> If I am paying so much money for our awesome military industrial complex, I would AT LEAST expect them to know how to stage the house to make it look like a robbery.

On the other hand, if this wasn't done by a government then it really is what a robbery looks like!

Yeah, because jewelry, cash or electronics have no (resale) value so thieves don't touch them ;)

To be fair, exactly this happened to a friend of mine living in Fulham, London. His laptop (a very pricey MacBook) was visible through the window from the street. Someone was in through the (old, poorly-secured) window and back out with the laptop within a couple of minutes whilst my friend was in the shop across the street. Didn't check the bedroom for jewelry, didn't take his expensive decks or TV - just grabbed the laptop and left. It seems some thieves do specialise - either that, or my mate is into some other stuff I don't know about and had just been told he was going to receive an encrypted file...hmmm.

When I was robbed they ransacked my apartment. They went through the couch, luggage, kitchen cabinets, took the TV, my change jar, bed sheets(probably to wrap up their loot). It looked the way it does in movies.

Yes but you work the odds of the robbery happening right after the Skype call and then the thieves taking just the laptop where some of the most valuable pieces of intel are. Anything is possible, but...

On another note, if Snowden wasn't in HK, CIA would have already "paid him a visit" or five. Probably each of them was shadowed by dozens of Chinese ones so they couldn't take the risk.

They may have heard a sound, assume they may be about to be discovered, and just scarpered with what the already had in their hands (which just happened to be the laptop).

I would still consider that more of a freak occurrence than dishonest journalists, and much more than spooks being dumb.

Could've been another journalist, someone working for a news-agency, or someone hoping to sell it to a news-agency / a gov't.

My car was broken into a few years back and all the thief took was my school books sitting in the back seat. My iPod was even sitting in the cup holder on a pile of loose change.

The polite, gentlemanly global surveillance state. They only take what they need. They don't make a mess. How nice.

"We would be happy to replace the laptop too, but we didn't think you'd want to use the new one."

Doesn't make sense. Implication: USG was listening to GG's Skype conversations, heard him say he would send big encrypted file, USG stole laptop. But GG says he never did send the big encrypted file. So they're supposedly spying on him, but not well enough to notice the non-transmission of the encrypted material.

You assume that they have full access to all comms in and out of the system; it's entirely possible that a transmission could have happened outside of a monitorable band (for example, mega.com).

To those without the key, an HTTPS download of a porn video is entirely indistinguishable from a tarball of state secrets.

state secrets steganographically embedded into porn videos. Poor NSA analysts forced to sit through hours of it trying to discover the hidden message.

Perhaps they didn't want to take the risk that the file somehow got past them (they failed to detect/recognize it, or it was sent another way (courier, etc.)).

Maybe there was a transmission of encrypted material (from a third party, something completely unrelated) and since it'd be difficult to determine if it was Snowden's they chose to take it anyways. (this is all, of course, presuming that the USG was responsible)

> If I am paying so much money for our awesome military industrial complex, I would AT LEAST expect them to know how to stage the house to make it look like a robbery. Or copy the hard drive and then bug the machine & router to intercept all future communications.

You forget the fact that the majority of operative work abroad is done by minimum wage hired thugs who don't give a single fuck about the intricacies of the execution of the task at hand; they probably even like the fact that they can help make the US look like a bunch of morons.