Glorifying Mediocrity

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas -- pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
"I had a flight booked to Cuba onwards to Latin America, and I was stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in Moscow airport."
"They're trying to ... distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency undercover overseas, I've worked for the National Security Agency undercover overseas and I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure ..."
American deserter-spy Edward Snowden

For taking illegal possession of countless high-value, top secret intelligence documents and spiriting them out of the country and arranging through the connivance of news agencies to publish them piecemeal to embarrass the secret intelligence agencies of his country, Edward Snowden chose to abandon his country twice. Once, when he betrayed it by making such documents public, the second time when he absconded with the documents to escape punishment for his act of treason.

Treason is rather a disturbing crime of national condemnation. It represents a total abdication of responsibility on the part of the malefactor to his national identity. And a betrayal of the values of that country's social-political covenant. Mr. Snowden could have objected to privacy intrusion practises on the part of his then-employer through other means that might have excluded theft and treason, but he chose the latter route.

More publicity, greater notoriety results from such extreme actions pleasing the celebrity-conscious wannabe, and warranting the charge of a capital offense.

He directed his flight first to China, then to Russia, deliberately selecting regimes whose values run counter to those of his own country, regimes who suppress and oppress, discriminate and harm by their disregard for basic human rights. Instead, his charges are that his country spies on entities on an international scale and within the country itself in its pursuit of national and international security. In any such large national operations there will be those who abuse their authority.

But Mr. Snowden decided he would 'sacrifice' his comfort to the larger and in his case fairly sanctimonious purpose of revealing an institutionalized miscarriage of what he insists are privacy rights. As though China and Russia would never engage in such underhanded activities as espionage. Spycraft is universal and always has been. But sympathizers hail him as a hero, laying bare the process and in some instances endangering his country's intelligence services.

"For a supposedly smart guy, that's a pretty dumb answer, frankly. He can come home, but he's a fugitive from justice, which is why he's not being permitted to fly around the world", retorted the American Secretary of State, John Kerry representing one of the more cogent responses he's made on any subject.

Those who know, including former colleagues, explain that Edward Snowden was hired initially as a security guard at an NSA-financed language research centre located at the University of Maryland.

Where his computer skills drew attention, leading him subsequently to work overseas for the CIA in Geneva, and for NSA contractors in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii.

The simple fact being that CIA and NSA employees who are sent to work overseas almost always work undercover. Which makes him both a turncoat and a dolt.