Cryptome?s searing critique of Snowden Inc.

[John Young]

Snowden did the right thing, as he said, released the whole wad
to the public. Just released it to the wrong few people with no
technical capabilities but with desire for personal recognition
and profit-taking. Heading to Hong Kong "Greenwald and Poitras
danced in the aircraft's aisle upon reading sample documents,"
according to one account by Luke Harding (Greenwald denied this).

Both full release and profit-taking could have been done, and maybe
both were done, that is, the full release has been placed where more
technically capable persons have access. A few technical persons
have had limited access according to news reports, to advise the
cache withholders, but not many which is highly regrettable.

As we said in the interview there are a host of parties with greater
skills and experience publishing classified documents, National
Security Archive and Federation of American Scientists, among
them. Granted that these orgs are quite cautious about publishing
unauthorized disclosures due to their boards having close ties
to authorities and dutiful legal obedience.

No question the methodology employed by favored journalists
has been effective for engaging (entertaining) the public. The
comsec and credibility problem is that the small number of
documents released (~11%) and large number of narratives
(>100/1 of document pages) has skewed and dramatized the
disclosures such that it is impossible to know how accurate
the fragments are without access to the full wad.

Now there are rumors that the bulk of the documents may be
returned for Snowden's exculpation, which would be a great
loss for the public but swell for Snowden and his PR team.

Short shrifting the public by the media where leaks are concerned
has become, maybe always was, the norm. Direct to the public
disclosure, un-mediated, is what is needed, no secretmaking
privilege to anyone. Journalists bristle at this, claim the public
must be told what to think, and in this journalists are just like
govs.



Moreover, that Snowden allegedly requires the cache holders to
check with USG before release is pernicious, maybe false. Quite
a few of Snowden's comments appear to be scripted by those who
have him over a barrel.

At 04:48 AM 2/22/2016, you wrote:
>On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 05:48:14AM -0500, John Young wrote:
> > Cryptome's searing critique of Snowden Inc.
> >
> > http://timshorrock.com/?p=2354
> > https://soundcloud.com/rebootfm/interview-with-cryptome-2016-02-06
>
>Suppose in the past you have the power to decide
>A. Snowden doing what he did
>B. Snowden not leaking _anything_
>
>What would you do?