How disheartening for Snowden to do the right thing and be stranded in Russia.
How disheartening for Snowden to do the right thing and be stranded in Russia.
Abhorrent behavior from our representatives, unforgivable.
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He ain't there by coincidence, and isn't the good guy in this story. Might have exposed bad shit US had surveillance wise, but Snowden didn't do it for ethical reasons, he did it to undermine the country, and ran to an authoritarian state that violates privacy even worse.
It's pretty crazy that he left his cushy job getting paid a government contractor salary and living in Hawaii and end up in Russia living in exile. He didn't strike me as someone who hates America - but someone who hated the abuse of power and lies. Which is all the more ironic. I still can't reconcile it. I understand that America isn't ALWAYS the good guy, and it's got a long history of awful things. But Russia? I still don't get it.
I think I understand it. It makes sense if his goals were to 1) release this information and 2) survive afterwards. Doing #1 was relatively easy, as he had the access to accomplish it.
But to then stay alive and (relatively) free required being beyond the reach of the US government. Being in the States is out of the question, and by extension so is being in any country with an extradition treaty with the US. I don't know what all the options were, but ultimately he chose Russia as the place he would live.
If you assume his goal is freedom for mankind in general, it does seem hypocritical to go running to an authoritarian country for safety. But it seems pretty clear he wasn't motivated by a vague principle, but rather wanting to blow the whistle on a specific injustice he saw.
I looked up a list of countries without extradition to the US and it's a short list today. I'm not sure what it was when this took place, but it's probably quite similar. Not many of the options seem like an appealing long term plan 🙃
Also keep in mind that a country that doesn't have such a treaty is largely free to extradite someone to the US anyway, as a one-off. So really the list is even shorter.
And add to that the US is perfectly willing to conduct military operations in other countries without even asking them if that strikes their fancy, and you realize you need to be inside a:
- nuclear armed country
- openly hostile to the US
Not a long list indeed.
Makes more sense when you look back at how Wikileaks actually functioned. They literally coordinated with Trump campaign to generate anti-Clinton disinformation, for instance. Why would they do that? Because the wanted Putin's guy to win.
I recall Snowden speaking out against WikiLeaks because they were a seemingly unfiltered trove of secrets disseminated, and he considered it reckless. Whereas Snowden worked with Greenwald and his team and ultimately had them figure out what to be published.
I definitely remember WikiLeaks and the Clinton campaign though! I thought that was a Julian Assange thing.
What has Wikileaks to do with Snowden?
That whole Clinton email leak was the most pathetic nothingburger ever. It was so bad they had to come up with the stupid pizza gate conspiracy for it to have any substance.
What did he push that was authoritarian lmao, this is just dumb