“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain
It doesn’t help that Mr. Snowden has not said how many documents he has. I’m sure it is a negotiating tactic on his part, but absent any better figure that 1.7M number is going to live on.
Today I Learned the government has “more than a million” pages of evidence… against the government.
Greenwald has repeatedly said that Snowden gave him “tens of thousands” of documents.
This is so disappointing. Epstein has produced remarkable stories in the past (and his latest book is pretty great), but for a self-proclaimed “skeptic,” he’s taking an awful lot on faith.
I mean, using Mike Rogers as a reputable source? Nasty, off-the-record smears whispered by a “former member of Obama’s cabinet”? Please.
I heard that he is a communist puppy kicker.
(Just to clarify: a communist who kicks puppies, not a patriot who kicks communist puppies).
I’m assuming these documents are separate files. Why not publish exactly how many files Greenwald and Poitras have?
This is a stupid issue, but putting it to rest would be as simple as saying “when I met Ed, he handed over to me 43,233 files that he had downloaded from NSA servers.”
Also – am I the only one disappointed that it is only tens of thousands? I was kind of hoping he really did steal 1 million plus documents and we could look forward to Snowden disclosures for years to come.
How many documents Mr. Snowden gave to Mr. Greenwald only sets a lower bar on the number of documents he took.
Back in the 1980s, when I worked as a tool of the military-industrial complex, I ran a secure computer room. Every document we had not only needed to be accounted for, but there needed to be officially registered plans indicating how we would keep track of all documents we handled. The “Orange Book” and “Red Book” security rule books had a lot of theory about how you make sure you always account for every document and person on your computers and network, so you can always audit that access.
If the NSA couldn’t do that for their internal operations, they’ve hopelessly failed. (And if you’re asking whether it’s malice or incompetence, it’s both.)
The government knows for a fact that Snowden did take 1.7 million documents…
(…they’re just not sure what base the counting should be done in.)
1.7 Million documents? I say that’s a good start.
It would also immediately go into Snowden’s indictment.
As I understand it, Greenwald & Co. are coy about the number of documents they possess in order to prevent the government from getting the kind of solid facts they’d need to prosecute.
Unfortunately, this strategy allows lies and misrepresentations to circulate as the truth.
It’s almost as if we have government agencies that are totally cool with making up facts to scare people and serve their own interests, isn’t it?
Crazy talk!
According to Greenwald, both he and Laura Poitras have copies of Snowden’s complete archive, which he’s pegged at around 15,000-20,000 documents.
This approximation seems far more believable than 1.7MM, and comes from a more trustworthy source.
My point is, that “better figure” you originally asked for exists, but no one is paying attention.
It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
And, in about less than a month the real bombshell is coming where the general public is about to find out who the securitocracy spies upon within the United States itself.
It’s being worked on as we speak and it’s about to change world history.
Yays for accountability!
Is “document” a defined unit of measurement? How would you count them, by tallying up unique filenames? Do you index the contents and de-dupe them or not? Is a fifteen-chapter report one document or fifteen?
(I suspect the 1.7M number comes from the same school of accounting as the DEA’s valuation of the “street value” of big drug busts. Yeah, the boat might have ultimately had a million dollars worth of coke in it after stepping on it multiple times and divvying it up into gram bags, but there are a lot of people between that boat and the street, all of whom take their cut. The guys on the boat were never going to see anywhere near a million dollars from it, but it helps the prosecution’s case to paint them as Tony Montana kingpins.)
