What Hillary Clinton did with her private email server, however, is criminal, says Snowden.

If any other State Department or CIA employee were using a private email server to send details about the security of embassies, as Clinton is rumored to have done, as well as sensitive meetings with private US government officials and foreign officials over unclassified email systems, "they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it," the NSA whistleblower said in an interview with Al Jazeera English.

"When the unclassified systems of the United States government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado, is more secure is completely ridiculous," Snowden said, referring to the location of Clinton's controversial email server, which had been maintained by the Denver-based company Platte River Networks, and to Clinton's initial assertions that her server was secure and had suffered no security breaches.

Snowden is right about the punishment others would face for mishandling classified information. There have been a smattering of such prosecutions over the last decade, generally involving low-to-mid-level military and government personnel.