Snowden has not been convicted by any one. He has yet to stand trial. If he should ever return to the US, he will not stand trial because he embarrassed any one. He will stand trial because he broke the fucking law. And in fact, it is a very good, reasonable law. Information is classified for a reason. Allowing Joe Blow to decide if information should be classified is a really bad idea. If he guesses wrong then the information is still out there.
So, you'd agree that had any of the doctors working on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment come forward, the damage they would have caused the US Government would have outweighed putting a stop to the barbaric experiments? The guy who blew the lid off that one wasn't a part of the program (so he wasn't sword to secrecy about it), so I guess he's a hero for not breaking a promise?
How about John White, a lowly O-2 in the Navy that used classified knowledge to publicly call the sitting President a liar and accuse him of manufacturing a
casus belli?
How about Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers? That dealt a huge political blow to the US government and public support of the Viet Nam war. He broke the same law.
How about Mark Felt - a.k.a. Deep Throat - the guy who brought Nixon down with a leak? He was sworn to secrecy as well. He was the number 2 guy in the FBI at the time, but the decision to declassify stuff resides higher than that, not to mention talking to the press.
How about Frank Snepp, the CIA spook that wrote and published a book about the inept handling of the fall of Saigon by several US agencies?
A similar situation happened with an MI 5 agent in the '80s who publicly outed her own agency for classifying citizens and domestic institutions like trade unions as "subversive" so they could be "legally" spied upon. How do you feel about what she did?
In 1996, Gary Webb of the CIA published a report linking the CIA to cocaine trafficking to support the Contras. Was he a traitor? Traitors sometimes feel really guilty and then commit suicide eight years later by shooting themselves in the head... twice.
All White House staff members are given Special Access Program (SAP) clearance which includes a blanket statement about the interworkings of the White House and the office of the President. Linda Tripp was no different. So, when she went to the IOC with the truth about the sitting president and another staff member with a particular blue dress with an accusation of perjury , was she violating her contract and acting in bad faith?
A retired O-5 leaked intel about bad intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war. Did she break a law, or expose a horrendous wrongdoing?
Samuel Provance, a low ranking enlisted man in the Army, violated direct orders and exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal to the media. Criminal?
The government has a habit of punishing those who don't toe the line in these dealings. Qwest communications was blocked from further government contracts after the CEO refused to go along with an NSA request for surveillance back in 2001. They were the only telecommunications company to who refused to act without a FISA court order. Everyone else just rolled over, and Qwest was punished for not wanting to spy on the American people.
After being ignored by congress and retaliated upon by the NSA in 2002, several officials went public with information about wasteful programs. They highlighted one program that was more focused and, thus, cheaper (and retained more privacy for citizens) than another program called
Trailblazer "which automatically collected trillions of domestic communications of Americans in deliberate violation of the U.S. Constitution." After the NSA called Trailblazer a failure due to financial concerns, they sealed the report and never released it to the public. In 2006, the FBI raided the homes of people involved to intimidate them. In 2011, Tom Drake published an article in the New Yorker and did a 60 Minutes interview, calling the program a massive violation of the 4th Amendment. Traitors? Criminals?
Some of these people are considered whistleblowers, and some of them have criminal records. Hell, some of the whistleblowers did time and then were exonerated after the fact. All of them, however, committed the same crime you accuse Edward Snowden of.