The lie about Edward Snowden that just won't die

They have no idea what he took and how much, because their internal logging systems are non-existent (on purpose) - but you shouldn't worry about any NSA abuses or other loss of data, because they have "strict oversight".

The piece in WSJ titled &quot;Was Snowden&#x27;s Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?&quot; is worth reading (<a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;online.wsj.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB1000142405270230483130...</a>).<p>Even though I am sympathetic to Showden for his disclosures of gov&#x27;t surveillance of American citizens and others, the scope, complexity, and execution of operation leaves many questions unanswered.<p>National security officials (both Republicans and Dems) are quoted in the piece that they believe that Showden operation was an espionage heist.<p>From the article:<p>&quot;On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.&quot;<p>So on one hand we have people like the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Obama officials who are neck deep in intelligence work, and on the other we have feel-gooders like BoingBoing, who really don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on, and who might never ever find out what really happened, because it could be classified for ages.

I don&#x27;t think this issue really is a big one.<p>I&#x27;m far more concerned by the&#x2F;my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as &quot;the new normal&quot;. It seems like Snowden&#x27;s work has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance.<p>I really hope I&#x27;m wrong.

The two questions that must be asked about this are:<p>Are all documents created equal? Is one document a multi-page report containing detailed information, or is it a brief memorandum about something trivial? How much of these documents is boilerplate such as daily summaries that will repeat the same information as long as it&#x27;s relevant? If I grab someone&#x27;s mbox is that one document, or a collection of emails that each count as one document?<p>Of course none of that matters if there the number is entirely fictional. But there is still the second question, does it matter how many documents were leaked? Would your opinion of Snowden change if the number were different? If you defend him, is there an upper limit after which revealing the information is no longer justified? If you think he&#x27;s a traitor, is there a small enough number that you would not object to?<p>I don&#x27;t think it matters. The writers probably don&#x27;t think so either and are thus using it not to add information to their articles but because sounds better. A person learning about this for the first time will see &quot;1.7 million&quot; and think either &quot;Wow, that&#x27;s a lot!&quot; or &quot;This reporter did a good job.&quot; A person writing &quot;Snowden is reported to have stolen an unknown number of documents,&quot; will raise the question of who it is unknown to. The reader may think the reporter didn&#x27;t do enough research. Or doubt the NSA&#x27;s account of what happened. Adding an irrelevant statistic makes the article more believable. And the more specific the statistic the better. Would the effect be the same if it were &quot;2 million&quot;, or the more cautious &quot;over 1 million&quot;?<p>I bet media analysts have studied click rates and know just what kind of meaningless statistics can be added to an article to increase readership. This is what happens when success in journalism is measured by page views.

You can&#x27;t infer anything about his motives from the number of files he took. It&#x27;s just good sysadmin instinct to backup everything, encrypt it, and then sort it out later. Disk space is cheap and it&#x27;s better to have too much than be missing something important.<p>It also often takes <i>less effort</i> to take <i>more data</i> simply because it requires no additional thinking or typing to exclude things.

s&#x2F;stole&#x2F;exposed to the public what they have a right to know in a democratic society&#x2F;g

I don&#x27;t think this would have been nearly as much of an issue if the reporters had been up front about how much had been given to them. Pick a metric - documents&#x2F;files&#x2F;pages&#x2F;slides&#x2F;whatever, and stick to it. As it played out, it went from Snowden saying &quot;I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed&quot; in his interview last June, to Greenwald saying the total count was 9-10k in July, then 15-20k in August, then the NY Times saying that the Guardian gave them 50k Snowden docs in September [1].<p>I&#x27;m curious why they won&#x27;t give a definitive number - I&#x27;m assuming that they&#x27;re trying to avoid accusations that he just scraped as much as he could and took it out of the country without properly evaluating the documents.<p>[1] <a href="http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-incredibly-mutating-document-trove/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ohtarzie.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;edward-snowdens-inc...</a>

slightly off-topic. how do you think snowden will be remembered in 10 years?

With that headline I was expecting the author to put forth a number or at least assert that it couldn&#x27;t be 1.7 million.