Friday, July 05, 2013

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

Echoing the catch phrase of bartenders everywhere, it's last call for Snowden in Russia.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia had received no request for political asylum from Snowden and he had to solve his problems himself after 11 days in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.

President Vladimir Putin has refused to extradite the American and Russian officials have delighted in his success in staying out of the United States' clutches since revealing details of secret U.S. government surveillance programs.

But Moscow also has made clear that Snowden is an increasingly unwelcome guest because the longer he stays, the greater the risk of the diplomatic standoff causing lasting damage to relations with Washington.

"He needs to choose a place to go," Ryabkov told Reuters.
Of course, Snowden's problem is nobody wants to take him. I imagine this is not the scenario he had in his head when he decided to go public. It seems he didn't calculate the geopolitical complications in seeking asylum. Kind of surprising. You might think a guy smart enough to hack closely guarded NSA data would have anticipated this in advance.

[cross posted at The Impolitic]
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5 comments:

  1. BadTux2:52 PM

    But *was* he smart enough to hack the NSA's data? Or was he set up by factions within the NSA who are disturbed by the surveillance of Americans and looked around until finding a patsy then set it up so their patsy *thought* he was hacking the NSA's data?

    Snowden hasn't demonstrated to me that he has the brains to do what he claims to have done, especially with what ex-NSA people tell me about the NSA's usual security procedures. How did he get three laptops full of data out of a secure area, for example? Someone had to have let it happen...

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  2. Linkmeister4:34 PM

    His situation reminds me more and more of that of Philip Nolan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_a_Country

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  3. BadTux4:49 PM

    Nonsense. Snowden has a country. Just one that wants to torture him in solitary in a SuperMax for the rest of his days.

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  4. Libby Spencer6:01 PM

    I heard he actually got the data out on thumb drives and not computers. Hard to know what's true these days. Under the new model of click-bait journalism, media isn't really a reliable source of info.

    In any event I can't figure Snowden out. Longer it goes on, the more it appears he was a useful patsy for any number of people with their own agendas.

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  5. Philo Vaihinger9:38 AM

    Bolivia, Venezuela, and other places have offered him asylum.

    Cuba, too?

    So what's the holdup?

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