If Snowden lied or exaggerated, the USG would ensure that every media outlet shouted about if from the mountain tops until no one couldn't know. Snowden would be destroyed as a liar. If the USG lie or exaggerates, Snowden cannot ensure the same. Additionally, government is based on lies, lying is what government does. The ratio of power and information control is not exactly on Snowden's side. The consequences for Snowden if he were caught lying or massively exaggerating are dire. The consequences for the USG lying really minor, they lie all the time, we expect it. The for Snowden is massively less likely to be lying, since doing so would absolutely kill him off.

Additionally, we are not at the point where we have seen all the dirt the USG can dig up on him. Turns out, they cant find much at all. There for its reasonable to assume Snowden is clean. DIrt on the USG is so numerous, its so overwhelming that its essentially back ground noise.

That is why people prepared to give him the benefit of if the doubt. That is also why people are less likely to do the same with the USG, or any other government.

That would not necessarily be good opsec. The government might consider that it's better to have the general public believe it's omniscient while being more realistic with diplomats; or it might simply decide that correcting specific inaccuracies would give too much information away.

Additionally, government is based on lies, lying is what government does.

Well, no bias there then.

However, you don't seem interested in my relativist/quantitative approach, based on your fondness for sweeping generalizations and requests for negative proof.

Could you please qualify that statement with an example?

The high degree of cooperation many countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law.

Your theory assumes both rational and benevolent politicians.

Respectfully, I think you are wrong; the US (our country) is an excellent bully and likes to threaten trade. Further, I look at the behaviors of those countries that have acted to halt transit (i.e. the recent Bolivian fiasco) as evidence of complicity with US espionage activities.

This in particular seems highly unlikely.

You appear to assume here that politicians take decisions purely or even mostly based on what is best for their constituencies? There could be many reasons for European leaders to be so supine, mostly I imagine it's pressure from the US and not wishing to be made a pariah, but also they are engaged in their own spying which is just as pervasive as the NSA, and to a great or lesser extent are reliant on the NSA for intelligence - most of the governments of Europe are partnered with the NSA on some level since Echelon and integration is probably tighter now, many have US bases on their soil. They have absolutely no interest in seeing any more revelations about the global surveillance network they have helped to create.

Also, they don't want their own Snowden copy cat to rise from their own intelligence programs. From that light, I'm a bit surprised Russia is housing him. If anyone wants to keep down descent more than USA, it's Russia...

It's not difficult - if you haven't seen all the data. You encrypt the data with a large, randomly generated password, and give pieces of the password (without looking at it) to several people in different countries. You also tell them that they need to be 100% certain you're not being tortured to get the passwords from them.

If you're tortured, then you actually cannot reveal the data. You can reveal who has the password pieces, but if they're all in different countries it will be nearly impossible to get them. It would be easier to get the data directly from the U.S. government.

Anyway, while that split-the-key scheme works, I wouldn't use it over one of the real secret sharing schemes cryptographers have developed, e.g. Shamir's secret sharing scheme [1]. If you just split a key and give pieces to different people, the more pieces of the key an enemy can collect, the easier time they will have when brute-forcing it.

On the other hand, Shamir's secret sharing scheme is an information-theoretically secure threshold scheme. That is, a key is broken up into n pieces and t of those pieces are required to reconstruct the secret. In Shamir's scheme, the enemy can collect t-1 pieces of the secret and still have no chance in reconstructing the password; it simply is impossible.

The scheme works off of the idea that an m-degree polynomial is uniquely defined by m+1 points. For example, here's a point from a 1-degree polynomial (line), which would model a t=2 scheme: (1,4). Can you figure out the y-intercept? (Actually, Shamir's scheme uses finite fields, but I think asking this question drives the point home.)

So, generate a key, split it up into a bunch of pieces, and require a threshold of those pieces to be present. Coercion-free and even if an intelligence agency can compromise many pieces, they still can't do anything until they've hit the threshold. Also, if you want to require all pieces present, just set t=n.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

Though I guess having a live video stream of you being tortured wouldn't be in the best interests of the person doing the deed. Maybe that's the catch that makes it work?

Listening to him speak, he obviously has very well-reasoned and logical positions which contrasts sharply with official response. And I don't place much weight on the opinions of foreign leaders whose hands are tied by political concerns.

That's actually not an extraordinary claim. It is standard operating procedure to teach people in the military how to do this, and the techniques are widely known. Here is how my brother (who received this training before serving in Vietnam explained it).

The first thing to realize is that you will break. When you break, you will say whatever you think will make the torturer happy. Once you have broken, you will no longer know what reality is.

So be a wimp. Pretend to break early. Feed the torturer enough interesting false information (with some truth mixed in) to get them interested. When you break for real they will continue to ask about the false leads, and you'll tell them whatever you imagine they want to hear. Nobody - including you - will have any way to sort out truth from lies.

This is, of course, just theory for me. However I'm assured that it works. And our standard training procedures include practice being tortured to drill in the point.

This. Most of the people I have discussed this issue with have failed to separate the data that was revealed with the manner in which it was. Thank you for doing so.

I think you're enormously overestimating the capacity for planning that any single individual could be capable of. Jason Bourne exists in the movies, not in real life.

Most of what Mr. Snowden has revealed has been pretty damn extraordinary. Upon first hearing many of his claims, I'll admit that I (more often than not) thought "no, surely not" and, shortly thereafter, government officials quickly came forward to deny many of his claims.

Then, almost without fail, Mr. Greenwald would publicize documents backing Mr. Snowden's claims and showing the government as the liars.

What it comes down to is, simply, trust and credibility. To me, at this point, Mr. Snowden has eons more credibility -- and I trust him much more -- than the United States government.

In the absence of evidence, I am certainly more willing to take him at his word than I am the various government officials who have proven themselves liars time and again over the last six weeks or so.

Or, more plausibly, these leaders also have something to hide from their ostensibly democratic constituencies and would find it beneficial for any more potential Snowdens of their own to think twice.

The recent articles about UK, France, etc. surveillance and data gathering bear this out.

Manwhile, leaders in more authoritarian governments or in weak sham/corrupt democracies are less concerned with Snowdens (people already corrupt or cowed), and more interested in taking US's tiresome high handedness down a peg.

Well, assuming that torture is an effective interrogation technique, the amount he can reveal is nonetheless limited by his own memory. It is quite possible that any datum critical enough to present a risk to national security if it were revealed is simultaneously too much for an ordinary person to remember -- e.g. a private key, an organizational plan, etc.

However, I fail to see a distinction between the potential capture and torture of Edward Snowden and the potential capture and torture of any other intelligence operative or official, particularly anyone in the CIA/NCS. Snowden is probably at greater risk of capture due to his notoriety, but this is really all the more reason for him to obtain asylum in a neutral country as soon as possible. If a country such as Germany were truly concerned about this, they could certainly enter him into a national witness-protection program with a new identity, making his involuntary debriefing all the more unlikely.

This is actually a serious mistake from a USA national security perspective, in that it ensures that whatever info Snowden has and fails to secure will be given directly to rival nations. If those in charge were worried primarily about national security, they would have let him run to a normal country like Finland or Chile or New Zealand, where Snowden could have been observed reliably. If he ever progressed from criticism of domestic surveillance to active assistance of rogue states, the host nation could have brought its own charges.

That those in charge didn't allow this tells us one of two things: A) they're really not very good at their jobs or B) their primary concern is not Snowden revealing secrets which will harm the USA, but rather secrets that will harm their own careers. It were ever thus.

1. Been on 7/4 instead of 7/6

2. Not held at (confined to) Westlake Park, which has ultra-liberal activist hippies and homeless protesting every day.