His China excuse still doesn’t fly for me. He still went to America’s enemy to leak this information.
What information did he leak? The fact that the NSA is spying on everyone? According to several people, including Java4Jay, anyone with common sense already knew that. Also, he didn’t need to go to China to pass information to the Chinese government. (That is, if he had any information to pass to anyone — other than the the fact that the information exists that is.)
At most, Snowden is guilty of providing meta data about meta data (i.e. he’s informed us that meta data is being collected by the NSA).
He does not want a drone up his but. And he is laying the ground work for many more Snowdens.