As a staunch progressive, I truly believe (can be swayed by future evidence) that Edward Snowden committed treason.

I used to be a big Snowden defender, but I was probably swayed by a lot of rather clever Russian propaganda and Snowden was instrumental in promoting a narrative behind it.

I'm not quite yet willing to adopt the position that Snowden was a witting asset so much as a naive dupe. I've held positions that he put on a show of holding about the nature of the surveillance state and I'm still nervous about the raw power of the intelligence apparatus. But one of the amazing things we've learned about the current surveillance state through the Russia investigation however is the safeguards for American due process are still holding, as all the rigorous requirements for FISA warrants require a lot of substantial evidence because they still had to jump through a lot of hoops to get one even for obvious Russian spy Carter Page. They currently can't just do fishing expeditions the way we feared and the Russia investigation basically vindicate the position that NSA is doing good work properly. I worry about the future of course when some crisis is leveraged to grant new powers immediately with the push of a button for some future Trump that is more politically savvy and less boorishly stupid, but we aren't there yet.

The biggest problem I have with "Snowden is a traitor" (instead of a dupe) as a meme is that if he is a traitor, then the government almost certainly has a lot of evidence to back up and they fucking dropped the ball on not disclosing that information to the public because weakening a criminal complaint against Snowden is a small price to pay to defuse a massive propaganda victory for Russia.

Either he was a dupe or the US government completely fucked up a response to a huge propaganda operation by Russia.

I guess either one is possible now. But wow is his chosen mouthpiece Greenwald sycophantic to Russia so it would not surprise me to learn he was a leveraged asset before he took his flight to Hong Kong.