It's remarkable how casually people demand sacrifices of others as a condition for taking their activism seriously.
There's basically no limit to how much someone can demand, e.g. "Well, if he was really committed to transparency, he would have tried breaking into the White House with a camera", or "If he was really prepared to risk dying to bring these leaks to people's attention, he should have self-immolated in front of the US embassy".
Personally, the metric I use is, if someone has achieved more for a good cause than me, and suffered more for it than I would, then they are a martyr for that cause and deserve my respect.
