For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing but I don't think this is a verbatim statement from Snowden.

"...the United States of America has been..."

Edit to add: The statement as quoted at http://boingboing.net/2013/07/01/snowden-asks-russia-for-asy... has the original version with "have" still in there.

Here's a screenshot from twitter of the original - https://twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/351833289000112128

So to claim that WikiLeaks would fixup all of Snowden's writings to conform to en_GB and then switch it right back to en_US after HN notices is rather surreal.

At best you could claim that Harrison herself simply transcribed Snowden's speech and that no one caught it until it was posted. But that still wouldn't explain what happened to some of the missing words that Snowden would have said. And that still wouldn't explain why WikiLeaks revised a statement so important without so much as a mention of proofreading corrections post-facto.

I think you need to loosen your tinfoil.

Does that sound like the same person talking about civil liberties and how Obama didn't change enough for him, and being ready to stand up for what he believes in? Or does that sound more like a certain other ego at opposition to the U.S. government and especially its President?

The concern would be if wikileaks were completely fabricating this, but I see no evidence for that. (Nor any motivation.)

I doubt they are fabricating it, but honestly they have Snowden in as much of a bind as the U.S. does now. They are his only source of support right now... what does he do if they take it away? He's in a web of very unequal relationships right now.

This assumes he has other channels of communication. He probably stands behind it insofar as its consistent with everything I've heard from him so far, but neither of us has any way of knowing for the time being.

If you want to preserve your credibility, it's better to either leave the mistakes in, or explain the context (eg 'this statement was a written record of a verbal statement; we apologize for an inaccuracy in our transcription of Mr. Snowden's recorded words').

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Do you have proof this is real? It seems awfully suspicious to change that when someone notices it and not mention anything.

EDIT2: Clarified what I think is (fully or partially) fake.

Also, bitching about downvotes tends to accelerate the rate at which one gets them. You've been here long enough to have noticed that.

Others think it's real because it is on Wikileaks.

I see both sides of the argument, but I'm staying on my side for now.

The risk-adjusted return on making a fake Snowden statement just doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

YMMV.

I'm not sure that going from "I love my country and want the people to know what the government is doing" to "FUCK THE US AND FUCK YOU OBAMA" (paraphrased!) is really the wisest course though. But what do I know?

Suppose (for argument's sake) that Snowden were depressed or had got cold feet, and was uncommunicative or otherwise climbing down from his previous position; a supporter who thought he was simply undergoing a crisis of confidence might decide to draft a statement 'in the spirit of his actions.'

I'm not saying that this has happened here, but such things are not unprecedented. You don't need to believe that the entire organization is engaged in a deception, or even that the (imaginary) author of such a statement would consider it deceptive, but rather reflective of a 'deeper truth'.

Maybe Snowden's words were run past an editor (as are most journalist's words) of British public-school extraction, who applied reflexively what he'd been taught?

This kind of over-parsing is typical of the kind of intensive derailing of Snowden's message that's been going on. ANYTHING to distract us from the Naked Exercise of Unlimited Power of Questionable Legality that's been uncovered.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-united-stat...

This is British writing style. Brits leave off the preposition "from" in these types of sentences; Americans put it in.

American English: "Administration now seeks to stop me from exercising a basic right."

British English: "Administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right."

I'm not a linguistics or grammar expert so I can't name the proper terms for all this. I've just observed in the past that this is a "Britishism" that differs from American style. It's interesting to see it here. Snowden wouldn't write like that. IMO, he needs to ditch Wikileaks because they've done nothing but harm him and seem to only be interested in advancing their agenda.

So, trusting the authenticity of a document is a probability game. If he had signed it with a public key, then the probability of a fake would be less.

Pass-phrases help mitigate the concerns for stolen private keys, but they do not provide assurances that things will not be signed or encrypted under duress. The best you can really do there is throw in more human element to increase the number of rubber hoses your enemy will need.