[hyperman1]

Maybe Snowden was worth more to Russia by not being a traitor. Consider:

* Most of the secrets were probably already known by well running spying organizations of big countries. They have their own real spies working in there, and what Snowden revealed was for a big part already suspected by many. Snowden has demonstrated the smoking gun to the planet, but a lot of people noticed the smell of the corpse before that.

* USA=Bad is a claim that sticks beter if the messenger is a knight in shining armor.

* Russia has a lot more room to mess around if the would-be police of the world iis caught with its pants down every other week.

* Russia is very good at sowing distrust between their enemies. It seems a main point of their current defence against NATO.

[macspoofing]

>revealed was for a big part already suspected by many

The problem is that the details on the existence of internal spy programs were a very small part of the cache of data he stole. Initial estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000 stolen documents (with later revisions of the estimates jumping to 1.7 million) with no real idea of the extent of the theft.

Here's how Army General Martin Dempsey (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) characterized the theft: "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures."

We know Snowden took those documents with him to China. We don't know what he did with them. We know he was monitored by Chinese, Russian and American intelligence agencies in Hong Kong - which should raise alarm bells because there is no way that neither Russian nor Chinese agencies would simply pass up an opportunity to exfiltrate this data for themselves. Snowden said that he destroyed all those files, though his story has changed several times and you simply have to trust him at his word ... which raises the question, why did he steal that data (not talking about domestic surveillance programs) in the first place. I mean, he sure as hell could have simply given it to the Russians, or had it stolen by another intelligence agency.

[hyperman1]

True of course.

But Snowden was not the only person having this access. What about all of his colleagues? If a country manages to bribe or blackmail even one of these people to smuggle out an USB stick, you have exactly the same situation.

Given the resources available to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc..., the sheer number of available targets, and the invisibility of the attack, what are the odds of this kind of theft not happening? And that's without all the other ways for them to get reasonable estimates of these things.

[macspoofing]

I'm not sure the point you're making. Are you saying that Snowden's theft isn't that big of a deal because other agencies must have already hacked the NSA and gotten all that data?

[hyperman1]

I say that Russia is smart enough to weigh both options. Either access to data they already had, or putting a wedge between their enemies by amassive anti USA pr campaign. Or even a mix of both.

And yes, also that the theft isn't as big a deal as it seems.