What snowden did was a form of civil disobedience. What about the civil rights activists who committed "crimes" aka peaceful protests and other non violent forms of civil disobedience in order to repeal or change said laws?
Umm, most of them went to jail. That was usually an explicit part of the protest. Take some time and read Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail sometime, for example. He explicitly discusses how a major point of protest an unjust law is to practice civil disobedience, but then be prepared to accept the consequences. The point of non-violent civil disobedience in many cases was to change the laws by showing how their enforcement resulted in injustice -- not to avoid prosecution.
And take a look at Ghandi -- in many cases, the idea was to protest in a non-violent manner by continuing to do something that you should be able to do, but let the British soldiers beat you -- accept your punishment, so that the British citizens themselves might become outraged at what their "law enforcement" was doing, and thus the laws might be changed.
Like many people today, I don't think you understand what non-violent action really was about, nor the cost you were expected to bear. Since the time of Ghandi and MLK, many governments have realized that beating the crap out of people who won't fight back (or who just accept being taken to prison) just ends up offending other people and ultimately overturning the laws. Law enforcement nowadays practices intimidation, but it avoids riling up the population too much with overt oppressive actions. Thus, fewer protestors are spurred to do the kinds of things that would result in arrest (or even beatings, etc.)... and thus the public is less outraged.
I'm not saying that this applies at all to Snowden. His actions were less about breaking unjust laws (after all, most people can probably agree that there are in fact intelligence secrets that should not be broadcast on the news, and it probably would be a bad thing if random people in intelligence just started exposing this information for no reason at all -- so those laws have some purpose). It was more about exposing the unjust practices of others within the government and things that had been inappropriately kept from the public.
In essence, the Snowden case is nothing like classic "civil disobedience" and peaceful protests. I'm not arguing that he should go to prison -- but if he were practicing actual classic civil disobedience, he should probably have been prepared to. Forcing the government to put you in jail or even beat the crap out of you was often a deliberate part of classic "civil disobedience" and "peaceful protest."
