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When the article chose to put quotes around "touched", my thought was that Snowden was being clever and running a script that ran 'touch $file' for everything h

• toyg 12y ago
  Almost -- I think he used "touch" to show all the documents he could take, but did something else to the ones he actually did take (maybe flipping a permission bit, granting full access to a "leakyleaky" group or something like that). Hence, authorities reporting only "the total number of documents he touched" is a failure from Snowden's point of view, because they didn't see the whole scheme. In that sense, I think he's being slightly naive there -- it's clear that, once the story got huge, Clapper and Alexander had an interest in exaggerating the number as much as possible; so for all we know, they might have actually understood Snowden's scheme but willfully chosen to ignore it.