To play devil's advocate, one could argue that there are two separate narratives being employed by Snowden and the journalists he entrusted. The first is that

To play devil's advocate, one could argue that there are two separate narratives being employed by Snowden and the journalists he entrusted. The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on. The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere. Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner. In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight. --- EDIT: I've moved this post from the duplicate thread; tptacek's reply can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468 In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests. Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate. As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.