NullCharacter

You can extend this logic indefinitely. From the Futurama episode I Dated A Robot:

> All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex.

Completely agree with you. I fly tons for work, and was just fine until I got into my mid-late twenties when I started to have horrible anxiety.

And like you, I don't necessarily fear death, but I definitely don't want to see death coming. More than anything, I fear helplessness.

Thank god for the military, America's backdoor to the middle class. Best decision I've ever made.

Kinda not within the spirit of the exercise don't you think.

Totally agree with you. I struggle to write a bio for companies I work for, can't imagine dedicating an entire website just to memorialize myself.

He asked a general question regarding authorities to OGC. What's the bar of "availing" himself to a channel? If he sent an email to OGC asking how their weekend was, he would have technically "consulted with OGC", would he not?

As it stands, there is zero evidence (from either side) that Snowden complained to the proper channels.

And why would he when his plan was to leave the country with 1.5 million classified documents?

> If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.

The dude planned this for years, he said it himself. He had plenty of time to simply take evidence of what he was going to blow the whistle on. I don't understand your argument.

> impossible to expose the information in any other way

Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.

> For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working.

If I understand your argument correctly, it's: "it's possible something here is illegal so let's just take all of it." I shouldn't have to explain why that doesn't jive.

> Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.

None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.

My point is how do you pardon someone for whistleblowing when literally 99.99% of what they took from a classified space has nothing to do with what they were supposedly blowing the whistle on?

If you're going to leak 1.5 million documents and flee to China on the grounds of being a whistleblower after following proper channels, wouldn't you want to display some, any sort of proof that you indeed did attempt to follow the proper channels?

People claim this dude was a genius, make him out as some sort of tech/hacker savant, so why not make the slightest effort to show the world you really are a whistleblower?

IIRC, in this case the FBI served up a "diagnostic" executable to users. Since they're using Tor browser, in general, simply enabling Javascript won't do anything to de-anonymize the user (unless the Feds had a TBB 0-day or something of the like). This executable obviously called out to FBI-controlled servers and provided a real IP.

Basically, the only people they ended up busting were people who for some reason decided it was a good idea to download and run an executable being served by their favorite CP site on the "darknet".