You don't need to dig deeper, it's completely transparent. Everything Putin says is meant for internal consumption in Russia, where nobody (within 99% margin, Putin doesn't care about a minuscule bunch of geeks who only talk to people like them) knows how NSA or CIA works and can not distinguish between CIA operative and NSA technical contractor. So for them Snowden is a CIA spy, and the fact that CIA spy has defected to Russian side is a welcome reference to the olden times, where the cases of such defectors were celebrates and triumphantly displayed as a proof of the superiority of everything Soviet. There's nothing new and deep here - it is a simple lie that is designed to deceive the uninformed and keep them this way so that they would keep supporting Putin who protects them from CIA atrocities. Any authoritarian thug with quarter a brain does that.
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.
Such a terrible take. Wikileaks did leak Russian intelligence files. The argument that he hasn't leaked the same amount hinges on the assumption that he somehow has access to everything, which is of course nonsense.
Snowden, I think, somewhat blinded by the overwhelming US propaganda machine and the fact that he's stuck in Russia, made an honest mistake. He admitted as much on his Twitter. Nobody's perfect, that doesn't mean they're working for Putin.
Ah, yes, the trained master-mind Snowden. It was all a ploy to embarrass the US and hide the fact that Snowden actually collaborated with Russia, which the US for some reason would never even assert.
Did Snowden go to his superiors about the program?
Did anyone care?
If the Russians wanted to steal our information why not just steal the information? They have many of the secrets Snowden talked about already (via their own intelligence agencies, Russia is no slouch) and could publicize them if they wanted to, or release them anonymously and pretend it was some hackers on steroids.
It just doesnt hang together that Snowden is a spy for me, whether or not you approve of what he did.
Just going to add a small bit of extra context to this from the eyes of the intelligence community because that doesn’t seem to ever get a look at on Hacker News where for many years there has been a more or less unquestionable assumption that he is some kind of hero.
But from their point of view, it’s really in no way obvious that this wasn’t an operation from the very start.
The FBIs chief spy catcher was actually working as a liaison officer in Moscow when this happened and he talks about it in some detail here in this interview (will update with timestamps later if I can find it) https://www.youtube.com/live/0NSGOJs150w but in his experience this is actually EXACTLY what he would expect an operation like that to look like and there has never been any clear evidence in the years since that would put a meaningful dent in that theory.
The other point I wanted to make was that because people tend to have no real idea beyond movies as to how intelligence agencies actually function in real life they have no context for where he fit into the bigger picture.
But Snowden was never some super spy or anything like that, he has zero operational experience or context he was just a Microsoft SharePoint administrator who had a security clearance.
He demonstrated numerous times since then that he actually had no meaningful context as to what he was actually leaking for into the wider operational picture or what kinds of controls were in place around its usage. He made a unilateral decision to take as much classified information as he could possibly get his hands on and then leak it with no regards to the consequences that came with it.
There are legitimate reasons to be upset with certain actions of the US intel community I am not here to do some wholesale defence on their behalf but this image he has built for himself as some heroic whistleblower is built on incredibly flimsy evidence. There is a reason why he has essentially zero defenders inside the intelligence community and I would put it to you that it’s not simply because “they are all evil”.
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.
For those that downvoted the parent, the NSA denied doing many of the activities that Snowden exposed. The US misled the public building their case to invade Iraq. Just two recent examples of where the government lied for their own interests. So, I think the OP makes a fair point.
Further, the gov. hasn't exactly offered substantial evidence to show that it was Russian government as opposed to hackers working alone. Maybe they don't need to provide the general public with all the details, but showing the evidence to a third party would go a long way to building trust.
There is no truth in this article, only conjecture by someone who clearly has a grudge to bear. For all we know, the author (un-named) of this article is working for Russian intelligence right now, by trying to paint Snowden as anything less than a concerned and patriotic citizen of the United States.
Everyone who works in the spy business has something to hide - and therefore, you really can't trust anyone who works in the spy business. Patriotic jingoism might work 80% of the time - but there will always be folks who can read between the lines and are unwilling to just put up with the state of affairs because some Authority told them it was so.
This article is full of authoritarian indoctrination. "Anyone who has worked in CI knows..", "as anyone who knows anything about intelligence can tell you..", "I've worked as an expert in this field for years" (and yet remain an un-named author), etc.
Be careful as you read this article, that your buttons are not being pushed. Of course, we know that the USA and Russia are engaged in an ideological war with each other - and of course, we know that there are reasons for all the secrecy.
But the fact remains that the US government, which is supposed to be democratic and representative of the desires of its people, has given itself unsavory powers that bring the world every closer to its destruction, in the name of its own 'safety'. "All countries do this", you will hear them say - "but then, what good are they?" will be the reply. And the answer is: if you're going to spy on the worlds population, unhindered and uncontrolled by anyone by your own agency, and use that power for your own wealth and survival, then, your country is no good at all.
For a while, I've been in the camp that the Snowden leaks were intentional and that he still works for the US. A rich work from home government contractor, with a smoking hot girlfriend, takes off with secrets and hides in Russia. His hot girlfriend is even allowed to join him.
I think it's more likely the Snowden leaks were to show just how little Americans care. They're using that spy network to track reactions.
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.
I know almost no one on HN wants to hear anything bad about Snowden, but Greenwald has stated that Snowden has leaked some information out of self preservation. We can't rule out the fact that Snowden has given information to the Russian government.
Even though I think, Snowden is on the right here, lets not kid ourselves, they using Snowden right now to trash Wikileaks, anyone remember when Snowden leaks came out, he was a russian spy, who apparently went to Russia by himself and dumped American intelligence documents to them.
now according to most mainstream publications Wikileaks are shill for Putin, cold war era rhetoric in 2016.
Is there any reason Snowden would be in a position to know this? The article doesn't give any evidence, but merely an accusation. Snowden was privy to intelligence info in 2013, but it's been 5 years since then and I imagine that his knowledge would be too dated to know what's going on here.
If Snowden was fake, and someone can make the NSA and government's response to his leaks look as genuine as they did, this is going to be someone so powerful, well-connected, and invisible, that's it's likely it's not even human. Every time you come up with a complex conspiracy theory, ask yourself how easy it would be to orchestrate that and just handle all of the logistics of it with zero leaks and 100% undying loyalty without getting stabbed in the back yourself.
People did question it -- he was getting spy accusations as soon as Russia let him in, but then they looked at the actual documents and realized that Snowden is irrelevant as far as the content is concerned. You don't need Snowden's motivations to interpret any of that.
What benefit does it serve you to suddenly get all of your enemies and frenemies to suddenly change all of their communication methods to avoid the NSA? You're spying on them without them knowing about it -- that's exactly what you want!
Snowden having that level of access and the ability to siphon off so many documents undetected virtually guarantees that Russian/Chinese moles have been doing the same (without going to the press about it, naturally) for quite some time. The idea that they don't already have the data is a crock of shit.
That's the thing I've been wondering about--either Snowden was a full-blown spy with lots of outside help, or he hacked his data out of the NSA on his own, with no formal spy training (and it wasn't as easy as downloading some files, either), which is ridiculously embarrassing for the NSA. The fact that they haven't branded him as a foreign agent immediately is telling.
The author in this article seems like he's being deliberately obtuse--
"Putin today called Ed “a strange guy” – whose main purpose is causing pain and suffering to Washington, DC. Which, let it be said, he has done rather well, thanks to the propaganda offensive waged by Greenwald, Poitras, and their helpers in several countries, with Ed’s purloined information, and who have masked their radical activism under the (thin) guise of post-modern journalism."
Right, because there's nothing at all problematic with the programs that Snowden revealed, and anyone who has a major problem with them is clearly a 'radical activist.'
I think we've found a great example of the type of mindset that led to these programs being created in the first place.
For all we know, Snowden is a CIA agent who's taking one for the team as part of the ongoing NSA/CIA turf war. Honestly I kind of lean that way -- he was a CIA direct hire before he was an NSA contractor.
OK, so prove any suspicions wrong: present some data for how the young Russians you turned during the cold war left a big (for the time) data dump for journalists of any stripe to examine. Where are those documents? Where's the statement of ideology from these young Russian loners?
That is, if Snowden is "the kind of guy" you used to recruit in Soviet Russia, where are the similarities besides a Myers-Briggs personality type evaluation?
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