Snowden, "famously paranoid"

[1StrongBlackMan]

147. This …

Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote.

Plus, this:

I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn’t recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world.

Equals, IMHO, his story, or her re-telling of it, is not true.

A trillion guesses a second? … Unless her password was a book, or passage from a book in some obscure language, it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple days to crack it because words logically follow other words … and I suspect the NSA knows a little something about linguistics.

If both of those statements are true, then he/they would have been “discovered”, long before he made his disclosures.