As Snowden Chats His Credibility Wanes

[struggle4progress]

By Tobin Harshaw
Jun 17, 2013 6:14 PM ET

... At this point, even Snowden's staunchest defenders worry he's becoming a liability. "Every time you say stuff like this, you make it easier to marginalize you as a messenger, and you cost yourself allies in the general cause for which you have risked so much," warns Esquire's Charles P. Pierce. Yes, it would be nifty for critics of government surveillance to de-link the man from the cause, but one doesn't have to be blanket defender of the NSA's actions to see that Snowden's particular message is the product of a remarkably naive worldview ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-17/as-snowden-chats-his-credibility-wanes.html

[PSPS]

1. "a remarkably naive worldview"

Yes, how naive people are to actually countenance the idea of a private life, a right to privacy, the constitution, and stuff like that. Come on people! USA! USA! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!11!! Besides, what about his girlfriend? Did he have acne as a teenager? That's the real meat of this story, right? What time is Idol on? Ten minutes to Wapner.

[struggle4progress]

2. Mebbe. Or mebbe the meat of this story is Mr Snowden's view that he, and he alone,

is entitled to decide what foreign intelligence gathering by the US is acceptable, and Mr Snowden's apparent libertarian belief that he should be free to use whatever documents he has in order to interfere with US foreign policy, as in the case of the recent China summit or the current G8

[Pholus]

3. Unilateral decisions suck, don't they....

When they aren't what you want. Kind of like finding out the government is on one hand collecting as much data about the citizenry as possible and on the other hand is generously funding work into analyzing that data to pick out "anomalies" in large data sets.

[bemildred]

4. But all those documents that he leaked are all still real. nt