WikiLeaks says it helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden leave Hong Kong

His flight is landing in Moscow now.

I commented in one of the other threads that my jury was still out on Snowden until further information was forthcoming.

The fact that Wikileaks is helping him doesn't bode well for my jury.

If Snowden was the patriot he claims to be he would not be making a world tour of nations generally hostile to U.S. interests.

A person that really loves their country will do so even if that country takes action against them.

All things considered, it makes Wikileaks look a little better. I'm half surprised that he wasn't kidnapped in an extraordinary rendition attempt yet.

It saddens me... I once really had a high regard for the US.

Going to Moscow and Havana removes any possibility from my mind that he was doing this for the good of the American people. Screw 'im.

In his position would you take an offer of sanctuary there, or wait to be extradited back to the US and potentially face life in prison?

Yup. The big difference between him and PFC Manning appears to be that he is smarter than Manning--and may be doing it for financial reasons.

Yeah he should totally get to Iceland by means of La Guardia Airport.

Good news. Those opposed to the US war against whistleblowers, and to their crimes generally, need to stick together.

Why are there no legal moves being taken against the people responsible for the programs that Snowden exposed?

Yeah, right - there's nothing better for financial stability than to be permanently on Uncle Sam's hit list.

I'm a little surprised there's not more public outrage in the US considering the scope of the NSA/GCHQ surveillance programs. After all, they're basically storing a large portion of all communications for a few days to scan for specific keywords. That's like putting a government camera and microphones in every home and having computer programs analyze what you do and say inside of your own home. Do you trust your government-run intelligence agencies so much?

And it's not like these programs can't be circumvented quite easily by criminals and terrorists. All it takes is a simple encrypted chat client, encrypted e-mail or an encrypted file container to render the content scanners ineffective. Of course, it's not as comfortable as using Facebook or Gmail, but that won't stop criminals. So what remains is total and uncontrolled surveillance of law-abiding citizens.

I think most people figure that if they've known what websites you visited, what movies and songs you downloaded, what sketchy places you've gone to, what naughty things you've said over the phone or texted, etc for the past several years and you've so far seen no personal repercussions, you probably don't have much to worry about in the future - the volume of data is just too big and the average person is just not that interesting. So most people don't care that much.

How do you know there ain't, and the news ain't showing it?



There were huge-antic protests all over the world over Iraq, and the mainstream news blanked it the fuck out.

And then feigned ignorance in the aftermath, trying to rewrite history.

"We all thought there were weapons!!"

Kind of puts the "cantankerous media holding the powerful to account" narrative into relief, doesn't it?

Okay, but when it comes to gun control, there's a large number of people who fear potential government repressions once you start going that route. In the case of surveillance, I would have expected the same: the very act of storing all your private communication is the slippery slope here, not actually abusing that data.

In the US, the news media has mostly changed from being a watchdog of the government to being its lapdog.

That said, I distinctly remember seeing the international Iraq protests on CNN and such during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

When was it ever the watchdog?

This shit generalises. The media is owned by the rich and powerful whose interests are broadly in line with those who they are supposed to hold to account. So more often than not they will take the same line as them, and marginalise other points of view.

Gun control has a long history of being personally intrusive, even on people it's not intended to affect. Peeking on your browser history - not so much.

I heard the Russians gave him fighter escort all the way to Moscow.

CNN is "the mainstream news", now?

I think he's saying it was then. Now it's a dog & pony show with more bling than the deck of the nuEnterprise.

Aeroflot has a horrible safety record.

Sadly, they were all pretty much legalized (unconstitutionally in my mind) way back when that monstrosity called the Patriot Act was passed in 2002 or so. The Dems have proved themselves to be both spinless worms and hacks by campaigning against it in 2008 but then doing jack shit to stop it since 2008.

The reason that there is not much outrage is that this is pretty much a bipartisan program.

Republicans started a lot of it. The Obama Admin. came in and basically said "Hey, that is all kind of cool! We might need to keep it going after all".

CNN has been "mainstream" news for at least 25 years, if not longer.

Am I the only one who the sound of Nancy Grace's voice makes me want to puncture both of my eardrums?

Actually, it predates the PATRIOT ACT, by a number of years. What the PA did was to allow them to expand their operations exponentially. The intelligence agencies have admitted that they're now storing encrypted traffic, because they know its only a matter of time before they can crack the encryption (10 years, tops).

While its unlikely that our web surfing traffic is of much interest to the government, consider this: You have a President concerned about an upcoming election, maybe its for his second term, or maybe its a mid-term that could shift the balance of power in Congress. There's tons of data out there about his opponent (or other candidates) that he can mine through to gain an advantage. It doesn't even have to be blackmail material, or other kind of scandal, it could simply be knowing who's working for whom, or what market they're planning on targeting the bulk of their efforts on.

Heck, they could even do it for something that's going to be voted on in Congress. It wouldn't even necessarily have to be the President or one of his staff interested in doing this. Remember during the '08 election how it came out that flunkies in the State Department illegally accessed the records of Obama, Hillary, McCain, and Palin?

As I understand it, none of what he exposed was illegal.

We should bomb Hong Kong, Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and anyone else who helps the traitor.

If it's unconstitutional, isn't that the same thing? In that case, the legislation authorising it should be struck off.