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>> I don't feel comfortable saying Snowden is still working for the US government, but I'm certainly suspicious of him.

Well. My deep belief is that individuals that are truly dangerous to the system (here, any system that is powerful enough but one can view it globally as a continuously evolving technology-driven wanna-be-AI) get separated from power asap and then directly eliminated if needed. One should be very naive to think that the following makes any sense: "a young boy from government family says that the whole world is controlled by a few; he wants to stop it and so gets a platform to alarm about it via main media channels, supposedly controlled by the same few". Another point of the whole move was to identify people (e.g., you and me) who will not buy this so they will likely avoid buying other incoming BS.




> One should be very naive to think that the following makes any sense: "a young boy from government family says that the whole world is controlled by a few; he wants to stop it and so gets a platform to alarm about it via main media channels, supposedly controlled by the same few".

I'm very sympathetic to this view, obviously; at first glance it seems too good to be true.

Of course we're supposed to believe that the media isn't controlled by these same few, that Operation Mockingbird ended by the time CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced in 1976 that the CIA would stop paying journalists, and that Operation Mockingbird was actually limited to a couple of wiretaps rather than the fullscale infiltration of the press previously reported through non-official channels (though they did admit that they paid journalists, they claimed that this was not done as part of Operation Mockingbird). Obviously the CIA still has people in media agencies, but we're crazy for believing that; it supposedly isn't the case. But even with a CIA-infiltrated media, I could see the story getting out. The CIA can't be everywhere; it's possible that by going through more than one media institution (including a British one, as if that mattered) and also contacting a documentary film maker who had a previous run-in with the federal government (she claims to have been put on the highest theat-level list the DHS has after making a film critical of the occupation of Iraq) he was able to make sure that the government couldn't stop the information from coming out through some channel or another. Or they could have been worried that by blocking it in the press they would provoke him to release unredacted versions that would reveal even more (yes, he claimed to not have these by the time he entered China, but he could have given copies to another still unknown source -- or he could have been lying about not still having them in some format, perhaps steganographically hidden).

I could also actually see a whistleblower escaping capture/death by going to an area controlled by a foreign power and making the defection public immediately so that any suspicious death would be seen as an obvious assination without a fair trial. That seems plausible to me, whether or not it actually happened.




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