Further fallout from Snowden affair

Ehehe... and I took a vow to stop posting about the story. However, this article in CNN is too dear to my heart to miss. Its title is "Why U.S. is being humiliated by the hunt for Snowden" and it's penned by Simon Tisdall, assistant editor and foreign affairs columnist of the Guardian. Even for a Guardian hack, the level of bile, derision and something too close for good taste to outright hate (but I know he will deny it even on his deathbed) are quite rare. Is this why CNN choose to publish it, I wonder?

Anyway, the first paragraph of that piece is the only one I can agree with:

The increasingly slapstick global steeplechase in pursuit of Edward Snowden, the former American contractor who leaked top-secret details of surveillance programs, looks like a cross between "The Hunt for Red October" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Yes, the best (and only) thing US government could do in the situation was (too late now) to forget about Snowden. Every misstep is now working in one direction only: increasing the remuneration Snowden is going to receive for his inevitable memoir.

Well, read the whole if you wish. I would only quote another paragraph, showing how Mr Tisdall in his all-consuming anti-American fashion, quite forgets himself:

The White House is furious at the non-cooperation it has received. But has it occurred to them that maybe not just the Russians and the Chinese, but those soft, liberal Europeans and all the other neutrals also don't like the idea of being spied on by an out-of-control transnational agency beyond the reach of the law, any law, anywhere?

I am not even asking what this "transnational agency" means, after all the man was too close to climax writing this to make sense, but why didn't it occur to the scribe that the Russians and the Chinese, as well as these "soft, liberal Europeans" are quite busily doing the same thing Snowden became famous for "revealing"? And that some people, besides doing this, have that little thingy called OSA (Official Secrets Act) that could make any two bit dictator pale from envy...

And now back to Snowden. Not so idealistic and innocent, after all:

Edward Snowden secured a job with a US government contractor for one reason alone - to obtain evidence of Washington's cyberspying networks, the South China Morning Post can reveal.

For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency's secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media.

Smells to me like a conscious decision to spy, doesn't it? Oh well, it's all spilled milk after all, and NSA should better think about improving their vetting procedure and their data integrity.

And now to something related but completely different from what Mr Snowden intended - from a post by Francis Sedgemore:

The current data snooping scandals centre on the US and UK, with other states expressing concern and exploiting the situation for their own political ends. An interesting example of the latter comes from Russia, with a senior member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party arguing that Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks should prompt Russia to engineer and control its own part of the internet, quarantining it from the global network, and rendering it subject to domestic political control.

Not that I believe for a moment that Russian FSB is virginal and innocent of using backdoors of its own. But in any case: it is not exactly what you dreamed about, is it, Mr Snowden?

Oh, and an unofficial payback of a special kind was started: leak and be leaked upon. How does it feel now to be an intrepid fighter for transparency?