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That's the side-show distraction from the actual leak.

Yeah, people are talking about him. That would be fantastic if he was in it for his own personal gain, but he tried to tell the people of the US that their government was over-stepping the line. Being the story is not helping the story he tried to tell.

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"Where's Waldo" is a simple concept that most people can understand and have an opinion about. A country spying on its own citizens is an important thing to deal with, but sufficiently complex that most people would rather just ignore it.

I would imagine that if even a tiny fraction of the people hearing about Snowden then go in to investigate the spying, then that's more attention than the spying would get by itself.

The mass media putting 'Snowden' in everything, to try to grab some of the traffic, is noise - and that is true it's a problem for the mass consumer. However, the important articles are still circulating, being shared, etc.. it would be good if there was a good way to see them curated in an updated list.

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