Snowden asks Putin about Moscow surveillance

[MADem]

61. There's a blogger who has read the latest VF article about him who thinks that

he could have been "worked" by the journalists and told, in essence, what to grab.

Not sure if that's a valid theory, but it's an interesting one. Parts of this are a tough slog, but here it is:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2014/04/vanityfairnarrative.html

Again, it's my belief that this is part of a construction of the narrative to exonerate journalists from any charges that they gave him assignments -- and therefore they could look guilty of complicity in espionage, instead of being able to endlessly hide behind the Supreme Court protections for journalists who report on stolen classified documents..... It's my belief that Snowden was guided in viewing this FISA document as "the most important" by the lawyer-blogger Greenwald and the others; at any event, even if he had some grasp of these issues before, he has never told the story this way.

And that he is only now telling the story this way is patently obvious, because the copy-pasters at Vanity Fair tell this story differently than Luke Harding, even though they copy Luke elsewhere (instead of Greenwald himself, for example, going with Harding's dates for their first real-life meetings, and not Greenwald's changing versions of the dates.)

When I see the dates "April 29th" and "expire July 19th," I also wonder if this gave impetus to Snowden to flee, or whether he was advised by the others that having the document "hot" while it was still in effect would be far more effective than exposing it after it expired and the NSA could always say it was only in the past and they wouldn't do it again. Snowden safely fled and on 16 July, the Russian government accepted his application for asylum. (That still wasn't getting formally the grant of asylum, but since none other than Putin himself had offered Snowden to apply for asylum in Russia on June 11, it was a done deal.)

Not everyone will be persuaded that this is a find, but you'll have to agree that whenever the stories are told differently, or suddenly something new is injected into the Snowden narrative, there are reasons and we should pay attention. Can you think of a better reason as to why Snowden is suddenly claiming he's the one who thought of, found, and retrieved the fresh April 29th FISA court order -- when he's never mentioned this before?