Two things:
1) I'd like to see a list of the countries where Snowden is applying/has applied/wants to apply for asylum along with the number of citizens of those countries seeking asylum here. Does this exist on the internet?
2) Every morning on the radio they say he's "reported" to be in this transit area in the Moscow airport. Can't somebody go there and actually see if he's there? How is it possible that it's unknown if he's there? I imagine it's not that big.

Gee, I never foresaw Russia getting all they could from Snowden and then leaving him to twist in the breeze.

It's so strange. You'd think someone who's in the intelligence community would understand how Russia plays the game.

@2: Snowden was never really in the intelligence community, he is basically just an IT guy who was contracting for the government.

Which is what is really kind of chilling about the story...how many other unaccountable, nobody contractors have such access?

Although you are right to point out that he is proving to be kind of a dumbass. Why he thought other nations would welcome him with open arms is kind of confusing. As far as I can tell, he is just being used.

Perhaps he likes the role he is playing, his writings definitely bring out the fact that he thinks he is much more important and heroic than he actually is.

1. Our government claims total power with no accountability.
2. They spy on every citizen round-the-clock without warrants or cause.
3. The president has declared himself judge, jury, and executioner.
4. It no longer matters for whom you vote since they won't even attempt to control the surveillance state or military complex.
5. Any questioning or objection to the above is called sedition or treason.

Well, that's the definition of tyranny. Duh.

This is what happens when Reddit heroes interact with the real world.

Russia did offer Snowden asylum, but only if he stopped leaking intelligence information. Snowden didn't like that condition.

Correa in Ecuador isn't going to take him. Maduro in Venezuela would be insane to take him. But the clusterfuck over Morales's plane flight might start WWIII; everybody in South America is righteously pissed off. Morales might take him just as payback for being detained; forcing a head of state's plane down is really, really stupid.

And everybody in Europe is freaking out over NSA bugging. I don't know what Obama's game is here, but he's really screwed this up. The security state has gotten away from him. And Putin is laughing into his hand. I fear that Rand Paul is too.

@7 Depends on the country. Here in the Czech Republic, people don't care.

What is being talked about here is how Russia seems to have played Snowden in something straight out of the cold-war playbook.

Given how familiar this area is with issues of surveillance and espionage, there's a bit of a sense that Snowden's revelations must not be worth as much he thinks they are- otherwise, Russia would have taken him in immediately. Or China, for that matter. Sure they may be bad PR, but much like the Wikileaks cables, the amount of seriously "damaging" revelations on an intelligence level seem to be missing.

I'm no spook, but here in the university system, this is what the people who study these things are talking about, so who knows?

@1, the first half of your request is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul…

Bet, but, whatever. (faceplam)

Snowden isn't valuable for what he knows. He's valuable as a symbol of America's embarrassing intelligence failures.

Like the U.S is the only country doing massive spying? Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. !.

@13, finding a bug placed by one country in the embassy of another country located in a third country is a big deal and always has been. Discovering that the US government has recorded every phone call and every byte of internet data EVEN IN OTHER COUNTRIES for a decade is a big deal. Forcing down the plane of a head of state on the orders of the US is a big deal. Snowden's just the face on this; the thing is blowing up.Frankly, he seems kind of stupid, but I think that's part of the point -- the nearly infinite resources of the Security State -- and it's illegal to even ask how much money that is, exactly -- guarantees that there will be weak points in the system that expose it all. Systems that "know everything" make us less secure, because they are unmanageable.

@14, hold on a sec. There's an internal contradiction in the phrase "internet data even in other countries" -- the internet doesn't care about national boundaries. It's not like German data hits the German border and bounces off, or waits for some passport guy to check its credentials. I would be astonished if Russia and China and several other countries aren't doing exactly the same thing vis a vis the internet. And this concerns me very little: anything I want to keep private I don't do on the net, or encrypt the crap out of and ship via a VPN. If people want privacy on the net, they'll have to do a little work.

The bugs, though, yeah. That's a fuck-up. And the plane thing is just plain (har har) weird. Who even gives a shit about this Snowden guy, when it's increasingly obvious that he's nothing but a narcissistic bonehead?

I think the phrase was give me liberty or give me death. Not, give me a nice country to take a vacation in with my ballerina girlfriend, or I'll keep running away.

@3

That is exactly the point that resonates most with me: total surveillance is a catch 22. They need a couple hundred thousand people just to deal with the metadata. There's no way they can rely on that many tech drones to do as they're told without ever questioning the lies behind it all.

Whereas a focused, targeted intelligence strategy would be more just by virtue of the need to pick only the worst, most likely threats. If you have proof someone is a threat, you have solid legal grounds to spy on them. And it only takes a small corps of highly reliable agents to do that.

@13, oh, and I forgot the top spymaster in the US admitting that he lied to congress, that's kind of a big deal too. Although depending on the circumstances, lying to THIS congress is possibly a heroic act.

@17, you know it's only a matter of time before some bored nitwit security goon hired out of some agency decides it would be cool to read Scarlett Johansson's email or listen in on Rihanna's phone calls or something, and hear something private, and leak it out. It's probably happened already. We already know that TSA creeps pass around scanner pics of hot girls who've come through. When you have a million people on the payroll, an insurmountable wall of data coming in, and no oversight, all kinds of crap is bound to happen.

@15, I think a German sending an email to another German might have a different expectation of whether the NSA should be allowed to read it without asking than you do.

@18 Yeah, that's fucked up. I think it's lose your job fucked. But really, by the time you're on the internet, you've agreed to so many conditions you never read but agreed to, your privacy is toast.

And oddly enough the media attention on this story has shifted from the NSA, and what it is up to, to 24/7 Snowden coverage.

Hmmm...

I can't be the only one that sees how convenient this is for the government and the NSA. I'm suspecting that the whole Snowden extradition escapade is a planned diversion. It's actually bad for the NSA if he is brought back to the US.

I knew a guy who was on a conference call when Clinton came to a city I was living in, while Clinton was president. Someone called in on a cellphone and made what was described to me as a very obvious joke about Clinton being assassinated that day. By the time the joke-teller got back to his hotel room an hour later, the Secret Service was waiting for him.

At that time, it was illegal to tap phones, and cellular calls were encrypted so they couldn't be monitored on an ordinary scanner. You needed some fairly serious technology to listen in. The explanation I got was that the U.S. government used "third countries" to listen in -- the British, most likely -- and inform them if need be.

Or maybe the N.S.A. itself was listening in on that one, for all we know. The point is that this has been going on for quite a long time. The only surprise to me about Snowden's revelations is that anyone is really very surprised. Or, more likely, no one's surprised by everyone's pretending to be.

> "Venezuelan"

Not a country.

@24, coherence eludes you.

@7 Straight up Alex Jones territory.