If I can briefly remove my tinfoil hat...<p>As far as I can tell, no media outlet has been able to independently confirm that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is actually in Sheremetyevo airport. No one has seen him, and the Russian Government has not presented him to the media. Yet the New York Times, and other outlets, report on his location as if it were a verified fact. Why is this?
Though Putin has said he is outside the control of Russia, there has to be some sort of Russian authority in that transit area and I imagine they would have detained Snowden right away. He has no valid passport and he can't get a visa. Russia also doesn't need for Snowden to be a traveling circus in their airport with his mug being beamed to the world from Russia on a daily basis until they get rid of him.<p>I would also think that given his situation, that they would have to put through some sort of request to the Russian government for asylum or a similar scheme for staying there without a visa (from what I have read, you can only stay at that airport for 24 hours without a visa.) That process will probably take a while.<p>Maybe Hong Kong and Russia have been dragging their feet a bit as an F.U. to the U.S. but it seems like they have been following their own laws. All the chatter about whisking Snowden away to some safe location seems to have come from people with no authority to do anything.<p>I think it's simple. Russia detained Snowden in the transit area (if for no other reason than to keep him away from the media frenzy) and that's why we haven't seen pictures of him.
I don't necessarily believe anything about Snowden and I try not to pay attention to Snowden. Snowden reportedly asked that people focus on the issue and not him, and I'm taking that to heart.<p>What I <i>do</i> try to pay attention to are the crimes my (the US) government is committing in violation of the US Constitution. And how they're using these criminal acts against friendly nations and its own citizens in order to violate additional Constitutional rights.<p>That's what I'm concerned with. The rest is Kardashian drama fluff disseminated to direct people's attentions from the real issue.
They're using the same method when reporting on Russia government activities that they use when reporting on USA government activities: send a stenographer to the press conference, and be sure to get press releases in copy-and-pasteable electronic form. Whatever they do, they never exhibit any skepticism.<p>Perhaps it's easier to see how little the popular news media contributes when they're "working" in unfamiliar environs. In this case, we can't rely on RT as a check because Russia. I just checked, and unfortunately Al Jazeera don't seem to have anything either. (Well, they had a link to the entertaining "Whistleblower" reggae mix, but no positive indication that Snowden is in the transit section.)
This is quite irrelevant to Hacker News. Please read the guidelines: <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p><i>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.</i>