| > - Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels. See Binney, eg: "William Binney HOPE 9 KEYNOTE":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI The "internal channels" have been broken for years, and do not work. Snowden was aware of this, and AFAIR has commented on that on several occasions. > - Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs. What? Incompetent? They managed to do their job, in the face of GCHQ and the NSA. Just because they made some mistakes, that doesn't make them "incompetent". If they were, we wouldn't have heard anything at all! > - Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills. So, being competent is a strike against Snowden, but being incompetent is a strike against Greenwald (who presumably doesn't have any training from GCHQ)? > - The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this. Everyone who was paying attention knew a lot about the clearly illegal stuff that NSA have been doing, from previous leaks - that doesn't mean the leaks didn't have value. > I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia. The first part was in my eyes a prerequisite for having a sizable useful set of documents to leak. The second part is really two parts: he fled - he didn't submit himself to capture, torture and/or assassination in the US. He did this by fleeing to Hong Kong. Then he went to Russia, the only port within reach that offered sanctuary. I'm ashamed that Norway didn't - for example. But of course we're NATO allies, and with the not too distant history of Mossad carrying out a botched assassination (successful kill, wrong person) on Norwegian soil, and Norway being complicit in extralegal detention and torture by allowing CIA's "white planes" to transit through - it would probably have been hopelessly naive for Snowden to try to flee here, even if offered "safe passage". |
I think you laid bare my mental split on this issue and for that I thank you. I will concede the point on Snowden being competent.
I said it because it felt (and still slightly feels) wrong to me: Like a kung-fu student hitting his master with a punch he was taught by that same master. Snowden used the trade craft he picked up at the NSA and CIA against these same organizations.
But he would have been foolish to ignore his own skills and I can't expect him to forget these and put his life in danger (more than he already has).