Plus, more paranoid fear-mongering

Glenn Greenwald is out there spreading paranoia about the US government again, telling the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake that Edward Snowden has distributed archives of his stolen documents to “many different people,” just in case “anything happens” to him.

As the U.S. government presses Moscow to extradite former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, America’s most wanted leaker has a plan B. The former NSA systems administrator has already given encoded files containing an archive of the secrets he lifted from his old employer to several people. If anything happens to Snowden, the files will be unlocked. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who Snowden first contacted in February, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

Like falling into the tender hands of Vladimir Putin, for example?

Also in this article, a very striking quote from Greenwald; the more he “explains” Snowden’s motives, the worse they sound.

Greenwald said he would not have published some of the stories that ran in the South China Morning Post. “Whether I would have disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking, I don’t think I would have,” Greenwald said. “What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.”

And what better way to “ingratiate” yourself to a country like China than to betray the United States?

Nice to know there are some things Glenn Greenwald wouldn’t publish, though.