[AwesomeTogether]

"Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?"

if the article presents a different answer than what's already known, through snowden statements communicated to laura poitras and greenwald, then they're probably not true, and if it repeats the same stuff, this is obviously a stupid question to ask and the article's just marketing b.s.

[danso]

I, too, have the exact same cynicism as you do (and I haven't yet read the article)...however, seeing James Bamford as the author changes things a bit. Bamford is the independent researcher who, back when the NSA was mostly unheard of and beyond reproach, cracked the organization through classic reporting and research. Of all the investigative reporters, Bamford is one that has my highest respect...he didn't have a news organization behind him, or any institutional privileges...this is not to say that someone like Greenwald is a lesser reporter (IMO, Greenwald worked incredibly hard to be in a position, years later, for someone like Snowden to trust)...but Bamford was really working in the wilderness and is not a lightweight in this field.

Some more background here: http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=17031

Anyway, that's just my bias going into this piece.

[igravious]

Exactly. Snowden has answered this many times. He has said (and I paraphrase) that the public of the USA needs to know what is being done to them and in their name so that they can get to choose and have a decision on the scope and limits of these programs. In other words Snowden has said effectively that if the public could get a direct vote on these issues and the public chose the status quo then he'd go along with that.

I don't doubt that Snowden doesn't want the status quo, he'd like to see the more (in his opinion) egregious civil liberty over-stepping practices rolled back but if his views differed from public majority he'd go along with that. He just wants the public to know and have a say, he's made this point a bunch of times and I'll cite it for you if you really insist :)

[joeclark77]

Right, but that's what's called a "lie" and everyone knows it, hence the question is still seeking an answer. No way did Snowden read hundreds of thousands of documents and decide that all of them were relevant to his personal crusade against whatever it was.