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Comment by Skalman | Hacker News Reader

Many on this thread are suspiciously skeptical of Snowden. I could easily see this as the Washington Post trying to portrait him as cooperating with China. I can't imagine China being interested, and I highly doubt Snowden would think they are. The only value to China would be PR.

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Why is our skepticism suspicious? A few of us have been suspicious all along.

Regardless to what value he provides to China with this, his motives are confusing. Is he seeking to save American's civil liberties or attempting something else?

Perhaps he's seeking to save America's civil liberties without becoming a martyr needlessly?

What is confusing about his motivations? Nothing has been suspicious about the revelations he has made thus far or in his stated intent. The only thing slightly suspicious is that he chose Hong Kong, but there are many explanations for how it's a reasonable choice (The asylum application process is currently being reworked and he likely can't be extradited before that's complete, it's a major media capital from which he can engage with the story, it has one of the few governments that is in a position to stand up to the U.S. and that could cause major implications if anything fishy happened...)

Its not suspiciously skeptical, its just downright skeptical.

But I do take your point, reading the article in detail along with the original article it references, seems like he might just be spouting off generalities about the US hacking and then was specifically asked about Chinese hacking since the original paper is chinese and he said yup...

The question I really dont know is if he is really really naive and easily lead into making these statements by the reporters or if this is carefully orchestrated propaganda...

Either way now that dude is saying these kind of things he has probably 72 hours or less before he gets delta forced up.

I found it suspicous because in most other threads I've seen a large portion commenters are more worried about the details of the surveillance than Snowden's motives - here it seems reversed.

Additionally, to me it seems very possible that this is part of the smear that Snowden will have to endure, the point of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853.

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