General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: the idiotic attacks on Snowden show exactly how petty and pathetic those folks are [View all]struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)If somebody gets a job with the aim of gaining access to classified documents, tricks coworkers into providing passwords, steals 1.7 million or so classified documents, flees to China, notifies the Chinese which websites the NSA there is trying to hack, then flees to Russia and ends up under the protection of a lawyer there with high level ties to Russian intelligence, that is an interesting story
If the fellow turns out to be a rightwing libertarian gunnut who had briefly joined the army in hopes of helping with Bush's Excellent Iraq Adventure and who later said of leakers "those people should be shot in the balls," that too is an interesting story
And if the so-called "journalist," who first encounters him, discourages him from posting his own account of his motives, on the grounds that it's "a little Ted Kaczynski-ish," that is yet another interesting story and might raise questions, not only about how dedicated the so-called "journalist" might actually be to the craft of bringing stories accurately to the public, but also the question of what motives the fellow might have expressed to us, had the so-called "journalist" not intervened to bring the story into a form more neatly matching the so-called "journalist's" tastes
The fellow's entirely unsupported grandiose claims are also an interesting story: he said, for example, "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president"