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We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much
by minimax 12y ago
We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much more so than any of the Putin dissidents. (With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated)
Assange has a TV show on Russian state television, and Snowden is a guy who fled to Russia with literally thousands of stolen NSA documents and now does TV propaganda with Vladimir Putin. Those are not dissidents. Those are Russian agents, whether they realize it or not.
- dragonwriter 12y agoThey are western dissidents, whether or not they are also Russian agents. Its not uncommon for dissidents forced to resort to exile to be leveraged for propaganda purposes by regimes opposed to the ones with regard to which they are dissidents, but that doesn't make them any less dissidents. Why do people want to make things exclusive that are not?
- ThinkBeat 12y agoDoes that mean that North Korean dissidents who speak about against the regime when they escape are CIA agents?
- minimax 12y agoIf a North Korean signals intelligence officer managed to smuggle thousands of strategic DPRK intelligence documents and himself out of North Korea, I would assume it was with the help of a foreign government.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jazzyk 12y agoYou are using the exact "reasoning"/propaganda that communist regimes used in Eastern Europe in the past. EVERY dissident who fled to a Western country was automatically labeled a spy.
- minimax 12y agoIf you were an Eastern European person who made it into West Berlin with thousands of secret Soviet intelligence documents in the 1960s, then you probably were a spy.
- jazzyk 12y agoSome were, some were not (I grew up there). Also, while some spies are money-motivated, most spies from Eastern Europe were simply fed-up with the system. We will never know for sure, but did you watch "Citizen4"? A closer look at Snowden - IMO, it's highly unlikely that he was a spy. It is clear (to me, at least) that he is highly principled, not money-driven. He'd have to be an extremely good actor.
- minimax 12y agoSnowden's principles are exactly what make him such a great Russian agent. They don't have to sell him on the ideology since he already has it. It's like Aikido. All they have to do is take the momentum of his enormous ego and sense of self righteousness, and just sort of redirect it a little bit. Now all of a sudden Snowden finds himself sitting in Moscow being debriefed by Russian intelligence. It's brilliant on the part of the Russians and terrible for NATO.