Snowden released a large collection of documents. Judging by his interview with Joe Rogan, he's a passionate advocate for encryption and says that the US is creating a tool for complete oppression. It's harder to get more apocalyptic than that.

If you want to win against a view, select a leader from your pocket, make him look plausible and make him take control of the whole view. At any point you desire, let that person discredit himself and take the whole view down.

Well if Edward Snowden weren't a CIA asset, how would you know? If there's no way for us to know if Edward Snowden is a CIA asset or not and he has every appearance of an independent actor, why should we care?

I think that it's not actually possible to know anything, and your only real options after recognising that are to reject the pursuit of truth entirely or fall back onto probabilistic models instead of binary beliefs. Not knowing whether or not Snowden is a CIA asset leads me to the question, "how likely is it that Snowden is a CIA asset?" As to why we should care, here's another question: "if Snowden were a CIA asset, how would that change my future behavior?" If it wouldn't change your future behavior, carry on not caring. If it would, then ask yourself "given that I may be wrong about Snowden being a CIA asset, which way would I rather err for an optimal risk/reward ratio?" Then you consider all three answers, and decide how to act in the future despite never actually coming to a conclusion about whether Snowden is a CIA asset. Maybe you think the risk of him being an asset is so low that you don't mind risking the chance that he isn't, or maybe you think it's reasonably likely that he could be an asset while not believing that your personal risk from being wrong is worth worrying about. Or, maybe you change your behavior.

I listened to that interview, and purposefully didn't include my take on it above because I didn't want my crazier belief to distract from my crazy belief. Let's dive into the deep end of my personal crazypool: he came off very politicany to me, even down to the purposeful missteps. People trust a speaker more when the speaker says something a little bit offensive, probably because it's a sign that the person will speak their mind regardless of what anybody else thinks. That moment where he said that no judge would refuse to sign a warrant for "Abu Jihad" or "Boris Baddenov" looked just like this to me -- it's offensive, but immediately juxtaposes an offensive faux-Muslim name with an offensive faux-Russian name, and it's weirdly still socially acceptable to make fun of Russians this way while the Muslim statement is not socially acceptable, so any in-depth discussion of the faux pas can get bogged down unpacking the distinction between these two and making the Muslim characiture seem more understandable in context. The bit where he keeps pulling Rogan away from specific lines of questioning in the beginning, not to avoid them but instead to tell his whole life story leading up to the leaks, seemed like the sort of thing an aspiring politician would do when presented with a microphone and a long format. He acted like his first book had to be autobiographical because the publisher insisted on it, but really, we all know Snowden could find a publisher for a non-autobiographical book. It's an obvious deception; he wants to familiarise the public with his personal story while also acting like he isn't trying to do that. If Snowden gets pardoned sometime between 2024 and 2032 and subsequently makes a run for President, I'm gonna be scared that one of the TLAs has a mole at the top of the one-eyed pyramid.

I'm not making any conspiratorial claims about this part, but as an aside it was weird to me that he claimed cellphone IMEIs can't be changed. It's not normally done, but it can be. I wasn't sure if that was dumbed down for Rogan's audience, a misspeak, or actual ignorance on Snowden's part.

Wait did he seriously say IMEIs can’t be changed? Surely he knows better: they definitely can. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. Or was, a decade ago at least.

Here's a transcript[0]:

>Edward Snowden: (02:26:27) They’re two globally unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in the world in one place. This makes your phone different than all the other phones. The IMEI is burned into the handset of your phone. No matter what SIM card you change to, it’s always going to be the same and it’s always going to be telling the phone network. It’s this physical handset.

[0]: https://www.rev.com/blog/joe-rogan-edward-snowden-podcast-in...

>> I don't feel comfortable saying Snowden is still working for the US government, but I'm certainly suspicious of him.

Well. My deep belief is that individuals that are truly dangerous to the system (here, any system that is powerful enough but one can view it globally as a continuously evolving technology-driven wanna-be-AI) get separated from power asap and then directly eliminated if needed. One should be very naive to think that the following makes any sense: "a young boy from government family says that the whole world is controlled by a few; he wants to stop it and so gets a platform to alarm about it via main media channels, supposedly controlled by the same few". Another point of the whole move was to identify people (e.g., you and me) who will not buy this so they will likely avoid buying other incoming BS.

> One should be very naive to think that the following makes any sense: "a young boy from government family says that the whole world is controlled by a few; he wants to stop it and so gets a platform to alarm about it via main media channels, supposedly controlled by the same few".

I'm very sympathetic to this view, obviously; at first glance it seems too good to be true.

Of course we're supposed to believe that the media isn't controlled by these same few, that Operation Mockingbird ended by the time CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced in 1976 that the CIA would stop paying journalists, and that Operation Mockingbird was actually limited to a couple of wiretaps rather than the fullscale infiltration of the press previously reported through non-official channels (though they did admit that they paid journalists, they claimed that this was not done as part of Operation Mockingbird). Obviously the CIA still has people in media agencies, but we're crazy for believing that; it supposedly isn't the case. But even with a CIA-infiltrated media, I could see the story getting out. The CIA can't be everywhere; it's possible that by going through more than one media institution (including a British one, as if that mattered) and also contacting a documentary film maker who had a previous run-in with the federal government (she claims to have been put on the highest theat-level list the DHS has after making a film critical of the occupation of Iraq) he was able to make sure that the government couldn't stop the information from coming out through some channel or another. Or they could have been worried that by blocking it in the press they would provoke him to release unredacted versions that would reveal even more (yes, he claimed to not have these by the time he entered China, but he could have given copies to another still unknown source -- or he could have been lying about not still having them in some format, perhaps steganographically hidden).

I could also actually see a whistleblower escaping capture/death by going to an area controlled by a foreign power and making the defection public immediately so that any suspicious death would be seen as an obvious assination without a fair trial. That seems plausible to me, whether or not it actually happened.