Brian Williams' Ed Snowden interview last night seemed--and I grant the possibility of some naivete here--an encounter with narcissism, but not treason.
Snowden, like his briefly interviewed compatriot in True Belief, Glenn Greenwald, came across as a temperament almost wholly invulnerable to the notion that his actions might have been flawed or mistaken. There is right, in Snowden's opinion, and there is wrong, and he squarely placed himself among the forces of undisputed righteousness--which in itself is, at best, a manifestation of self-inflation, at worst a disturbing sign of borderline personality disorder. I trust and respect skepticism; and though there comes a time when one must take a stand on the paramount issues of one's day, doing so without the self-awareness of fallibility is a journey into delusion.
But was Snowden's righteousness--or self-righteousness--treason? That seems a stretch. Traitors are motivated by either material gain or malevolence toward their country. Snowden demonstrated neither. In fact he believably professed a deep love of his country and implicitly aligned himself (again with the self-inflation) with its Frederick Douglasses and Martin Luther Kings. He even suggested he'd be willing to trade a spell in the slammer for a return ticket home. These were not the sentiments of a Benedict Arnold.
Snowden's hole card, though, was his lamentation that the American security apparatus' whistleblower "protections" suck. As he told Brian Williams, he tried to do what he believed was right in the right way, but the way in place proved utterly inconsequential. And that's a fault not in Snowden's stars, but in the rabidly self-protective, we're-as-righteous-as-Snowden-is bureaucracy of America's surveillance state.