Snowden asks Putin on live television if Russia spies on its citizens
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Which is, of course, B.S., at least insofar as it's possible to trust government in general with this kind of thing. Remember just a year ago when people were saying we couldn't compare what NSA does to what FSB does, because they're Russia and obviously would spy on their own people?
But the question wouldn't have come up (it appeared on live TV but was pre-recorded) if the answer Putin was going to give wasn't already teed up.... what is Snowden trying to play here with the softball? Surely he can't be meaning to be the fiddle for Putin to play (a similar Reuters article claims Snowden is trying to press on surveillance in other countries, but that makes zero sense whatsoever, pushing too hard on that could only get his asylum revoked...).
This is like how they were able to prove that the NSA was lying in its responses, over and over again after each leak. So when mandarins attempt to say we're having a "great debate" or whatever it is transparent that they are fucking with you.
Edit: I should clarify and that it isn't "Russia" doing it to anyone, it is Putin and the people in control there.
Make no mistake: any conflict between NATO and Russia would end in Russian defeat, but not before you saw China get involved (against Russia, to keep the Japanese off the mainland) and the Middle East explode as a bunch of nations took the tying up of the usual powers as an opportunity to grab some land and settle old scores.
Wave goodbye to the American economy, Chinese economy (but ironically possibly not the European one) - assuming of course, that everyone stays sane and no one thinks to try and use their nuclear arsenal offensively to retake lost ground.
The Russia where its not clear where the FSB ends, the executive begins, and which parts are in fact just the Russian mafia?
It's safe to say Snowden, in so far as he doesn't want to - at minimum - get his asylum revoked - has no choice. At worst Russia, and Putin specifically, are exactly the types to kill him and not tell anybody.
Of course he has a choice. The fact that he has not exercised that choice leads me to conclude it's not coercion at all, but that he's willingly cooperating.
Part of the reason the continuing stories about NSA surveilance have been effective is that the NSA doesn't know what's coming. If they had a chance to put him in isolation and waterboard him until he confessed to what he took, the NSA could pre-empt the disclosures and do effective damage control.
Whether the value of that exceeds the impression of being hypocritical is up for debate.
The "choice" is being offered to a guy who took an action he claimed to be very difficult, because of the principle of that action.
So yes, I expect him to demonstrate a commitment to his principles. Fleeing justice in pursuit of the greater good of those principles is one thing.
Aiding and abetting a different regime's use of mass surveillance and wiretapping, which violates the very principles he claims to espouse, is another thing entirely.
That he claimed to do this all in order to facilitate the end of mass surveillance in the U.S. only reinforces this point, because American data is also not safe if Russia can wiretap it.
If Snowden's standard is that mass surveillance is hazardous, then that needs to be his global standard on a global Internet.
But that is not Snowden's standard, which I've tried to warn about since a couple of days after his leaks first broke out.
"We don't have as much money as they have in the States and we don't have these technical devices that they have in the States," Putin said.
"Ah but when we do....!"
Putin is such a master chess player, you always have to dig a LOT deeper every time he says something. A lot of people could say he said it because he thinks / knows Snowden is a spy (the whole Russian spy conspiracy angle: http://rockthetruth2.blogspot.com/2014/01/snowden-was-russia... ), or could just be playing a game with semantics where he's just trying to stoke the ire of the US government. Either way, it's going to reinforce whatever opinion you had of him prior to this.