As far as I can tell, no media outlet has been able to independently confirm that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is actually in Sheremetyevo airport. No one has seen him, and the Russian Government has not presented him to the media. Yet the New York Times, and other outlets, report on his location as if it were a verified fact. Why is this?
I would also think that given his situation, that they would have to put through some sort of request to the Russian government for asylum or a similar scheme for staying there without a visa (from what I have read, you can only stay at that airport for 24 hours without a visa.) That process will probably take a while.
Maybe Hong Kong and Russia have been dragging their feet a bit as an F.U. to the U.S. but it seems like they have been following their own laws. All the chatter about whisking Snowden away to some safe location seems to have come from people with no authority to do anything.
I think it's simple. Russia detained Snowden in the transit area (if for no other reason than to keep him away from the media frenzy) and that's why we haven't seen pictures of him.
What I do try to pay attention to are the crimes my (the US) government is committing in violation of the US Constitution. And how they're using these criminal acts against friendly nations and its own citizens in order to violate additional Constitutional rights.
That's what I'm concerned with. The rest is Kardashian drama fluff disseminated to direct people's attentions from the real issue.
Perhaps it's easier to see how little the popular news media contributes when they're "working" in unfamiliar environs. In this case, we can't rely on RT as a check because Russia. I just checked, and unfortunately Al Jazeera don't seem to have anything either. (Well, they had a link to the entertaining "Whistleblower" reggae mix, but no positive indication that Snowden is in the transit section.)
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This seems to. I've wondered variants of the same thing: there's a lot of authoritative commentary surrounding an issue which nobody talking has authority on (to wit: "those who know don't talk, those who talk don't know").
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Poster's point was exactly that "how do they know he's there?" isn't being covered.
Obviously the overall topic is interesting (having completely taken over the HN front page at one point not long ago); "how do we know X?" is relevant thereto.
Seeing the US Government's posturing towards information freedom advocates is central to information and data policy in the US and the Internet.
Information freedom has always been something central to the Open Source and technology communities for the past 2 decades. I don't understand how anybody finds this to not be on topic...
Anything about Snowden appears to be on-topic to me. No, his sex life, what he eats, how he sleeps, all those personal aspects don't matter, what matters is the leaks, and discussing where the person who disclosed them is at the moment is pretty useless because this will be an entire discussion based on assumptions and I think this or I think that...
Now, if you want to discuss about information freedom or privacy issues or the leaks, this thread has nothing to do about it.
As far as "...information freedom or privacy issues or the leaks, this thread has nothing to do about it.", I think you are missing the story.
Whatever happens to Snowden is part of the story. What happens to the guy who revealed this information will set the posture for how the US treats future Bradley Mannings. This incident will be shaping information security policies for dozens of governments, hundreds of multinational companies, and affect international relations between the US and the most powerful countries in the world.
This particular post raises an important question of are we being told the truth about Snowden's whereabouts? It wouldn't be difficult to imagine that some government, foreign or domestic, has him in a hole, trying to get information out of him somewhere while the speculation of him tucked in a corner of a Russian airport, drinking newsstand coffee and bathing in the public restrooms circulates the news headlines.
While on-topic, there are certainly other posts on the topic that provide much more value. Snowden's whereabouts are part of the biggest story to rock the Internet in the past decade: The US government is listening to the intimate details of everything the world is transmitting (potentially including US citizens), and some lone analyst is responsible for telling the world about these violations of privacy and trust.
I have not seen anyone question the official story that Snowden is "in the transit area" despite a complete lack of independent confirmation.
While it may be that it's just a matter of safety that he is kept out of public areas, it is still an interesting and unreported aspect of the story.