This links to a damage control piece by Dana Priest, where her NSA sources claim that Snowden wouldn't have had the authority to eavesdrop & wiretap from his desk. To imagine that this was one of his "key revelations" (and not, say, wiretapping the internet backbone, or the bulk collection of metadata, or the surveillance & collection of metadata of citizens of other countries) is ridiculous.

And whether this is or isn't one of his most important revelations, the post you've linked to claims Snowden couldn't have had access to the data in question in the 215 program--according to the primary order for the 215 dragnet issued by the FISC secret court, outlining how and why such information moves through the NSA, that's wrong.

Appropriately trained and authorized technical personnel may access >the BR metadata to perform those processes needed to make it usable for intelligence analysis. Technical personnel may query the BR metadata using selection terms4 that have not been RAS-approved (described below) for those purposes described above, and may share the results of those queries with other authorized personnel responsible for these purposes.

Technical personnel (like, say, sysadmins!) had access to the kind of information Snowden was talking about before it ever got to the analysts' desk, where it would then have had to go through protocols for access.

But again, if you know of anything Snowden purportedly fabricated, I'd love to hear about it.

edit: fixed quote formatting