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Does anyone else think Snowden is full of it?

4 points by findyoucef ↗ HN
I'm not sure why, but I don't find Snowden to be very credible. I've been following his story for years, and I don't doubt the the authenticity of the documents that he released, but I what I doubt is his ability. I don't feel like based on the way he describes his experience that he has the technical skills / ability to do what he claims he did. I feel like he exaggerates his contribution. After all he has was basically a sharepoint admin.

6 comments

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oldgun
First I don't think Snowden was celebrated by many because he was a good hacker and "hacked" the documents. He was celebrated because he released it. You don't have to be a hacker to contribute to and even be important in digital rights movement.

Also what exactly made you think he was exaggerating?

findyoucef
Maybe not celebrated, but it's certainly how he's depicted in media / popular culture and he's done nothing to dispel that myth. I submitted this question after I listened to him on the Rogan podcast. Someone in the comments below posted a quote about Snowden's so called "heartbeat" project, so read that to get some idea of why I think he's exaggerating. And on at least two occasions in podcast he described himself as a spy.
pnako
I don't think he ever claimed any sort of technical prowess. He was a storage admin, and when he found a treasure trove of documents under his responsibility, he bravely decided to reveal that the US spying agency conducts spying.
findyoucef
Go listen to the Rogan podcast where he describes his experience and he makes it sound like he was more than just a storage admin.
namirez
> I feel like he exaggerates his contribution. After all he has was basically a sharepoint admin.

I have the same feeling. I have not read his book but watched his interview with Joe Rogan and honestly he sounds borderline delusional. Just jump to 1:05:20. I just find it hard to believe that a low-level contractor can do this.

"so now I come in and now I'm the sole employee of the office of information sharing but I'm not close enough to retirement that I'm ok with just doing nothing at all so I get in business and I come up with this idea for a new system called the heartbeat and what the heartbeat is gonna do is connect to basically every information repository in the intelligence community both at the NSA and across Network boundaries which you normally can't cross but because I've worked at both the CIA and the NSA I knew the network well enough both sides of it sides that normal workers at the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other I could actually connect these together I could build bridges across this kind of network space and then draw all of these or records into a new kind of system that was supposed to look at your digital ID"

findyoucef
LOL, I submitted this question as soon as I finished the Rogan podcast. He sounds ridiculous in more than one area when he described what he did. I feel like he starting to believe what the media has made him out to be.

This quote that you posted got my attention as well when I was listening to the rogan podcast. He's basically described building an inter-org (cia-nsa) middleware as a storage admin. Snowden isn't a developer / programmer, so I'd love to understand how he built his so called "heart beat".