[MajesticHobo]

> It's not just that Snowden wasn't an insider, but that he lacked the ability to leak carefully and strategically --- and so the public outcome was inferior to the Pentagon Papers.

This is hard to believe. I find it much more likely that Snowden had a broad agenda he wanted to cover, and simply decided to delegate the work of sifting through documents relevant to the public interest to journalists. How successful this strategy was is another issue entirely.

Also, the direct comparison between the material Ellsberg had to work with and what Snowden had is misleading. Ellsberg leaked a study from RAND literally designed to assess and document the history of the Vietnam War, including past failures. It's easy to look at that and go, "Wow, this is a careful, strategic disclosure." But Ellsberg couldn't have had an easier choice about what to leak!

In contrast, Snowden had access to a much more disparate set of documents that required lots of interpretation and technical parsing on journalists' part. There wasn't a single PowerPoint presentation that summed up NSA's abuses so conveniently.

That doesn't necessarily justify scraping as much as possible and passing it over to journos, but we have to keep the two men's access to material in context.

[tptacek]

Can you be more specific about what exactly it is you find hard to believe, what you believe instead, and what evidence could be presented to you to change your belief?

[MajesticHobo]

The notion that he "lacked the ability to leak carefully and strategically" because he was an outsider. I'm fairly sure he was more than capable of selecting only documents related to domestic surveillance if he wanted to -- that just wasn't his broader goal. However, I would definitely appreciate the argument that his status as an outsider rendered him opposed to the idea of leaking selectively. I think the author hinted at this when he contrasted "hackers" and "leakers", but it's still quite different from what you're saying.