Vladimir Putin Grants Russian Citizenship to Edward Snowden

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/26/putin-grants-russian-citizenship-to-us-whistleblower-edward-snowden

Whoopieeeeee!

Now he will get to serve in the Russian army in Ukraine and get killed!

A couple of years ago he might have been happy, and I might have been happy for him (despite my mixed feelings about him). But being granted citizenship to a country just as that country is going to hell in handbasket is kinda like getting a free boarding pass to fly on the Hindenburg.

Well, he'd have been long gone from there had the Obama administration not deliberately trapped him in Russia, so well done to them I guess?

Exactly, he didn't spy for the russians and purposely defect to them. He leaked the blatant and enormous violations of privacy rights that the NSA was doing, against everyone. He then fled the basically life imprisonment he would have faced and was simply passing through a russian airport when he was stranded and lived there for a bit in the airport before being granted asylum.

I worked in computer security for 20 years and this affects my opinion. I do not applaud Snowden. He didn't like that NSA was collecting some data so he:
+- Borrowed a co-worker's password to extract information about the data collection.
+-+Superficially that framed the co-worker for the data breach.
+- Collected much more classified info about the program than he needed to prove it.
+- Collected a great deal of classified info about many unrelated activities.
+- Rather than taking the info to Congress or a respectable U.S. media outlet
+-+he gave it all to a foreign activist website that just posted it publicly.

And what was NSA reported to be collecting? E-mail meta-data.

What is e-mail meta-data? It's comparable to the information on the outside of the envelope when you mail something through the Post Office...when and where the e-mail is going to and is from. Not the content of the mail.

The meta-data on e-mail or paper mail is inherently exposed. Everyone who helps the mail on to its destination can see it. With paper mail that means the Post Office can see it...they have to see it. With e-mail every computer that passes the data on can see it...they have to see it...and it is the design of the Internet that the data could take many different routes through many different privately-owned computers, possibly in multiple countries...all of whom see the meta-data.

Collecting data is sort of NSA's job. Given the things going on in the world I hope they do their job well.

Trump hopefully goes to jail for his carelessness not protecting classified data. Snowden did far worse.