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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

> Snowden tried to responsibility report the issues and he hit a wall. He realized that the option to handle it internally didn't exist, so he did not have any other choice.

I uh... no that is just not even a little bit true.

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This is a blatant lie. But I guess this is the type of propaganda and JTRIG ops that we have to get used to.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

> Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.

> Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted — and it was for blowing the whistle.

William Binney describing the FBI raid on his house while he was in the shower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE&t=5m27s

and

> Top NSA Watchdog Who Insisted Snowden Should Have Come to Him Receives Termination Notice for Retaliating Against a Whistleblower

http://www.pogo.org/blog/2016/12/intelligence-community-land...

Vice published emails via FOIA that suggest he had made concerns known before leaking: https://news.vice.com/story/exclusive-snowden-tried-to-tell-... This suggests it is at least a little bit true

It might well be true, but the details of the VICE story (one email from Snowden asking a question about whether a training programme was correct in asserting that executive orders were equivalent to acts of congress, and a belatedly acknowledged meeting with a compliance trainer which the compliance trainer says consisted of Snowden complaining about "trick questions" ) don't really back up the clickbaity headline...

(my clickbaity headline would be "NSA appears to lack competence at searching its own email")

Yeah, the title (and contents) of the story are total clickbait, but they did helpfully attach the full contents of the FOIA dump. As you point out, there is ambiguity (which is why I used a lot of qualifiers :), but seeing the internal communications around the issue is interesting.

Help us understand then, and tell us what really happened

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