When I was a teen (long time ago) I remember telling my dad that I thought it would be great to take a flight with many stops because that way we got to takeoff and land multiple times! What fun! A bit later of course it became exactly the opposite and not just for time travel reasons, price or schedule.
If you're going to leak 1.5 million documents and flee to China on the grounds of being a whistleblower after following proper channels, wouldn't you want to display some, any sort of proof that you indeed did attempt to follow the proper channels?
People claim this dude was a genius, make him out as some sort of tech/hacker savant, so why not make the slightest effort to show the world you really are a whistleblower?
We also have statements from Snowden suggesting that the reason he took the job was to gain access to those documents and them disseminate them to various world governments, which is a goal that would be impeded by whistleblowing through channels.
> Is patently false. He did attempt to use those channels and was ignored [1] - at least once as confirmed by the NSA itself, and many other times according to him, which the NSA disputes.
The same article you link says Snowden "tried to go through channels". It's not "patently false". It's "he claimed he tried". Meanwhile, investigations show only one email he sent regarding general clarification on NSA authorities but zero raising any concern or complaints: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...
The senators claim he did not avail himself of these channels. He did avail himself of a channel. That much is not in dispute. He may not have done so to your satisfaction, or apparently to the satisfaction of these senators - but that isn't what they claimed. They claimed he didn't do it at all. And that is patently false.
He asked a general question regarding authorities to OGC. What's the bar of "availing" himself to a channel? If he sent an email to OGC asking how their weekend was, he would have technically "consulted with OGC", would he not?
As it stands, there is zero evidence (from either side) that Snowden complained to the proper channels.
And why would he when his plan was to leave the country with 1.5 million classified documents?
> WRONG - He has stated many times that he did approach all manner of "Oversight" people who basically told him to shut up. What happened to Tomas Drake and the others who tired the insider approach - nothing ever came of it.
Then why not bring proof? 1.5 million documents and he can't bring the emails he sent? No, we saw the emails (that is to say, one email: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...) that were sent to OGC, and nothing in them indicated he was raising any concerns.
> How do you verify this? you can't
He took 1.5 million documents and we've seen what, maybe 100-200 documents and slides over the course of three years? What's the other 1,499,800 million classified documents about?
> Meanwhile the NSA was illegally infringing the privacy of almost 310 million americans
Fine, if he had only taken documents pertaining to his qualms then there would have been a much greater chance of him being labeled a whistleblower or at least be met with some leniency even if he didn't in fact follow the proper channels.
> the activities were NOT lawful (as in legally defensible when challenged in a court), they were not overseen by anyone and some of them were unrelated to intelligence.
1,499,800 documents that likely have absolutely zero to do with what he was supposed to be blowing the whistle on.
Have these documents been released? Do you know under what extenuating circumstances he was under when he collected these documents? What's your point?
My point is how do you pardon someone for whistleblowing when literally 99.99% of what they took from a classified space has nothing to do with what they were supposedly blowing the whistle on?
If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.
In any case, it's already been established that he broke the law in order to expose a much greater law breaking, but many if not most people believe it to be OK because we also believe that it was impossible to expose the information in any other way. Considering all the miss-steps most whistleblowers made in their activities, Snowden was remarkably careful and clean. He made some calculations on what he needed to collect to successfully expose the crimes he witnessed, and the accuracy of those calculations is up for debate. I could easily come up with several reasons why he might have thought that he needed all those documents while under duress. For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working. Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.
> If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.
The dude planned this for years, he said it himself. He had plenty of time to simply take evidence of what he was going to blow the whistle on. I don't understand your argument.
> impossible to expose the information in any other way
Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.
> For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working.
If I understand your argument correctly, it's: "it's possible something here is illegal so let's just take all of it." I shouldn't have to explain why that doesn't jive.
> Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.
None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.
> Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.
That is absolutely not true. There is plenty of evidence that he tried to report to several superiors. Read the accounts yourself.
> None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.
If he was looking to dump documents on china and russia for fun and profit, why exactly would he go through the rigamarole of working with the guardian, making an ethical issue out of it, spending tons of time meeting with various celebrities and dignitaries, doing talks, writing essays, and crafting a remarkably coherent and complex false narrative. That sounds about as far fetched as most things that get labeled conspiracy theories. He'd have to be one serious double agent to pull all that off.
IIRC, in this case the FBI served up a "diagnostic" executable to users. Since they're using Tor browser, in general, simply enabling Javascript won't do anything to de-anonymize the user (unless the Feds had a TBB 0-day or something of the like). This executable obviously called out to FBI-controlled servers and provided a real IP.
Basically, the only people they ended up busting were people who for some reason decided it was a good idea to download and run an executable being served by their favorite CP site on the "darknet".
We're a cyber security company and moved to Romania because around 1/4 of our employees were Romanians working remotely with us. Sure, if you are willing to work from home you can find a job anywhere it's available.
> All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex.