[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

Rest at link. It's worth reading his other posts on the topic as well.

[Lurker]

He is now.

[Greysard]

From all available facts it looks like Putin was dragged into this affair entirely accidentally, simply because Snowden had nowhere to go.

It's far more likely that it was Obama who wanted to protect Snowden. Consider the following:

- Snowden leaves HK and takes a flight to Latin America. He has a layover in Moscow.

- At exactly that moment his passport gets cancelled by Obama. Why would Obama do that? It was in NSA's interest to let Snowden continue to Venezuela, or anywhere else except Russia. It would be imperative to remove him from Russian territory. Snowden would have been accessible anywhere else; even in China, if it had to come to that. But TLAs do not operate freely in Russia; Snowden is safe there. If only he made it to Caracas, he could have been just shot dead in the street, or abducted.

- Further, Obama makes several very specific moves designed to support Snowden's asylum request. Per UN rules, an applicant has to prove that his government is after him for political activity. Obama promptly gave a speech, and then they diverted an airplane of a foreign diplomat. Asylum case open and shut.

This leads us to an obvious conclusion: Obama cancelled Snowden's passport at a carefully calculated moment, to make sure he remains in Russia, away from reach of the USA. As an alternative, we can think that Obama is just so incompetent that even his mistakes are lining up in such way as to cause the most damage.

[what's up]

Snowden is in the same camp as Julian Assange. Both are commie traitors.

Putin is doing all he can to keep conservatives from seeing this.

[James C. Bennett]

Without Snowden’s actions, far fewer people would have been awakened to the reality of the police state that America has morphed into, over the past two decades, “patriot” act, et al.

[Thunder90]

Edward Snowden is a Communist traitor.

[sickoflibs]

Obama gave a speech last week saying changes need to be made to data collection and storage.

Quite a coincidence to do it now.

Were Obama and Holder involved with Snowden?

[palmer]

Because some dumb bureaucrats at NSA decided to put all the docs into Sharepoint. Sharepoint would control access in theory, but like every other Microsoft product (and software from most other companies) it requires an expert administrator to keep it running. That administrator can download everything without anyone else finding out.

[cynwoody]

Mikey underestimates the powers of user 0. User 0 is like the queen and rook together with an invisibility cloak and then some.