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Comment by 0xDEF | Hacker News Reader

The goal was always to get into either China or Russia. They are the only geopolitical heavyweights that wouldn't have folded like Ecuador did with Assange.

It's amazing how the "American whistleblower randomly ended up in Russia during transit" revisionism is being pushed.

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You’re the only person claiming this, Snowden himself has said the opposite in 2014, on record.

Why do you take the words of Snowden as gospel?

> 2OEH8eoCRo0 0 minutes ago

> Why do you take the words of Snowden as gospel?

I am not sure who could possibly be more of an authority on the intentions of Snowden than Snowden himself.

I mean if he:

* says he was on his way to Latin America

* was in an airport transit zone for a short length of time before;

* having his passport revoked (which he couldn't control), and;

* after applying for asylum in latin american countries, and also notably;

* had not applied for asylum in Russia (or China).

Yeah, I kinda take his word for it that he knew where he wanted to go.

Here is my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37095083

Ecuador folded because Assange was inside the embassy, in what ultimately is UK soil. There was no way, when push came to shove, to prevent him from being captured. If Assange was in Ecuador proper, they might not have folded, or he might have been able to leave Ecuador for, say, Cuba before the hammer dropped. I imagine this was Snowden's plan since he wanted to go to Cuba, Ecuador, or Venezuela. If he wanted to stay in Russia he wouldn't even have noticed his passport being deactivated, and if he wanted to go to China, he would have went to Shenzhen from Hong Kong instead of going to Russia first.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-assange-smeared-his-f...

Maybe they were tired of him smearing shit on the walls of their embassy.

don't you find it too convenient that the journalist the US want to annihilate happens to be a poop-smearing rapist ungrateful douchebag?

> . If he wanted to stay in Russia he wouldn't even have noticed his passport being deactivated,

Unlike the US, Russia requires one to carry an ID.

A cop on the street isn't going to check whether your passport was or wasn't revoked (and in fact simply can't). You would only notice that at the airport. And he did in fact claim that he noticed this in the airport, when trying to leave Russia.

In theory, it does. In practice, pretty nobody actually does this, because it's largely unenforced, and on the other hand, nobody wants to lose their internal passport and have to go through the headache of replacing it. Losing your international passport as a non-citizen would be even worse.

An embassy is a soil of the embassy country.

This is a misconception, it isn't. It's extraterritorial-ish, meaning that the host country temporarily and revocably confers the privilege for that area to be under different laws. It's revocable at any time with sufficient notice, and it stays sovereign soil of the original country.

It’s actually worse than that. He was forced there by Sarah Harrison and Assange.

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