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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Those sources still don't say that Snowden gave information to china. He talked to a newspaper. And to that newspaper he confirmed that, among other places, the NSA hacked chinese computers. No mention of a quid pro quo.
That newspaper is a Chinese newspaper, now an English propaganda apparatus of the Chinese government. Why do you think Snowden went to Hong Kong to begin with? Why do you think he specifically knew he had those documents in his trove of documents that he claimed he didn't look at?
The conspiracy-brain is strong in you. But there are perfectly rational arguments for all your allegations. Snowden went to Hong Kong, because it offers comparably high living standards to the US and was still somewhat free back then, while being squarely outside of the US sphere of influence. So he didn't need to fear being extradited or kidnapped while being able to take advantage of the freedom of the press that existed back then in Hong Kong.
He absolutely had some idea of what information he had at hand, as he was able to give the journalists pointers on what to report on first. Furthermore, the first reporting that SCMP did that you linked was on June 13th. The first reporting done on the leaked material was done by the Guardian on June 5th, so by the time Snowden gave the interview to SCMP, he and the journalists had to have dug through the material already.
The SCMP is, as you said, a chinese newspaper. So it absolutely makes sense that they'd ask China-focussed questions like "Were there chinese systems compromised?"
There has been absolutely no reporting on Snowden meeting with chinese officials.
And Snowden claimed to be a patriotic American. Why would he tell the Chinese about the systems that the U.S. had compromised? He also told the SCMP that he chose Hong Kong years ago, so telling them about these hacks clearly wasn't some spur of the moment decision made with little forethought.
This is not some vast conspiracy theory requiring dozens of people to be in on some secret plan. This is a simple analysis of a single simple-minded man.
Thing with patriotism is that everyone understands something different. Some may think that not questioning your leaders and doing what they tell you is what it means to be patriotic. Others may think that fighting injustice and corruption in your own country, so that every citizen may live in a free and just society, is what being patriotic is about. Some may even go so far as to say that fighting for your country to be fair and honest not only to your own citizens, but also other countries is patriotic. Snowden is part the latter group. You seem to be part of the first.
And of course leaking that amount of material is not a spur-of-the-moment decision. He clearly planned carefully for a long time. How is this even a point you are trying to make? He did exactly what conscientious whistleblower should do.
And calling Snowden simple-minded truly betrays your ignorance. It is you, in fact, who is simple-minded, as you jump to conclusions based on conjecture devoid of facts.
Absolutely not. I'm for fighting government abuse. I'm against helping antagonistic foreign dictatorships like China. You and Snowden seem to be for the latter. It is not that hard to do the former without doing the latter.
His plan to live in Hong Kong didn't work for what to me seems obvious reasons. He completely misinterpreted the PRISM slides. He failed a very simple analyst test. He's unironically a libertarian. He didn't understand whistleblower laws at all and didn't even bother to consult a lawyer. For all of these simple thinking errors, he now finds himself living under Putin's thumb. All the available evidence points to one conclusion.
Like I said, different definitions of what it means to be patriotic. But don't call Snowden simple-minded, that is just plain stupid.
Sorry, I updated my comment while you were responding. Please go ahead and update your response, and I'll then cross out this comment.
I don't see how your edit changes anything. You just claim stuff without any sources. I for one didn't find anything relating to Snowden misinterpreting PRISM. Just a bunch of newspapers explaining how PRISM works based on the data Snowden released. And why exactly should he trust the US whistleblower laws, when the US government is the one breaking the law and Snowden is the one exposing them? The US has prosecuted plenty of whistleblowers trying to expose government wrongdoing. He was right not to trust the US government and he was proven right by the US even going to so far as to force a plane carrying the Bolivian president to land, because they suspected Snowden on board. Him having to live in Russia is more a testament to how far the US is willing to go to catch him, rather than him being naive or "stupid".
Snowden claimed PRISM lets the NSA read any American's emails and chats. Greenwald believed him because he didn't know any better. It turned out not to be the case. Instead, the US government could request real-time copies via Section 702 orders (used for data for specific accounts belonging to non-Americans outside the US) that would be ingested by the FBI's existing wiretap integration for requesting data for Americans under court ordered surveillance, and PRISM was just the data ingestion system that integrated with the FBI for that non-American data. It's clearly shown in the slides, but neither Snowden nor Greenwald had enough smarts to Google the word, "DITU" and came up with wild conspiracies involving NSA computers running in Google's data centers requesting any data they liked.
The only illegal domestic surveillance program in the entirety of the leaks was a system that collected phone metadata about who called whom when for how long. The leaks showed that it could only be queried in a very particular way. Snowden thought the NSA could listen in on any American's phone calls and read any American's email, but nothing of the sort showed up in his leaks.
Why should he trust US whistleblower laws? Because they work. The guy who leaked Trump's call to Zelensky asking him to investigate Hunter Biden was protected by whistleblower laws to the point that you don't even know his name. After he filed a whistleblower complaint and the investigation began, multiple other witnesses came forward. None of them have been prosecuted, and this was even under Trump.