do’… I think this would be a whole different discussion,” Waktins reports Alexander said. “I do think he had the opportunity [to be] what many could consider an American hero.”