| This play is straight out of the wikileaks playbook that they used almost verbatim when the us was making a lot of noise about assange. It appeared to be effective, in that US intelligence took the threat seriously and were concerned about the ramifications of what might be included. One element of that was the belief that those docs included some kind of "kill shot" class leak that would pretty much sink Bank of America. There were certainly elements of truth to all of these things - there was a document cache, it was encrypted, people did have split keys, it probably did include elements of what was revealed as the robosigning scandal. But from hearing discussion about it the subject, I think that US Intelligence now more or less holds the opinion that it was a bluff. Nothing of significant harm was included in the unreleased documents, though I think that's informed speculation and not some kind of confirmed fact. All of a sudden after Snowden was getting helped by wikileaks and he was under a lot of pressure, the revelation of a similar encrypted cache of documents distributed widely was given to a lot of news agencies, and has regularly come up at opportune times in friendly media outlets. I haven't been told this by anyone, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence community isn't buying it. Reports by greenwald were somewhat inconsistent with idea that there is a large cache of even more damning documents left. He's been travelling internationally, was staying in hong kong where many services operate openly, and presumably under pressure from a variety of security services and states as he tries to escape moscow and secure a safe place to live. It is hard to keep secret keys and documents secure under the best of conditions, and those are about the worst conditions possible. The only reasonable thing to assume here is that it's all burned - everything snowden walked away with is or will be in the hands of foreign states and anything particularly damning will likely end up in the press sooner or later. So if you believe that, that there is no way to unring this bell, the last thing you're going to do is spend any time being concerned about a dead man's crypto cache. If you're willing to do enough horse trading to close the entire european airspace to a single individual, you're pissed and you're gonna do whatever it is you want to do. That's not going to include killing him, simply because the cost is high and the benefit is low. But they are clearly going to exert an inhuman amount of resources into making him regret being born. And that's absolutely unrelated to Mr. Snowden. That's all for the effect it will have on anyone having similar thoughts. I think he's awesome and did Americans and the world a great favor, and that's he's really brave. And yet after seeing this go down if I was ever in a position to consider doing something like this there is no fucking way I'd ever think I could handle this kind of heat. Not a chance, no question. Problem solved. |
Look at the facts on the ground. The United States government is well-documented for atrocities ranging from torture to extrajudicial killing to political assassinations to mass surveillance, not to mention providing support to private American corporations involved in similarly disgusting behavior.
Has this impacted the power of the United States? Not really. France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy -- countries with tremendous "pride of place" and a sometimes sneering disdain for the US -- denied airspace to a foreign head of state on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden was on board. The US is still, by at least an order of magnitude, the most powerful country in the world.
The only challenge to US hegemony is the declining relevance of the US economy relative to other world economies like China, India, Russia, Brazil, and others. In the end, only money and guns talk. There is no "kill shot" leak as long as Bank of America has the right friends in Washington.