Exposing the secret police agencies for dereliction of duty, corruption, violation of the law and their own enabling legislation, and counterproductive stupidity isn't treason. There's no war involved and no aid and comfort to the enemy.

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." [1] We don't yet know if the USA will return to constitutional government from the path it has been taking. Whether Snowden will be honored or despised in this nation will be one barometer of our future.

Also, Deutsche Telekom is a major ISP and radio telecom provider in the USA as well as abroad.

[0] United States Constitution, Article 3

[1] John Harrington

It is your rightful opinion to have, though. Others might wonder whether spying on an important military and economic ally is not, in fact, at least as bad.

So if you have a strictly America-first orientation towards the world, feel free to continue the justification. But if you can see the world outside the pretty box, Snowden is one of the most important figures in the world today. He represents what America used to be: brave, honorable, and doing what's right in face of the certain personal danger one faces when going up against totalitarian systems of control which have the purpose of enslaving us all.

This is preposterous. It would make sense to blame the American people for the actions of the American government if there was a strong correlation between public opinion and government policy. I would argue that there is no such strong correlation, and even if there were, the blame would only apply to the specific individuals who approve of the government policies.

You can't just assume the middle school civics class description of government as reflecting the will of the people, then conclude therefore that the people are to blame for the actions of the government.

To be explicit: I am an American citizen (an accident of birth), I approve of and consent to very little of what the US government does, and I accept no responsibility for what the US government does.

That said, wrt to Snowden being a traitor... if that is your reaction to "the previous and current administrations have created a completely out-of-control behemoth which invades both our and our allies' privacy without any oversight, and therefore threatens the notion of free and fair election anywhere in the western world", maybe you should rethink your priorities.

Have a look at RIPA, one important bit of law that regulates GCHQ: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents

Here's an example of GCHQ being mentioned as exempt from a law. This is the sexual offences act; GCHQ are allowed to "make"[1] a photograph of child sexual abuse if it's needed for a function of GCHQ. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/46

Peoe said when RIP was a bill that it was too strong and did not offer enough protection.

The poor quality of oversight of GCHQ is surprising.

[1] make here is a technical term and includes "make a copy of a digital file".

Well, I don't know about that. The fact that they're happily sending everything to the NSA can hardly be compatible with EU data protection law, and considering that their best friends, the US intelligence and law enforcement services, were caught red-handed doing illegal wiretaps right before the executive branch retroactively made it legal, well, it doesn't inspire much confidence. Now, if you start looking at, say, the activities of the British secret services during the Thatcher era, you come to realize that there may be a slight gap between the things they admit to do, and the stuff they actually do.

My impression from all I have read about the Snowden affair is that some time ago he gathered some very large number of documents (large enough that he couldn't have gone through them all by hand, rather it seems he did something like a giant data dump). He then encrypted these documents, disseminated them to a small number of individuals/locations, and now he is not necessarily in control of them any more, perhaps even he no longer has access to them all.

This doesn't address the more general question, if you gather a crapload of documents indiscriminately, and then you end up losing control of them (and losing control of the ability to release what you want and not release what you don't want to), are you nevertheless responsible for future releases?

I don't know the answer to that

Furthermore, that review was to ensure that it was material the the public "needed to know" and wouldn't actually harm the U.S. (as he claimed he could do).

So the question of who ended up with the material after Snowden is irrelevant, inasmuch as Snowden himself says he signed off on each and every single leak you see in the media derived from that initial document dump, even if he didn't directly control the editorial process of each media (or activist) outlet doing the publishing.

The alternative (that Snowden didn't actually review every document and simply negligently put stuff out there) is bad for him too, as it makes him a liar.

In either event this is indicative of a political agenda, not some concern with American civil liberties. But we've already known that since his leak of phone tapping in a certain Central Asian country where American (and allied) forces are fighting for their lives each and every day, something which can't possibly implicate American civil liberties.

Snowden has misinterpreted some of the few documents that were widely released. For example, he thought direct data collection from facebook to mean the NSA had a direct access to facebook servers. When in fact it just meant the NSA would get the data from facebook, rather than listening to snooping on telecom links, or as they called it "indirect" access.

If he can't get even basic details right, how the hell can you trust him to know when a file would expose a source?

Would you trust your DBA to judge which of your files were okay to be posted on the internet? I sure as fuck wouldn't. One of mine quit last month because he was afraid of Ebola. He did good work though . . .

Not true.

> as they called it "indirect" access

NSA also tapped FB upstream.

> Would you trust your DBA to judge which of your files were okay to be posted

Would you trust the NSA to judge which of your comms are ok to steal?

Which might have made sense as a defense if Snowden was talking about MUSCULAR... but he was talking about PRISM, and by your logic (saying he had IC expertise and wasn't simply a sysadmin) he should have known better than to confuse "direct access to Facebook" with "data directly from Facebook's servers".

The rest of your comment doesn't address what I said.

Why is that crazy to believe? I think it's crazier to believe that the only people who should be given the official authority to decide which secrets to keep are those who are directly and strongly incentivized to keep secrets about atrocious programs like those which Snowden has leaked.

Because he doesn't know what he is looking at. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. He doesn't know what has been said to foreign diplomats.

>I think it's crazier to believe that the only people who should be given the official authority to decide which secrets to keep are those who are directly and strongly incentivized to keep secrets about atrocious programs like those which Snowden has leaked.

I would be behind an independent group to review this sort of stuff. But it can't be one political dood who thinks he is doing the right thing.

Snowden "chose for himself" just as much as John Walker "chose for himself" to figure out U.S. Navy anti-submarine doctrine during the 80s and pass it to the Russians.

What's worse, even if it were true, your conclusion doesn't make sense and is just a cheap shot based on your own political views. Nothing about his stated motives are undermined by these releases, whether you agree with his actions or not.

Note the date.

Here's the quote:

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

The article itself continues immediately:

"He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed."

His first sentence said "...every single document I disclosed..." (emphasis added). Note how he didn't say "every single document I copied from NSA"; he was referring to documents he disclosed, and those documents were only disclosed to the journalists you're referring to.

What this means is that if a journalist ever showed you a Snowden leak at all, it was because it passed through Snowden's self-professed "carefully evaluated" disclosure review.

Stop blaming the journalists, Snowden himself specifically said that if those journalists have any of his documents at all, it was because Snowden intended specifically for them to have it.