The Intercept:
A hero to some, a traitor to others, Snowden lives in Moscow, having been granted asylum there after U.S. authorities charged him with three felonies. Two of the charges are under the Espionage Act, a draconian 1917 statute that blocks defendants from explaining why what they did was justified. Snowden has said he would come back to the U.S. if he were granted a fair trial.
The @Snowden handle had been taken by someone who hadn’t used it in three years. So Twitter was contacted, and agreed to turn it over to Snowden himself.
In a
recent interview with Kashmir Hill at Fusion:
KH: What do you see as the biggest win to come from your disclosures?
ES: It’s actually not in the courts. It’s public awareness. If you simply recited the facts of what we knew a few years ago, they would have said you were a conspiracy theorist, an insane radical that couldn’t be taken seriously, but now everybody knows. The fact that the government is intercepting communications of people not suspected of doing anything wrong is now fact.
[...]
KH: You’re obviously on the internet a ton. Why are you not blogging or tweeting?
ES: One of the big challenges in the situation I’m in is that I have all these opsec routines that I follow. All the web publishing platforms have massive amounts of analytics embedded in them. Facebook, for example, databases how long you’re on each page, what posts you click on, what pictures you’ve seen, and they store this permanently.
[...]
KH: So are you following the presidential debates? Are you going to be sending in an absentee ballot from Russia next year?
ES: I almost certainly will be.
If you haven't seen
Citizen Four, this would be the moment.