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Comment by eblume | Hacker News Reader

It's probably too late now, but I feel like it was a mistake not to release a public encryption key along with his initial effluence of records. I for one believe that this was written by Snowden, but it seems like an obvious use of some basic form of identity signing.

Edit: It now seems like there is some reasonable doubt that this notice was forged. I still remain confident this is no forgery, but the point I'd like to make is that there may in fact be an identity question -- and that is a problem with a technical solution that unfortunately seems not to have been leveraged.

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He used 'have' after United States of America, which is a Britishism. To Americans, 'United States of America' is singular and would use "has" in this particular sentence:

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing but I don't think this is a verbatim statement from Snowden.

Sarah Harrison, the Wikileaks advisor accompanying Snowden, is a UK citizen. It's likely she had a hand in drafting this statement.

Maybe it was changed since you saw it, but the statement now reads:

"...the United States of America has been..."

Edit to add: The statement as quoted at http://boingboing.net/2013/07/01/snowden-asks-russia-for-asy... has the original version with "have" still in there.

Here's a screenshot from twitter of the original - https://twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/351833289000112128

Well that's interesting...

So it was changed, and not flagged as being changed. Interesting...

Not that interesting. It's probably because they proofread and edit statements in a manner typical of any writing fitting of a professional appearance, and didn't want tinfoil hats with an anti-wikileaks agenda to take cheapshots based on the benign edits, when the substance was not materially affected.

I work with coders and developers from the U.K. They know what en_US is, and they know what en_GB is, and it's very obvious which is which.

So to claim that WikiLeaks would fixup all of Snowden's writings to conform to en_GB and then switch it right back to en_US after HN notices is rather surreal.

At best you could claim that Harrison herself simply transcribed Snowden's speech and that no one caught it until it was posted. But that still wouldn't explain what happened to some of the missing words that Snowden would have said. And that still wouldn't explain why WikiLeaks revised a statement so important without so much as a mention of proofreading corrections post-facto.

If they "know" en_US and en_GB, then assuming the statement is not actually Snowden's but rather was written by a Brit, why did that Brit get it wrong? If making a mistake while falsifying a statement from Snowden is plausible, then why isn't making a mistake while editing or transcribing plausible?

I think you need to loosen your tinfoil.

It may very well be tinfoil. But right now the totality of the evidence points me to the idea that this isn't 100% Snowden's words. Forget about the grammar and punctuation; read the words.

Does that sound like the same person talking about civil liberties and how Obama didn't change enough for him, and being ready to stand up for what he believes in? Or does that sound more like a certain other ego at opposition to the U.S. government and especially its President?

It probably isn't all of his words, but so long as he stands behind his name on it, who cares?

The concern would be if wikileaks were completely fabricating this, but I see no evidence for that. (Nor any motivation.)

> The concern would be if wikileaks were completely fabricating this, but I see no evidence for that.

I doubt they are fabricating it, but honestly they have Snowden in as much of a bind as the U.S. does now. They are his only source of support right now... what does he do if they take it away? He's in a web of very unequal relationships right now.

What are they actually providing him with right now? Money for food I guess?

Airfare to his next destination and lodging costs as well. One of the articles said that they even paid for his trip out of Hong Kong so I'm not sure how much cash he has on him.

It probably isn't all of his words, but so long as he stands behind his name on it, who cares?

This assumes he has other channels of communication. He probably stands behind it insofar as its consistent with everything I've heard from him so far, but neither of us has any way of knowing for the time being.

No journalists edits direct quotes like htat - where a person's words or spelling (in a written quote) is idiomatic or incorrect, the practice is to put [sic] after the odd word(s) to signify that they're being reported as received.

If you want to preserve your credibility, it's better to either leave the mistakes in, or explain the context (eg 'this statement was a written record of a verbal statement; we apologize for an inaccuracy in our transcription of Mr. Snowden's recorded words').

So, it's probably fake [statement from Snowden].

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Do you have proof this is real? It seems awfully suspicious to change that when someone notices it and not mention anything.

EDIT2: Clarified what I think is (fully or partially) fake.

A fake what? A fake statement by Wikileaks on their own site?

Also, bitching about downvotes tends to accelerate the rate at which one gets them. You've been here long enough to have noticed that.

A fake statement from Edward Snowden.

In other words, Wikileaks is straight-up making shit up now? I don't think you'd have to look too hard to find grounds for accusing them of having a clear editorial bias, but outright fabrication?

So, I say it's fake because they silently edited things that might alert people to its legitimacy, and because they didn't offer any proof that it is really from him.

Others think it's real because it is on Wikileaks.

I see both sides of the argument, but I'm staying on my side for now.

While it's not exactly evidence that they haven't fabricated this statement, I think the damage that would do to the organization and its reputation, were it to come out, is a pretty compelling reason to think it's not a fake.

The risk-adjusted return on making a fake Snowden statement just doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

YMMV.

The most likely scenario I see at this point is that the piece itself was mostly driven by WikiLeaks and Snowden gave approval to put his name to it. Perhaps he helped with some of the main points but it doesn't sound like him and it certainly didn't look like his writing. The 'political speechwriter' theory sounds the most reasonable to me at this point.

I'm not sure that going from "I love my country and want the people to know what the government is doing" to "FUCK THE US AND FUCK YOU OBAMA" (paraphrased!) is really the wisest course though. But what do I know?

Why assume the entire organization is involved; it could be one person.

Suppose (for argument's sake) that Snowden were depressed or had got cold feet, and was uncommunicative or otherwise climbing down from his previous position; a supporter who thought he was simply undergoing a crisis of confidence might decide to draft a statement 'in the spirit of his actions.'

I'm not saying that this has happened here, but such things are not unprecedented. You don't need to believe that the entire organization is engaged in a deception, or even that the (imaginary) author of such a statement would consider it deceptive, but rather reflective of a 'deeper truth'.

So will everyone who is nit-picking over grammar also be demanding that politicians write their own speeches and statements?!

Maybe we just want a world without secrets. :P

Oh, they edited it in the last 8 minutes. I was copy pasting from the wikileaks post in my comment and still have a tab open where they used "have" instead.

Since it was a letter to Ecuador, it may have been poorly translated into English for posting.

There you go, let's all get caught up in the endless distractions.

Maybe Snowden's words were run past an editor (as are most journalist's words) of British public-school extraction, who applied reflexively what he'd been taught?

This kind of over-parsing is typical of the kind of intensive derailing of Snowden's message that's been going on. ANYTHING to distract us from the Naked Exercise of Unlimited Power of Questionable Legality that's been uncovered.

Or, perhaps it's only reasonable to be skeptical.

This has actually been a debated usage in American English:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-united-stat...

That debate effectively ended in 1865.

In addition to the likelihood of this just being a matter of editing, I use British style punctuation with quotation marks even though I'm an American. I wonder, were I ever in a situation where the authenticity of my statements were hard to validate, if my punctuation style would be taken as evidence of forgery.

He probably called someone and read them the statement over the phone. That way he wouldn't have to risk exposing his laptop to the internet, assuming he even has a laptop or access to the internet.

This is a serious question: How could we trust that his private key had not been compromised at this point?

>Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody.

This is British writing style. Brits leave off the preposition "from" in these types of sentences; Americans put it in.

American English: "Administration now seeks to stop me from exercising a basic right."

British English: "Administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right."

I'm not a linguistics or grammar expert so I can't name the proper terms for all this. I've just observed in the past that this is a "Britishism" that differs from American style. It's interesting to see it here. Snowden wouldn't write like that. IMO, he needs to ditch Wikileaks because they've done nothing but harm him and seem to only be interested in advancing their agenda.

I think all this really says is he's working with a European editor. Which you'd kind of expect since Snowden is an IT guy, not a writer.

Nice work Sherlock. Except I must say as a counter example that I am British and I flip-flop between using 'from' and not using 'from' in such sentences.

You might, but I've yet to read American writing that leaves out the 'from'. It certainly wouldn't ever occur to me to do that.

As an American who often adopts idioms and sentence structures from various things he reads, I will say (for me at least) that it depends entirely on how much, and what, you read :)

Hardly convincing. I am American, and frequently edit my writing to remove extraneous "from"s and "that"s which make it into my sentences as a product of spoken habit. I usually try to make my writing habits a bit tighter than my speaking habits.

He could have created the private key with a really strong pass-phrase.

[insert obligatory xkcd about rubber hose crypto-analysis here...]

Pass-phrases help mitigate the concerns for stolen private keys, but they do not provide assurances that things will not be signed or encrypted under duress. The best you can really do there is throw in more human element to increase the number of rubber hoses your enemy will need.

We probably couldn't, but I don't think there is any way to be 100% sure of the authorship of something, unless you are physically sitting next to the author.

So, trusting the authenticity of a document is a probability game. If he had signed it with a public key, then the probability of a fake would be less.

I've never heard anybody in the UK say "have" when referring to USA. Looks like a standard typo.

Maybe we should ask for a photo of him holding a hand-written time-stamp.

I was actually just about to ask... how do we know Snowden had anything to do with this statement at all? It's not as if he's likely to publically challenge Wikileaks if they decide to make a sockpuppet out of him for their own ends.

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