Ask HN: Snowden: When does ethnical whistleblowing cross into defection?

At first I fell in with the bandwagon hailing Snowden as a true American hero for blowing the whistle on the Prism surveillance program, as well as anecdotes of other unethical/illegal behavior on the part of the intelligence agencies.

However, the narrative of the ethnical whistleblower, the hero, started to fall apart once I heard he fled to China (HK, but still China). First - the supreme irony that he claims the US is a surveillance state while praising the China (suffice it to say, the one state with the most complete surveillance infrastructure on the planet -- and does anyone think that the Chinese intelligence services don't have their fingers all throughout HK telecom?). Second - now that his "whistleblowing" goes beyond exposing illegal domestic intelligence collecting activity to wholesale exposure of defense/foreign intelligence related work. If he wanted the free people of a free country to decide his fate, why not go to Switzerland or Iceland?

Daniel Ellsburg is an unequivocated american hero, by contrast. He uncovered the lie of the Vietnam War, but didn't produce lame justifications for defecting to the Soviet Union.

So to wrap it up - when/if Snowden sits down with a Chinese intelligence officer to tell all the dirty little secrets, is he still the "hero" he once was?