I know this may seem old news yet more is being released and a recent conversation with a friend does not view him this way.
I followed this story lightly and would like to dig more and hear your thoughts.
Here is an article that sums up my perspective so far. What do you think?
Yes, Edward Snowden Is a Traitor | The Diplomat
"He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."...
Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."....
"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."..........
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...............
Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations | World news | The Guardian
"....Snowden has been vague about when he decided to leak, but he has been very clear on what compelled him to act. "It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realization that Congress . . . wholly supported the lies," he said. "Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – director of National Intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy."..........
But Snowden also understood that giving the documents to WikiLeaks, or simply posting them himself, had drawbacks. "I don't desire to enable the Bradley Manning argument that these were released recklessly and unreviewed," Snowden later said. "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. 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 mainstream press, another option, seemed even riskier. Recalling how The New York Times delayed Risen's 2005 warrantless-wiretapping story under pressure from the government, Snowden feared the same happening to him. "When the subject of [one's] reporting is an institution as wildly beyond the control of law as the US Intelligence Community, even the best intentions of the New York Times begin to quaver," he writes me in an e-mail. "You can't stare down a spy agency without being prepared to burn your life to the ground over the smallest grain of truth, because truth is the only thing they are afraid of. Truth means accountability, and accountability terrifies those who have gone beyond what is necessary."............
Greenwald spent every day with Snowden for the next two weeks, interviewing him in the morning, breaking off to write, going back later in the day, and frequently continuing their conversations online. Snowden would go to bed every night around 10:30 or 11, casually telling the journalists he was going to "hit the hay." While Greenwald barely slept, Snowden greeted them at seven each morning, rested and refreshed. "He was about to become the most wanted man in the world," Greenwald says, "but slept as if he didn't have a care in the world." Both he and Poitras were "infected" by the younger man's idealism and enthusiasm, Greenwald admits, and so were his editors at The Guardian, which published the first story on the leaks on Wednesday, June 5th. That piece, detailing a secret court order issued in April 2013 that compelled Verizon to hand over consumer data to the NSA, was followed, on June 6th, by a second story, exposing the PRISM program, and then a third, on June 7th, explaining how the British GCHQ gained access to PRISM in order to collect user data from U.S. companies. On the 8th, Greenwald and MacAskill published in The Guardian a report about an internal NSA tool, known as "Boundless Informant," which recorded, analyzed and tracked the data collected by the agency – suggesting that National Intelligence Director James Clapper had lied to Congress when he insisted that the NSA did not wittingly keep track of the communications of millions of American citizens............."
Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...aked-the-secrets-20131204page=5#ixzz2zxCGzFjq
The statements quoted in the original post from the Diplomat are false. Snowden was not reckless about the type of documents he released and who he released them to. He released info detailing the privacy and other policy impacts of the government programs and exposed lies made to the public and congress. The people of the USA did not provide informed consent to losing their rights. He meets all the qualification for being a legitimate whistleblower.
More info:
What Edward Snowden Leaked Was Nothing Compared to What He Didn
https://www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-search