White House: "We expect" Hong Kong to comply with Snowden extradition

[MADem]

21. They answer to PRC, though. They are as "independent" as Beijing ALLOWS them to be.

Every actor talking for "Hong Kong," be it the Beijing friendly SCMP or the lawmaker who was opining about how HK might deal with the matter, is on the PRC team. That's not a secret.

I wouldn't be surprised if the SCMP reporter had some sort of affiliation with the government.

I wonder if Snowden thinks he knows more than he actually knows. If I had to bet, I wouldn't say the US is targeting "terrists," or Americans, or anyone of that nature.

I wouldn't be surprised, though, if they were trying to get a handle on hacking of DOD, industrial and commercial applications. And we know where that's coming from.

Snowden had a path to solving this problem that didn't involve "blowing up" USA and UK while leaving the hacking capabilities of PRC intact. He didn't take that path. Instead, he violated the oath he took to not disclose classified material, went off on a tangent suggesting he knew who our operatives were (if that's true, they must be sweating as many are local nationals who might be killed) and, instead of going to his hero's son, Rand, on the Senate Intel Committee, he went to the Chinese--the people who have been stealing military capability from us for fifteen years or more.

And while everyone claps themselves on the back and says "Phew--the government isn't aggregating any of that awful metadata...!" the corporations will continue to intrude on your life to a degree the government can't hope ever to do--and you, and everyone else who slaps shit up--pictures, locations, noxious details down to what-I-had-for-dinner-and-here's-a-picture on facebook, hands out their phone number like it is candy, lives their life in excruciating detail on the net, will be complicit in the process.

Who's supporting Young Ed now, I wonder? Who is paying his bills, buying his groceries, "minding" him?

There's more to this than meets the eye. It sounds all neat and Don Quixote-ish right now, but I don't know if it will hold up over the long haul.

Time will tell, as it always does.