Snowden’s decision to depart for Russia reasonably raised questions about what information he may have traded in exchange for safe passage but should reasonably make us wonder why he fled at all. If his primary motive for dispatching classified government information was to forestall the creeping arm of government surveillance, enlisting the assistance of China and Russia—two governments with an even feebler grasp on civil liberties than post-9/11 America—makes no sense. If, as some have argued, Snowden has shrewdly played off geopolitical tensions to avoid prosecution, he’s simultaneously offered a patina of moral standing to governments guilty of the same actions he criticizes and misunderstood the very logic of activism: that a cause is larger than the well-being of any single individual associated with it. Implicit within his actions is the idea that American civil liberties are more important than the lives of Russian dissidents. In exposing government secrets, Snowden wished to raise a number of points but a backdoor endorsement of American exceptionalism was, presumably, not one of them.

Given a choice of undermining his argument or seeking the assistance of governments with human rights records that are questionable even when graded on the sharpest of curves, Snowden’s only reasonable recourse would be to remain in the United States and face prosecution.