When you catch someone with a shoddy-but-carefully-curated story, Edward Snowden, producing the mother of bad faith arguments (in effect, lying) while, in addition, facilitating a character assassination (and severe cyberharassment), something very, very sinister about the person emerges that can help answer some fundamental yet still hanging questions.
Say I tell you about this well furnished institute based in Saudi Arabia (with a fridge full of fermented yoghurt drinks) that fights for women’s rights in the U.S. You do not need to be an expert on gender studies to see the incongruity and would assume the countries were mistakenly inverted. So, if I tell you that there is this fellow in Moscow organizing a freedom-from-oppression movement in California, you don’t need any expertise in espionage (or conditional probability) to realize that there is something fundamentally dubious there. Add to it a crucial piece of information: said institute gets funding in cryptocurrencies (and the runner of the institute must escape the banking system as his royalties and speaking fees get confiscated by the U.S. government).
Clearly, it is a lunacy to compare Edward Snowden to Assange, Manning and, particularly, Ellsberg — and not just on account of that strange inversion of countries. Daniel Ellsberg went to Congress,…
