Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Russ Feingold is 100 percent correct in his statement that Edward Snowden should not be pardoned in the U.S.

For those that don’t know, Snowden leaked classified documents to media outlets back in 2013, which unveiled the fact that the National Security Agency and several other international intelligence agencies had been spying on millions of people around the world.

Now I’m not saying the NSA wasn’t in the wrong in this case, but I think we can all agree that releasing classified government documents to the public, especially so that other nations have access to them, is definitely not the most patriotic thing to do.

The fact of the matter is that Snowden should not get a get-out-of-jail-free card after leaking those documents even if his intent of unveiling the wrongfulness of these intelligence agencies’ spying tactics was rather noble. To pardon him would be like the U.S. government saying, “Hey everyone, you can get away with dishing out classified documents willy-nilly as long as you’ve got a good enough excuse.”

Don’t get me wrong, in no way do I think the NSA should be able to just go around collecting people’s phone records at random in the name of national security, but I wholeheartedly agree with Feingold on this one: Snowden should face the consequences of leaking secret information.

That being said, I don’t think Snowden’s case should fall into the same category as any other treason case. The fact remains that the NSA was quite literally spying on the American public, infringing on our basic American core values.

The dark secrets Snowden revealed needed to be brought to the surface, and I honestly feel that this should have an influence on the severity of his sentence and punishment. We can let him off easy, but we can’t sweep his very criminal act under the rug.

Phil Michaelson ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in biomedical engineering.