Snowden, Through the Eyes of a Spy Novelist
FOR a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism — can anyone ever distinguish the two? — leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge. In reality he’s found the world’s most dangerous place to be a dissident, where power is a knife blade and a sprinkle of polonium. For now he’s safe. He’s of use to his new Russian friends. But if they change their minds ...
I wish I’d written it.
But Mr. Snowden is real, not a character. And I am sorry to watch his true life unraveling.
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What Mr. Snowden at first seemed to want — and rightly — was to force our electronic spies to answer, in plain English, are you saving e-mails, Skype and other Internet communications? What about phone calls? For how long? Who can get access to this data, and is a warrant required in each case? How are calls between Americans treated? Et cetera. Despite many promises of disclosure from the White House, the answers to all those questions remain murky.
So Mr. Snowden seemed to have done the world a service. But in the last week both he and his former employers have misplayed their hands, and his story has become far trickier. Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don’t give their secrets to journalists for free.
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We have treated a whistle-blower like a traitor — and thus made him a traitor. Great job. Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial? Maybe he would have gone with President Vladimir V. Putin anyway, but at least he would have had another option. The secret keepers would have won too: a Congressional hearing would have been a small price to bring Mr. Snowden and those precious hard drives back to American soil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/opinion/snowden-through-the-eyes-of-a-spy-novelist.html?smid=re-share&_r=0
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Does he have an enormous savings account?
Or did someone pay him for his trouble?
By the time Snowden got to Hong Kong, he'd already spilled the beans. It was too late. He should have gone to his idol Ron's son, Rand, who is on Senate Intel Oversight. Instead, he cooked up a halfassed idea to spill secrets, DEMANDED that the WAPO release them on his time schedule, and when they refused, he reneged on his exclusivity promise with them and dragged in Greenwald. He's not a hero. He's a frigging IDIOT.
This is not a child. This is a thirty year old MAN who once wrote that leakers should be shot in the balls. This is the asshole who thinks social security should be trashed. He is a man devoid of empathy, of compassion, who thinks that shorting stocks is "cool" and who was thrilled with the legalized prostitution of Switzerland.
He's a clueless ass.
He thought the citizens of Hong Kong would kiss his ass, greet him as a liberator, carry him through the streets to profound cheers, and let him hang out for a couple of months, eating dim sum and having cocktails and cigars at L'Etage while he filled out the paperwork to slide into Iceland. Such a smart guy, not--he didn't notice that Iceland changed their government recently, and he also didn't notice the change in trade relations between Iceland and USA, either. Next thing he knows, Assange is sticking his beak in, causing a great deal of agita between elements in Ecuador and stealing some of the limelight for himself and Hong Kong is telling him to VAMOOSE, under instructions from Beijing, no doubt, after they figured out that their PLA UNIT 61398 got more information out of us in a day than that emo-looking dweeb had on all four laptops and however many thumb drives he had with him. So where does that leave him? Unless the Russkies have him squirreled away somewhere, he's hiding in a transit area of a Moscow airport, washing his skivvies out in the sink. Whadda life!
And he could have been a MODEL...so he says...
