Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden is now on Russian soil, leaving the Moscow airport transit lounge with 12 secure months of asylum from Russia tucked under his arm and
a pending job offer at VKontakte, Russia’s biggest social networking site, in his pocket.
Wow. And all of that presumably without a series of grueling face-to-face interviews from his new employer. In addition, Glenn Greenwald, the reporter at The Guardian who broke Snowden’s revelations, has landed a nice book deal -- plus, perhaps, an extended contract at his newspaper, which hasn’t had this much publicity since the 1963 Profumo political scandal.
The rest of us should be so lucky.
A part of me wants to turn this tragi-comedy fairy tale into a cyber-age spy thriller, with Snowden as an undercover U.S. CIA agent carrying out a top-secret assignment to get inside Russia’s cyber security apparatus and save civilized society from World War III.
But let’s get back to reality: How did the rest of America fare from Snowden’s disclosure of U.S. intelligence electronic data gathering methods?