I recently had a conversation with someone who works IT for the Air Force. Apparently, it is now the OpSec position that Snowden's story of how he got the data is mostly a lie and he was almost certainly acting as a Russian asset.
Could you please elaborate on this? I recently had dinner with a friend in intelligence, who was trying to convince me that Snowden was in bed with Russia from the get-go, and that the 90% of the leak had nothing to do with privacy concerns.
I took his opinions with a grain of salt given his background, but also couldn't refute due to being relatively unfamiliar with the Snowden saga.
You also have to consider the possibility that that is a lie. One of Snowden's comments was that many individuals had access to what he released (as in most standard NSA employees), discrediting that statement is in the governments best interest.
I think there is reason to believe that Snowden is a blackops story. A guy making six figures and working remotely in Hawaii as an NSA contractor, somehow extracts tons of critical data and then one day decides he has a moral compass and gives it to reporters at The Guardian and Der Spegiel? Then he goes and hangs out in Russia and his smokin hot girlfriend says she wants to go be with him.
We should not be surprised that in 30 years, declassified documents show this whole thing was orchestrated to show Americans don't actually care at all about domestic spying.
In an attempt to sound like he had noble reasons for leaking hundreds of thousands of unrelated secret documents to journalists, Snowden claimed it was watching James Clapper's congressional testimony in March 2013 that triggered him to start downloading and exfiltrating classified material.
This was a lie. He'd actually started collecting his trove of stolen documents many months prior, in mid-2012, coinciding with arguments with his managers. He had a grudge against his employers, and he acted upon it.
Snowden also never mentions that nation-state adversaries got all of this material too. The intelligence agencies of China and Russia must have been rubbing their hands in glee when he fled to them in quick succession. No wonder Russia continues to protect Snowden from being brought to justice in the US, from their point of view he did a stellar espionage job for them.
That's not the only bullshit from Snowden either. Even little things like his claimed $200k salary when it was actually closer to $100k-ish. He's a serial fabricator full of grandiose claims about himself and what he did.
Wait what? Snowden himself says that the source of the information was office gossip. This isn't a case of believing or not believing Snowden. It's a case of people taking a snippet of gossip and reporting it as true because they want it to be true!
People's reality distortion field when faced with the Snowden topic - it astonishes me.
If you want to put on your tinfoil hat for a second, consider the fact that Snowden started his career in the military, then moved to CIA, then moved to Booz Allen.
It's entirely possible that Snowden is an ongoing CIA op to discredit their rival NSA as part of a turf war.
I've quite often seen people claim Russia and/or China had full copies of the Snowden documents, and try to use that to accuse him of being a foreign agent. It's interesting to see a high ranking NSA employee say the journalist were likely the unwitting source.
Is it a likely scenario that Russia intelligence could recruit, contact and provide help to an NSA employee without NSA knowing about it?
Yes? Very yes? But stop assuming you know what I think about Snowden. I find the idea that Snowden was literally an FSB mole to be far-fetched. I think he did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do (I think he was probably wrong about a lot of what he did, though).
Basically, my problem is with the narrative fallacy. I find that most people's thinking about stories like these latches immediately to whatever makes the most sense as a story. "Snowden is a hero who was driven to leak exactly the right information by a system that was utterly disinterested in abuse reports and who will now lead the charge to abolish the NSA". Fiction. "Snowden is an agent of the shadow Soviet government who was charged with infiltrating the US government so he could help sabotage the world's last remaining superpower." Fiction.
Reality is almost always messy and incomprehensible. The Snowden situation has all the hallmarks of not being a clean good-versus-evil narrative.
Agreed. Are we just believing everything Snowden says without proof here and are we believing that any site that posts a Snowden interview is actually posting a legit interview? That's not to say someone really believed they were talking to him but rather to ask how are we to know? Are there documents that prove the mass data collection is real, especially the British and other European programs. So far the only documents I've seen are related to PRISM. I'm hesitant to just take Snowden's word at face value. There are a few things about him and his behavior that make me question his reliability. I'm willing to believe a lot but not all of it yet.
Ugh, the 'NSA sysadmin'. Snowden himself addressed this point that this is a framing move on the part of the US government to downplay his knowledge of what the NSA was really up to. He actually did participate in spying activities! Such a shame that this framing even persists in news of his leaks. (Yes I am aware of The Register's reputation.)
Or this may be a black op/psyop, with the leaked documents being fake, obsolete or irrelevant. Snowden himself may be a willing operative, or an unknowing patsy.
This is intelligence, where misdirection and outright deception are ways of life. Why should we take anything he--or what anyone involved in this--says at face value?
Are you or have you ever been employed by a US intelligence agency?
You seem very skilled at subtly misleading with half-truths. We don't really know what unpublished documents Snowden took, and it is extremely naive to trust the state's allegations. The published info about defense and foreign intelligence was relevant to the American people because it demonstrated that NSA had been lying to congress and our allies. Unchecked violations of our alliances is a grave threat to national security.
It's really hard to take that report seriously. It basically reads as FUD against snowden. This is what CIA and NSA agents are trained to do professionally.
While I'm with the tin-foil hat brigade on this whole debacle, I'm not quite sure that 'it wasn't from Snowden' necessarily means 'so it must be misinformation from the Government'.
especially as it would be so easily disproven that Snowden had anything to do with it.
Something smells fishy here. How did the Intercept maintain enough opsec to stay in contact with Snowden (who would have dropped them like a hot potato if they didn't seem competent) and then do this, with the same general staff in place?
I didn't follow the Snowden story because I don't have the background to evaluate the claims, but there is something I recall that hasn't been discussed yet.
Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.
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