Hacker News Reader

Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant. It's sad it lends itself so easily to spin, "The Chinese Turned Him!" I expect that is what Americans will be told to believe.

View on HN

But on top of that you have the fact that "The Chinese could offer him asylum in exchange for classified information" is a decent deterrent for them even asking.

Additionally, suppose they ask China for extradition and China offers protection in exchange for information. Then Snowden has several useful options. He could suggest that the US back off so he doesn't have to make a decision. He could give in to the Chinese. He could turn himself in and issue a public statement that if the only way he could stay in Hongkong was to sell out his country he would rather face jail.

Even the third option (turning himself in) would be very possibly something that would work in his defence. That is hard to spin against him, "He's so patriotic he'd rather go to jail than sell out his country."

But i mean it's curious he did this right as the Chinese PM was visiting Obama, no?

No is not. To you maybe, but not to me. It just looks like a coincidence and that is like I will take it until further evidence emerges. Otherwise we just look like the religious morons whom claim that their religious text is the correct one because it predicted a historical event somewhere in the last two thousand years.

Very curious.

There was actually an article upvoted on HackerNews a few days ago which supposed, even before Snowden revealed himself, that these leaks were the result of Chinese intelligence activity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com