But you will charged with "treason" when you acquire hard evidence, since now a days, every thing is a "state secret".
And if you look more closely, it doesn't sound like Orwell after all. It's too grandiose.
Perhaps treason that serves a higher good. Perhaps not. Reasonable people can disagree. But not need for the scare quotes.
This is not an absolute truth. Revealing "state secret" documents is only treason if you identify the elites and elected officials as the country, and not the population. Arguably, when Ed released state secrets to the citizens of his own country, it was NOT treason. He certainly didn't betray the citizens who were being lied to by their government, and the citizens compose much more of the country than the government does.
Treason is defined in 18 USC § 2381 (pursuant to Article III definitional constraints) as a citizen of the United States "lev[ying] war against [the US] or adher[ing] to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere."
In this, US law follows the arguments of Blackstone, who believed that high treason, more so perhaps than any other crime, must be precisely defined and delineated ("For if the crime of high treason be indeterminate, this alone ... is sufficient to make any government degenerate into arbitrary power"). Madison warned in The Federalist that only a narrow Constitutional definition of treason could protect citizens from "new-fangled and artificial treasons" enacted to serve political factionalism. Arguably, were Snowden to be convicted of treason for exposing questionable government activity, it would be a textbook case of constructive treason, precisely that which the Founding Fathers sought to prevent.
Now, Snowden has been tried in the media as being guilty of treason (perhaps most famously by Richard Clarke), but that, I think, is a tough row to hoe, even in a post-9/11 America; the only "enemies" the US is specifically at war with are al-Qa'ida-affiliated terrorists, and there's just no evidence that Snowden had an "intent to betray" the US to terror groups.
Disclosures relating to, e.g., China or Europe are non-treasonous, as we are not at war with any of those states; in the same way, Jonathan Pollard was convicted of espionage due to his spying against the US for Israel, but his actions did not fit the definition of treason.
In summary, the charge of "treason" sets an extremely high legal bar, one that Snowden's actions -- while unquestionably illegal -- almost certainly do not rise to. He is a criminal on the run, certainly; a hero, possibly; a traitor, not at all.
> "adher[ing] to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere."
Incidentally, the information that Snowden shared was clearly not giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy, it was giving information to the people, so as you eloquently point out, treason is not applicable. Unless of course we now consider the citizens of the United States to be the enemy...
I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched and I'm subject to arbitrary action by people who have power. I think total surveillance, even if it includes the powerful few, would be a disaster for human rights and freedom in general. So what if the dictator is impeccable in his daily routine, if he's watching every move of a population and subjecting them to unequal treatment under the law?
That may be possible, but it's also possible that total surveillance would result in a permanent entrenchement of whoever manages to gain (or maintain) power through the transition. It's very hard for a competing ideology to rise in prominence if it's possible to detect and crush every individual who starts to disagree, before they can even communicate it to anyone else. I think it's likely that with total surveillance we'd soon see the rise of rapid automated enforcement, which would be a incredible impediment to any attempt at changing the status quo.
That's already the case. There is (near) total transparency for the population. The only way to fight back, is to have total transparency for the powerful few too.
But they make the rules, and have the money and the power, so this ain't happening.
Is it plausible that one of the reasons that major corporations have so much power now is because the government was TOO open for enough decades that the corporations were able to out compete?
Governments used to have to go begging to private wealth to finance themselves, during panics, at times of war, etc. Today Bill Gates is hilariously undersized compared to the US Government (as are all corporations); 120 years ago, Rockefeller by himself towered over the US Government. During the 19th century governments of Europe had to beg for private financing for wars and bailouts.
What corporation, anywhere on earth, has any meaningful hard power? Tanks, jets, machine guns, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, nukes, legal surveillance capabilities, thousands of soldiers, transports, military bases, the legal right to knock down your door and arrest you, the ability to put you in prison for 15 years with minimum sentencing laws, the legal ability to steal your property at gun point through civil asset forfeiture with no compensation, the right to arrest you for smoking pot, and on it goes.
Name a few corporations with anything even resembling those powers.
All real control over currencies today rests with central governments and their proxies (eg the Fed). That was not the case prior to the global establishment of the modern central banks in the last century. A little over a century ago, JP Morgan ruled the financial markets, and was vastly more powerful than the US Government in financial matters. Today, one month of QE is bigger than the entire fortune of the world's wealthiest man.
At what other point in world history, other than the last century, have governments been singularly all-powerful when it comes to military might? No domestic entity even remotely dares threaten the big governments of today. See: China, Russia, US.
No corporation can arrest you for smoking pot, but corporations could decide for smoking pot to become legal overnight. No corporation can launch a missile, but they can arrange for the missiles to be bought, installed, etc..
That said, I would soften your statement that governments are singularly all-powerful: ISIS, al-Qaeda, the iraqi insurgency writ large, MEND, and other non-state groups have been able to quite successfully go toe-to-toe with nation states and make out quite handsomely.
The Federal Reserve is not a government entity. Though the Fed's President is appointed by the government, candidates suggested by the member Banks who hold shares in the organisation.
Here are a list of private military companies.
If information magnifies power relationships, then require the powerful (governments, corporations, the wealthy), as well as those who've violated social contracts (criminals).
Which is fairly much how Europe's Right to be Forgotten is working in practice (as some of us predicted).
So if you think transparency could be applied to everybody in society, you're wrong.
Rich people will have the means to protect their privacy, not the "middle class" and not the poor nor the extremely poor.
I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!)
I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.