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Comment by jodah | Hacker News Reader

You mean the journalists, who vetted and chose to publish the material, disclosed this. As has been discussed exhaustively, Snowden didn't disclose anything himself, opting to rely on the expertise and judgement of partner journalists to select which items to write about. Keep in mind, many times more items were withheld than not.

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No, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If Snowden truly is a hero, then he has to be held responsible for the outcomes of his actions. By definition, heroism involves intent and responsibility.

Snowden was a steward of the documents, albeit taken against the will of the NSA. Relinquishing those documents to journalists he knew to be technologically uneducated (remember, he had to teach Poitras and Greenwald how to use PGP and adopt the basics of computer security) cannot, with logical consistency, be considered as placing them into authoritatively safe hands.

In most cases, information disclosed to a journalist should be considered to be disclosed to that journalists' readership.

I'm not sure how this is seen as a positive thing. Journalists, with, on average, limited knowledge of infosec, holding in their possession classified documents. Lots and lots of classified documents. I'd wager a guess that at least a handful of these journalists were holding said documents on a system that had its share of known vulnerabilities.

I'd be absurdly happy to be proven wrong, but there is a very high chance that every single document snowden distributed is on sale to the highest bidder, and has been for a while.

There is zero evidence that the data was stolen from these journalists and sold to the highest bidder. Since there is zero evidence, you have to cinsider yourself wrong for now.

Ah, I am not so sure about that. [1] These are just things publicly available on google in a 3-minute perusal of search results.

Paragraph 15 [0]

[1] http://politix.topix.com/story/6798-who-stole-computer-from-...

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-h...

Even still, no claims by any government agency or any other source have been laid that the data in question was stolen from Greenwald or his team. Believing that the data was stolen and sold is mere conjecture.

I guess you didn't read the links.

> Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong hotel.

I believe that qualifies as a "claim by a government agency"

actually, i did read it (you seem to assume a lot of things). speculation by two ex-intelligence experts hardly confirms that the data was stolen. Believing the assumptions of two experts is no better than believing your own assumptions.

You have an odd definition of disclosure. Snowden took the documents and gave them to journalists. That _is_ disclosure.

If what you say were true, then Snowden should just come back to the US. He doesn't even need a pardon. Afterall, he didn't disclose anything.. the journalists did.

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