[davidw]

> What can Snowden promise them, anyway, that they would make this deal? The toothpaste is out of the tube.

My understanding is that he has actually been quite a bit more judicious than Manning about what he has released, putting out stuff that clearly shows what the NSA is doing wrong. I get the impression that he does have more material that could go out but he doesn't feel really needs to be public, as a bargaining chip.

[ceejayoz]

> My understanding is that he has actually been quite a bit more judicious than Manning about what he has released, putting out stuff that clearly shows what the NSA is doing wrong. I get the impression that he does have more material that could go out but he doesn't feel really needs to be public, as a bargaining chip.

I believe he's claimed to have gotten rid of all materials prior to going to Russia. They're in the hands of the team of journalists distributed around the world.

[tripzilch]

> I believe he's claimed to have gotten rid of all materials prior to going to Russia.

This was in response to the question about this data accidentally falling into wrong hands. He said he was very confident that nothing was stolen copied or accessed during his stay in Hong Kong, and that he completely wiped his harddisk before going to Russia.

This doesn't mean that this data does not exist, anywhere, as a bargaining chip. Just that it is not present with him, on a physical storage medium in Russia.

[gavinlynch]

This was my impression as well.

[mpyne]

> My understanding is that he has actually been quite a bit more judicious than Manning about what he has released, putting out stuff that clearly shows what the NSA is doing wrong.

That was his claim, yes, but it's quite incorrect.

Various journalists have the data now and are piecing through it, not Snowden, but things like details of Chinese hacking or tapping into Merkel or Medvedev's phone calls are not violations of U.S. civil liberties and can hardly be said to have been judicious disclosures.

In that regard Manning actually ends up with a better case IMHO; Snowden claimed to have specifically looked at and identified every piece of data he took as requiring disclosure (although taking 58,000-1,000,000+ pieces in a year with a full-time job to do would tend to argue against being 'selective'), so any areas where Snowden leaked something that was only vital to national security happened after he specifically cleared it.

Manning, on the other hand, specifically released a few things but other than that let loose a bunch of data she never quite scanned through. This was definitely negligent, but doesn't seem to have been malicious.