Snowden never had Russia as a destination, the US revoked his passport while he was waiting in a layover. He was stuck in the airport for months. How is it "telling" of anything?
There is a non-zero number of documents that are classified as Top Secret not for national security but because corrupt shitheads are in control of classifying documents.
I call BS. The Snowden files completely rewrote the rules of security inside Google and everywhere and led to zero-trust. These companies are now protected against this unlawful hacking of the government on their local companies and thus also better protected from governments around the world. Ironically, the leaks made the US more secure.
Given that our incompetent security policies apparently granted full access to people with no conceivable need to know (see also Manning), the bad guys already had all that stuff. If that wasn't the case before, it certainly is now, with Trump in office.
Law-abiding US citizens are pretty much the only ones who didn't know what was being done in their names. That's the only thing the Snowden disclosures changed.
>Snowden's aim was to damage the US and its allies, and he succeeded in this.
Dude, nobody's buying this nonsense. Snowden expressed his concerns multiple times. He talked about the surveillance enabling turn-key tyranny, if ever a fascist leader would rise into power in the US. And look what's happening now. He was right, and thank god he blew the whistle, as that gave privacy activists a decade long headstart to get end-to-end encryption deployed.
Your comment is indeed very telling. He ended up in Russia because the U.S. revoked his visa while en route to Ecuador so he was forced to live in a Russian airport for 6 weeks.
The obvious purpose would be to avoid the authorities of the US and our allies, no? If you broke US federal law and hoped to avoid being detained, would you choose to travel to a NATO country or a non-NATO one? This isn't rocket science.
He deliberately planned to travel via countries which were unlikely to extradite him to the US on his way to a country which offered him permanent asylum.
Do you have a suggestion for a better routing? I surely can't. How should he have gotten to Ecuador? (Which, btw, is not a US adversary.)
As for your "drop off" conjecture, we have no evidence that happened, and unless you are attached to the "Snowden was black-hearted liar" fabrication, we can all read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden where he says he did not do that, and explains why:
> In October 2013, Snowden said that before flying to Moscow, he gave all the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong and kept no copies for himself.[110] In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[57] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow.
I take it you believe he lied, and during the last decade-plus his nefarious actions and additional secret files never leaked.
Would you care to explain the basis for your belief?
>It is of course very telling that Snowden ended up in Russia.
Yeah it's almost like you can revoke someone's passport during their layover in Russia and make the people with MAGA-levels of intelligence take the optics at face value through decade long repeated messaging.
If Snowden was a Russian spy, he would've taken the files, given them to Putin, received the largest Datša in the country and we would never have heard from him or the files. Instead, he gave it to journalists who made the call what to release.
Even if you are playing tic-tac-toe at a chess tournament, you still have to think a move ahead. Saying "Very naive to think that the Russian and Chinese governments didn't get a full copy" makes your initial point moot. If the adversaries you are supposedly worried about already have everything, what's the point of keeping it from the American people?
GP didn't claim that Snowden worked for both countries. Snowden certainly did offer details of compromised Chinese networks to SCMP, which is now a propaganda rag for the PRC, in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...
Snowden gave the full set of documents to Greenwald, Poitras, and The Intercept. Greenwald's opsec in particular is highly questionable, and I would be shocked if Russia and China didn't get a full copy from him. China had no need to barter with Snowden.
Which exactly weapons are supplied by China? Even ever lying news sources like Bloomberg and CNN never made such unfounded accusations.
Also, how and why some "spy" would work both for China and Russia? Two very different countries from every point of view: culturally, economically, and in every other way also.
The only thing in common is that USA wants to destroy both Russia and China and that because of that reason US controlled media (like 90% of media in the world) publish scary fakes about both countries.
He left his cozy upper middle-class life, partner, and put his life on the line to expose illegal mass surveillance. That's gazillion times more risk and sacrifice to do the right thing, than you'll ever accomplish.
The problem is that much of it wasn't illegal. Some was, but some was just spy agencies doing spy agency things. The laws draw some pretty fine distinctions that are at odds with what you expect.
Perhaps it's worth it to have exposed the genuinely illegal things and have scrutiny on the legal but unpleasant ones. But I don't think that's obviously the case. Spy agencies are by definition going to do stuff you wouldn't approve of if you weren't paying close attention to what protections are in place.
