Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, "the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing," and that "legal scholars have strongly argued that the US Supreme Court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense." Professor at American University Washington College of Law and national security law expert Stephen Vladeck has said that the law “lacks the hallmarks of a carefully and precisely defined statutory restriction on speech.” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said, "basically any information the whistleblower or source would want to bring up at trial to show that they are not guilty of violating the Espionage Act the jury would never hear. It's almost a certainty that because the law is so broadly written that they would be convicted no matter what." Attorney and former whistleblower Jesselyn Radack notes that the law was enacted "35 years before the word 'classification' entered the government's lexicon" and believes that "under the Espionage Act, no prosecution of a non-spy can be fair or just." She added that mounting a legal defense to the Espionage Act is estimated to "cost $1 million to $3 million." In May 2019, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board published an opinion piece making the case for an amendment to allow a public-interest defense, as "the act has since become a tool of suppression, used to punish whistleblowers who expose governmental wrongdoing and criminality".
Regardless of what you think of what Snowden did, there is no evidence that he turned anything over to hostile governments: he handed it over to journalists from the Guardian because he explicitly said that he had his own biases but didn't want to be the one who made the decision what to release to the public. He also warned the journalists the information there could harm the US and some of its agents and they should only release what was absolutely necessary. Perhaps that was the wrong call, perhaps not. But given that head of the NSA (Tapper) had just lied to congress about what the NSA was doing, I'm not sure he saw he had much of a choice.
He did not flee to Russia, the US grounded him there by revoking his passport while he was trying to travel to Ecuador. He lived in the terminal for a month before Russia granted him asylum. Not quite in line with the propaganda trying to turn him into a Russian spy.
Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job? A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.