Will China Offer Snowden Freedom in Exchange for Information? [View all]

[arely staircase]

Edward Snowden’s revelations keep coming. On Friday, the South China Morning Post reported that the former National Security Agency contractor shared details on the IP addresses of the computers in Hong Kong and China that the NSA had hacked over the last four years. The detailed data also reveals “whether an attack on a computer was ongoing or had been completed, along with an amount of additional operational information,” reports the Hong Kong daily. Snowden insisted that he felt comfortable sharing this information because the targets were civilian computers. "I don't know what specific information they were looking for on these machines, only that using technical exploits to gain unauthorized access to civilian machines is a violation of law. It's ethically dubious," Snowden said.

Snowden’s justification seems either naïve or purposefully misleading. As the New York Times points out, the line between the civilian sector and the government is hardly clear-cut in China. While some legal analysts say Snowden may be “digging his own grave,” as one put it, others contend that the leaks could encourage Beijing to prevent the former contractor’s extradition if he agrees to share what he knows. At the very least, the revelations to the Hong Kong paper seem to demonstrate he has plenty of information that Beijing might find interesting. So far though it isn’t clear whether Beijing will get involved, according to a South China Morning Post source. There’s much officials could learn from Snowden. Former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash tells ABC News that “if a foreign government learned everything that was in Edward Snowden's brain, they would have a good window into the way we collect signals intelligence.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/14/edward_snowden_reveals_details_of_hong_kong_and_china_nsa_hacking.html