The US Inadvertently Handed Moscow A Pretense To Detain, Search Snowden

[dipsydoodle]

2. Did the Obama administration klutz up the play to nab Snowden before he left Hong Kong?

The blogger Marcy Wheeler argues that the aggressive pursuit of Snowden by the White House may have made the whole problem of US state secrets ending up in the wrong hands worse:

Wheeler writes that Snowden "could do great damage to the US, but may not have yet, and certainly hadn’t by the time he first revealed himself in Hong Kong":

If that’s right, then it seems the Obama approach has been precisely the wrong approach in limiting potential damage to national security. The best way to limit damage, for example, would be to get Snowden to a safe place where our greatest adversaries can’t get to him, where we could make an eternal stink about his asylum there, but still rest easy knowing he wasn’t leaking further secrets. Indeed, if he were exiled in some place like France, we’d likely have more influence over what he was allowed to do than if he gets to Ecuador, for example.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/25/edward-snowden-russia

nb posted on the live update c. 1 1/2 hours before this post on DU.