Snowden Starting To Develop A Credibility Problem

Many of us raised an eyebrow at Snowden's imaginative claims that he would have been "disappeared" if he had used the proper channels to report wrongdoing or that the "triads" could come after him. Other parts of his claims are also unravelling.

Booz Allen Hamilton just issued this statement:

Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, was an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. Snowden, who had a salary at the rate of $122,000, was terminated June 10, 2013 for violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy.

Not $200,000? Many folks were wondering about that. Seems to have been a boast.

Also, did you notice that WaPo made major stealth-edits to its PRISM story? ZDNt's Ed Bott has an extensive review, but here's a taste:

And then a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to that story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story. Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”

Click over and read the whole, extensive thing. Did the journalists get it wrong, or did Snowden?

Revealing the truth was allegedly the whole point of Snowden's decision to turn over top secret material to journalists. If it turns out he was less than truthful, he will have severely damaged U.S. national security for questionable benefit.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 10:01 AM

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