Snowdon ~ as a decoy or just a brilliant opportunity? The US response is message to the world of the same kind we got from the Stasi, the KGB and other authoritarian powers:

"We know all about you, and we have been monitoring you for a long time."

"If you get smart with us we'll bring you down. Just look what we did to this guy. "

"You can run but you cannot hide.."

As Al Capone put it, to justify his unlawful operations,

"My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way."

Or, to quote the bully who stole your lunch at school, the US is responding to our accusations of their snooping,

"Yes, I did steal your lunch. And just what are you going to do about it?"

Or, as George Orwell wrote, "Big Brother is Watching You.".

Why would the US need to advertise that point? Well, as it turns out, the USA's surveillance in the past (as revealed by the KGB) has usually turned out to be a hopeless shamozzle. I agree more and more with @Vitaly_Kiselev - this, intended or not, has turned out some priceless publicity for American hegemony. And, in case anyone missed it, a bare-faced, undisguised threat to the private lives of us all.

IS this really a conversation imagining that the US,UK and especially France etc DONT spend most of our hard earned pennies on spying still?

@leonbeas

So if Snowden wants to use this way to tell the world we are being spied ... It's a complete contradiction"

Then what mechanism do you propose for exposing government offenses, other than working with independent journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, publishing material on the internet for everyone to read, giving interviews and using mass-media as best you can?

What would you suggest he do, other than telepathy or smoke signals?

Contacting really independent people

Hence, Greenwald. His involvement was enough to convince me that Snowden was legit.

Contacting really independent people :-)

Yeah, Greenwald is so much part of the mainstream that the D.o.D. has officially blocked access to his blogs on the Guardian's website from all of its bases. That and the forced search of the Bolivian president's (one of Obama's drinking buddies) plane in Austria for a potential whistleblowing fugitive is all part of their plot to convince the world Snowden is not a decoy...

The big story is really probably that Snowdon is going to be made an example of.

Information wants to be free

Once the war-cry of idealists, it sould now be given the status of one our law s of social behaviour: Information will be free and will get out, no matter what we do.

Jut like most of we IT consumers felt that initial rush of empowerment at being able to research and find friends and products online - only to discover later that our own searches were no secret, so have governments found out that their own snoooping activities tent to come to the surface. (Yes at very high levels, cigar-smoking government types get Rushes of empowerment like a kid with a new face-book account).

Some Governments developed different styles of stealth. The Chinese went for what they really wanted. Others in the US like Oliver North, jumped in willy nilly and was naive enough to think he could cover his Iran arms- dealing tracks by deleting lots of email on his own computer workstation. He got burned and we all laughed. By then we'd learned that emails get read off servers.

But there's another born every minute. Government politicians, understanding little about IT, can order surveillance clumsily. What turns out is that all our attempts to watch on somebody get found out in the end - either by new technology, a USB stick left somewhere, a disgruntled employee, a careless employee or simply a set of procedures which were flawed.

Even cash leaks. Our banks have periodic incursions of cash trickling out. Staff get called in at 3 am to stick their fingers in dykes. Sometimes there are GULP-sums of cash whisked away - yet the Banks rarely declare those losses.

If the Banks have outward trickles, the French would have bubbles coming from their blow-up Zodiacs "a la Rainbow Warrior," While the USA has a barbed-wire canoe, with its faithful subjects lashing out with their paddles at the occasional deserters like Snowdon.`

I'm absolutely sure the USA has masses of data - and that they can hardly wait to tell us how good it is. But I'm saying a lot of it is possibly data for it's own sake, lots of it useless, that there differing arguments about how it should be mined, That there will have been a confusing number of means of collating, prioritising, storing and retrieving the data. If you remember Mogadishu, Afghanistan, Kuweit, Watergate, Abu Graheb and Guantanamo Bay, a picture should start to form of the way orders are carried out at variance with procedures.

We'll find out. The 4th and 5th amendments allow every US agent to spill the beans eventually.

Sorry guys out some days for work, I've been thinking about this subject and apart from the theme that this guy is a decoy :-) We really must not judge people like this, all this is for distraction, the important event that is happening in this precise moment is that ourselves are alive, and have strength to do something for our own lives and people we love. Be happy enjoy little precious things like fresh air and a smile. And just maybe when they are spying on us the happiness will get to them also... ;-)

BIG SMILE TO ALL