Imagine a prominent foe of Vladimir Putin—someone who had been forced to flee Russia for fear of a jail sentence—appearing via video hookup from abroad to address a large audience in St. Petersburg to deliver withering criticisms of Putin’s attacks on civil liberties. Imagine, moreover, this personage receiving raucous applause from the Russian audience.

Hard to imagine, no? Precisely because there are no civil liberties in Russia, such a spectacle would be unlikely to occur, and if it did, everyone involved would face the danger of jail time.

Yet Edward Snowden has no problem speaking from an undisclosed location in Russian to address the South by Southwest Festival in Austin—and receiving a standing ovation from the audience and softball questions from his ACLU questioners on stage. What’s wrong with this picture?

No one apparently asked Snowden about the obvious hypocrisy involved of defending Internet freedom—with a copy of the Constitution superimposed behind him—even as he enjoys the hospitality of a despot who tramples on every freedom the Founding Fathers held dear. Instead the audience seemed to treat Snowden as if he were just another libertarian professor or writer—rather than one of the most damaging traitors in our country’s long history.

Too bad none of Snowden’s questioners had the wit or courage to ask him what he thinks about Internet controls in Russia or Putin’s power grab in Crimea. The answer would expose him either as a craven lackey of a dictator or leave him in danger of being booted out of his gilded exile.

It is hard to know what is more revolting: Snowden’s hubris in delivering his self-righteous lecture or his audience’s gullibility in according him oracular status that he earned by doing dire damage to the government which protects them, and the rest of us, from threats like al-Qaeda and, for that matter, Vladimir Putin.