I know this is a Ron Paul line, but the logic doesn't clearly follow. Snowden isn't "wanted for giving information to the American people". He didn't only release information to American citizens.

Of course, it is impossible to leak classified information publicly and not leak it to the "enemy", but this particular platitude bugs me. There are many reasons to be upset with the government right now, but the charges against Snowden don't imply the government thinks citizens are the enemy.

The definition of "enemy" has moved beyond state affiliation. It's not "the Russians are coming". We're worried about extremists of various ilks these days. So a citizen can be an enemy in the current line of reasoning.

Let's be real here -- nobody who follows these issues was surprised by what Snowden said or found it implausible. Our potential nation-state enemies, who are not completely inept, or operate assuming that the NSA had the capabilities described by Snowden. It's publically known that the US compromised Soviet undersea cables almost 40 years ago -- I'm sure Chinese Intelligence didn't assume that that capability still existed today. Anyone who has any business or knows anything about doing business in China knows about the Great Firewall and knows that a State entity has the ability to broadly and deeply monitor network activity.

The simple answer to the question is "yes".

The follow-up question is "why"? The evidence seems to be pointing towards the conclusion that there is such vast institutional corruption in place that they are protecting themselves, through intelligence gathering and militarized police forces, from any threat posed from the general population. Intelligence gathering allows them to keep tabs on any movements which threaten or expose them, e.g. Occupy, WikiLeaks, Snowden. They can then coordinate with law enforcement to disable and neutralize them, and the media is used to discredit them.

Interesting answer, potentially suggesting the people of the US are the enemy of the US government, simply because government wants to protect some corrupt corporations.

What a gloriously ignorant or deliberately disingenuous statement. Snowden is wanted for stealing state secrets. That = espionage. If a Chinese agent got caught for doing the same thing he'd be charged with espionage. Espionage has everything to do with the getting not the distributing. If you catch the person leaving the building, meaning the information was never shared at all, you can't go "Oh rats, can't charge him with espionage!" But that doesn't help when we want to do clever word smithing like the above.

For the record treason is a judgement on whether you used the information you stole (espionage) to harm your country. It's actually very telling that he's not charged with treason. The government is saying (today) they don't believe he did set out to hurt his country by simply charging him with stealing state secrets and chosing not to charge him for trying to damage his country with his actions after stealing them.