One of tech's biggest investors has branded Edward Snowden a traitor

You may not have heard of Marc Andreessen, but if you have been using the Web for a while, you have used one or many of the services his venture capital firm has backed.

Andreessen co-founded Netscape and was responsible for Mosaic, one of the earliest web browsers. And as part of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist has invested in countless companies including Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Groupon, Airbnb, Lytro, Jawbone, Foursquare and Zynga, to name a few.

But if you ask him about Edward Snowden, Andreessen has a few choice words. “For me obviously he’s a traitor,” Andreessen told CNBC . “If you look up in the encyclopedia ’traitor’ there’s a picture of Ed Snowden,” he further said and added, “I think I am in the distinct minority out here. I think most in Silicon Valley would pick the other designation.”

For Andreessen the biggest fallout from the Snowden leaks is that it hurts US technology firms’ inability to sell overseas. And as if to point out that he is above the rest of the world, Andreessen said, “The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked (about NSA spying), because I thought we’ve been funding this agency for 50 years that has tens of thousands of employees and spends tens of billions of dollars a year.”

Perhaps Andreessen has a very short memory, because it’s just about a year since we have found out the massive scope of the NSA spying. Thanks to Snowden’s revelations we know just how pervasive some of their tactics were. We also know how NSA has been spying on offline machines as well through hardware plants. But obviously Andreessen thinks these should never have come to light through Snowden, because it hurts the bottom-line of a few companies.

Secondly, it’s not like these companies themselves are any happy about the NSA revelations. If anything they are fighting back with many steps and programmes , and there’s almost some or the other major security update every day . So we can assume they owe some gratitude to Snowden, but not if you ask the man who may have funded them at some point of time.