Snowden's Leaks

On the 18th of October, Ed Pilkington wrote an article for the Guardian indicating Snowden had said he did not take any documents with him to Russia.  According to the article (which is at  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/18/edward-snowden-no-leaked-nsa-documents-russia ) all the documents were left with journalists, presumably to be let out a few at a time, over time, to increase the value of the goods to the publications they appear in.  Releasing them all at once, has a narrow impact on circulation, which is the business part of the whole thing.  The Guardian already admitted as much.

I want to ask my readers how plausible such a story sounds.

The Russians were taking a risk by accepting Snowden's appeal for asylum.   Was he really afraid somebody was going to kill him to keep him from releasing the information, as he once insinuated would happen?  If so, he has been watching too much television while sitting around the airport.  Nobody is going to believe such a claim.

Was he going to be arrested and put in jail?  Yes, he was.  Human Rights Watch tried to make a case for this justification for asylum by saying whistleblowers don't have adequate protection in National Security cases (http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/03/countries-should-consider-snowden-s-asylum-claim-fairly )  which may even be partially true, but hardly a reason for Russia to think he deserved asylum.  They would have a fit if we used that as justification for allowing a Russian to defect to the U.S.  It just isn't very convincing that the Russians jumped to his aid because they felt like he might be put in a U.S. jail for what he did.  They put reporters in jail for lesser offenses.

Why leave the documents with journalists?  For one reason, because the foreign spy agencies in China and Russia have finally figured out that journalists cannot be prosecuted for having them, and spies can.  Even though that makes absolutely no sense at all, the law in the U.S. and England have allowed it to be.  There will shortly be another case in the U.S. where a spy will be found to have given documents to a journalist and the journalist published stories about them.  When the Justice Department made him a co-conspirator in the case, the journalist community raised holy hell.  The journalists have a powerful lobby, but that isn't a good reason for their behavior.

If Snowden actually did leave all his sensitive documents with journalists, what could the Russians gain by giving Snowden asylum, that they couldn't get without giving him asylum?  The answer would seem to be nothing, but we can't have an answer that runs contrary to every understanding we have the Russian politic.  They never do anything like this without a reason.  They have to be getting something.

Either they believe Snowden knows a lot he isn't telling yet, or he brought more with him than he is willing to admit.  The Russians have to believe they will get more than the altruistic good feeling that comes from keeping a person from going to jail.  Nobody, not even the Russians, likes a traitor enough to take one in with the idea that they will get nothing in return.  It is too much for any of us to believe.