General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why the Snowden Leak Is Such a Big Deal [View all]sofa king
(10,857 posts)Look, not one of these disclosures is particularly new to anyone who has been reading this forum for the past ten years.
What is new is that the Chinese aren't putting up with the US noting Tienanmen Square and tisk-tisking them for human rights violations. Now, when we do that, they're making sure we see that our own emperor has no clothes, either.
Because this guy is already in China and under the protection of the Chinese, we can easily conclude the following:
1) This kid, knowingly or otherwise, was exploited and turned by Chinese intelligence. He could have gone to them after the fact but chances are much better that they were in control of the timing and extent of the disclosures;
2) The information he offered was insignificant and expendable to the Chinese, by comparison to all of the other venues of information collection they already have;
3) So instead they allowed their source to expose himself and used the information to embarrass the United States.
The genuinely important thing here is that the Chinese simply don't care what an NSA contractor knows, because they already know what he knows. So his information can be freely disclosed and squandered as a propaganda operation.