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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Well, they really didn't have much to work with here. Snowden was almost the perfect dissident. His actions and past were totally clean, except for maybe going to Russia,.

You have to understand that he didn't leave them much to manipulate external and internal biases with. So they went with his lack of education.

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As someone else pointed out in the thread, his career trajectory was pretty much straight up. It wasn't until 2012 where he became disenfranchised with the intelligence community.

Otherwise, he's held some incredibly top level positions in the NSA and CIA up until 2012. Had he not gone "rogue", I'm pretty sure he'd still be climbing the ladder and be one of the more respected people within the intelligence community. This guy was headed to some very high, well paid positions within the NSA.

Kind of hard to discount his career up to that point.

>he's held some incredibly top level positions in the NSA and CIA

And Kim Dotcom was an elite hacker. Don't let reality get in the way of a good myth.

So this all myth then?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career

According to Greenwald, while there Snowden was "considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert" in that country and "was hand-picked by the CIA to support the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania."[73]

In 2011 he returned to Maryland, where he spent a year as lead technologist on Dell's CIA account. In that capacity, he was consulted by the chiefs of the CIA's technical branches, including the agency's chief information officer and its chief technology officer.[39]

Pretty sure if you're being consulted by the CIA's CTO, you're not exactly some low level contractor doing sys admin work.

It may or may not be a myth, but the only source backing up these assertions is Snowden himself by way of interviews.

He got stuck in Russia on his way to South America.

Yes, the US cancelled his passport while he was trying to get a connecting flight in a Russian airport, thus sticking him there.

Which, from what I've read, was an error. They actually wanted him to get on an aircraft, fly over Europe, and then when he flew over the skies of a US ally that ally would force the aircraft to land. Then the US would extradite him from there.

But they lost track of Snowden, panicked, and cancelled his passport. Leaving him stuck in Russia of all places (which is actually worse for the US than either a South American country OR HK, as they have zero political capital there).

They didn't revoke his passport when he was in Russia, they revoked his passport the day before he left Hong Kong [1]. He traveled to Russia on what turned out to be an invalid travel document issued by the Ecuadorian embassy in London [2] (same one that Julian Assange is holed up in).

[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-source-nsa-leaker-snowdens...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/ecuador-rafael-...

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