PRINT ONLY: In the strictest legal sense, yes, Edward Snowden is a traitor. What he did, while not as threatening as it was initially thought to be, compromised the American security apparatus at a time where it’s fighting a multi-headed conflict war against people even mildly described as pretty appalling.

There are outlets and mechanisms in place to protest the actions of an agency. We are, after all, a democracy, and even if it’s necessary for entities like the CIA, the NSA, and the special forces community to move in the shadows, what they do is done for good, for stability, and for the freedom and well being of the world.

Snowden’s actions may have been intended to do well, or to expose what he perceived as injustice, but that is not the way it’s done. We are not some monolithic, soviet state, where protesting actions of the system you’re part of will get you disappeared or sent to the gulag.

But Snowden skipped all of those steps, did not pass go, did not collect $200, and instead released information that allowed terrorist organizations- not citizen’s rights groups, avowed terrorists whose stated goal is the death of westerners- to steal a march, and degraded the effectiveness of our counterterrorist operations.

And to top it off, he’s sought asylum in Russia, who, speaking of enemies of the west, are not on our Christmas card list now.

Whose current head of state is an ex-intelligence officer himself who, I doubt, would have little qualms about exploiting Snowden’s breach of operational security, if not outright extracting wholesale information from him in order to gain more leverage over the United States and her allies.

As nauseatingly punchable as Pvt. Chelsea Manning is, she approached her crime, the disclosure of classified operational files from Iraq and Afghanistan, in a straightforward manner. She believed it was going to help change the world for the better, and, when found guilty (as she was) of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice under the articles of treason, she took her lumps.

Snowden did no such thing. He did his crime, made his bird, and sought asylum with a competitor (if not outright opponent) of the United States. This is not the act of a patriot, of a man standing up for what’s right. This is something confused and pusillanimous, and I find it execrable.

Snowden is a traitor to what the country stands for, and no matter what good it’s caused, that fact is salient to any discussion of his actions.