Snowden's long game on leaking

Here's a curious side note on Snowden's epic leaks. He contacted this documentary film maker in January, Interestingly "she is filming the story behind the story — including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald — for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks."

We now know Snowden ultimately contacted a slew of media people by the time he produced any hard evidence. Now they're fighting over credit for the scoop. It also apparently took him a long time to come up with the documents.

We were contacted, we didn’t know what he was up to, and at some point he came forward with documents.

Think Progress has more on Snowden's actual work history. He changed jobs a lot. He was just an IT guy, not an intelligence officer. He was an accomplished computer geek and made a ton of money privately contracting out his skills. But he clearly didn't have “the authorities to wiretap anyone," it appears he simply had the ability to hack further into the systems than he was cleared to do. And this is interesting:

He wasn’t just worried that data was being collected, but that it would eventually be used selectively to derive sinister conclusions from the actions of people living innocent lives.

In other words he has no proof that innocent people were being targeted with intrusive data intercepts, he just decided it was going to happen someday. In other words he lied, or exaggerated if you prefer, to get the media's attention. Which still makes me wonder if he either invented those powerpoints himself or if they were really a sales pitch from one of his many jobs with outside contractors and not from the NSA at all.

The more real information that comes out, the more it looks to me he's more interested in fame than in exposing actual government wrongdoing. I hope you'll forgive me for finding that less than heroic.