Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

Then he owed it to humanity and acted on it. Kudos to him.

This is a serious question.

You can only report it to their peers, and I promise you, from personal experience, that you will get absolutely nowhere except, like Snowden, have an entire world of hurt come down on you instead.

I can not recommend whistleblowing to anyone. If you see the government going wrong, ignore it. Walk away. You only have one life. How many years of it do you want to write off?

What we actually need is better and better procedures for anonymously reporting misconduct to a body that will actually hold people accountable. Many investigative bodies end up being staffed by those somewhat related or associated with the persons under investigation and therefore guaranteed to produce no meaningful results.

I don't know how to construct a body that actually works effectively, but I would love links to any good studies or articles on this.

>if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order

Correction: the company can challenge the order. In case you've been living under a rock / off the grid and haven't seen the Twitter files recently, private companies not only aren't fighting back against government spying, censorship, etc - they're openly cooperating, going so far as to set up task forces to facilitate open cooperation. Why do you think Microsoft was feeding PRISM 5 years earlier than Apple? It's not like one organization had vastly more technical capability than the other - some private organizations are just openly complicit with the government regardless of the morality. IBM produced many of the systems used by the Germans to facilitate the holocaust - something being legal and profitable doesn't inherently make it morally acceptable.

>by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.

It is followed in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, by a court that rubber stamps 99.97% of requests. Besides, as I've argued above, immoral actions should not be tolerated simply because they are allowed by law. See also: slavery, usury, civil asset forfeiture, murder of unarmed civilian by cop ft. qualified immunity, drone bombing weddings overseas, overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other countries, plotting fake terror attacks against US citizens to justify foreign wars (operation Northwoods).

Evil is evil regardless of whether or not it's been "made legal" by a corrupt government with an extensive track record of violating international sovereignty, human rights, the geneva convention, and arms control charters, not to mention the only country to ever commit genocide of civilians with an atomic weapon. The US has zero moral authority.

"85% of people on earth are followers, 10% are leaders or creators, or manipulators and 5% are observers. The followers need something to follow or believe so the creators capitalize on that and take advantage of their desire to be lead. The observers see everything that's going on and can ruin everything for the 10% but, the 85% label the 5% crazy or plan to get rid of them because the 10% have control."