I'm reading your comment as saying that if I don't think Snowden/Assange should be pardoned and set free, I'm implicitly supporting mass surveillance.
I wanted to provide a counterbalance to that view. Snowden is a complicated case - in my view it isn't as simple as 100% hero or 100% villain - but Assange is in my view relatively clear.
Wikileaks and Manning appear to have leaked anything they can. I don't support such a scattergun approach. Also, while some of their leaks pertain to surveillance (the vault 7 ones) most of them do not.
Then there's Assange. He was facing extradition to Sweden under a European Arrest Warrant for rape alleged to have taken place there, but instead skipped bail on the pretext it was all some US conspiracy. Until extradition was approved he was free on bail. Likely had he been extradited to Sweden he would also have been free on bail, and the burden of proof would have remained on prosecutors. I'm sure he would have had a fair trial.
Instead he made it to the Ecuadorian embassy and stayed until he made himself unwelcome. At which point he was arrested by the UK for skipping bail and has since been subject to the very extradition procedure that was his pretext.
I'm British, although I no longer live there. If you are the US government and you want to extradite someone legally I can't imagine a friendlier jurisdiction than the UK.
I'm also mildly irritated that the UN torture experts keep sounding off that this is torture. Not at all. Assange chose to enter the Ecuadorian embassy and in doing so chose to break the law by not attending court. He chose to remain there for a considerable time, making labelling him a flight risk so obvious as to be automatic. When he came out of the embassy, he was convicted and jailed of that crime. He has also remained there because he's currently subject to extradition proceedings and no judge is going to grant him bail. I'm certain living in a confined space in the embassy wasn't pleasant, but that was a choice. I'm certain prison isn't pleasant either (no matter what UK tabloids say) but that is a consequence. This is a far cry from what, say, the Syrian regime does.
I support encryption and anything that frustrates mass surveillance because I believe fundamentally that private citizens have a right to a private life and that invasion of that privacy should be specific and justified, including when it comes to electronic communications. I accept that law enforcement will sometimes be faced with a situation in which they cannot decrypt communications between two almost certain criminals and this may make their job harder, and I'm happy with that trade-off. In the end, all a pervasive backdoor does is target law abiding citizens, as criminals by definition won't feel bound to put their keys in escrow or whatever. They're already developing their own handsets and the police have shown themselves capable of targeting them (encrochat).
At the same time, if Assange is extradited to the US tomorrow then good riddance. I don't see that I have to support him in any way in order to object to mass surveillance, pervasive monitoring and mandated backdoors.