I completely forgot that this is one of the assertions he makes. I think the main crux of his argument comes from:
1. He leaked the documents from Hong Kong (as opposed to within the US, where he might've got V&).
2. He's currently being protected by the Russian government, and razor can't postulate any reason besides it being quid-pro-quo.
3. When it all came out he revealed several methods to the Chinese on how the NCA was collecting their data.
4. There's a few contradictory statements between the exact date and communication between Snowden and the Russians.
5. Razor also doesn't believe Snowden when he said that he kept no documents from the NSA for himself and gave them all to journalists or destroyed them, because lying about the reasons you're quitting your job and fleeing your country forever on threat of life imprisonment in the worst cell the government can throw you into is on the same level of not disclosing everything absolutely necessary to the boon of the American people.
In general there was a lot of miscommunication and differing events from everybody during the early period in part because they intentionally wished to obfuscate in order to protect Snowden, and a lot of people weren't even aware to the fact they were being told lies for this purpose. And Snowden himself said his continued stay in Russia is the result of America's stronger influence over the countries that offered to asylum him (Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela -
though personally I think he chose Russia because of the generally (I suspect) higher standard of living.), not due to supposed ties.
The biggest smoking gun to this shit is what the government itself charged him with:
- 18 U.S.C. 641 Theft of Government Property
- 18 U.S.C. 793(d) Unauthorized Communication of National Defense Information
- 18 U.S.C. 798(a)(3) Willful Communication of Classified Intelligence Information to an Unauthorized Person
It feels like he did the same with China's supposed impending coup/implosion, where he read a glance of it in one another place (probably some Linkdn or Facebook boomer) and ran with it as gospel, or he's just creating a theory based on conjecture - again.
Snowden didn't "sell" to China, he
outright told them this shit for free, and it made its way up to the PRC because they own the press.
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.”
However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public’s right to know. “Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,” Greenwald said. “I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”
Greenwald said Snowden for example did not wish to publicize information that gave the technical specifications or blueprints for how the NSA constructed its eavesdropping network. “He is worried that would enable other states to enhance their security systems and monitor their own citizens.” Greenwald also said Snowden did not wish to repeat the kinds of disclosures made famous a generation ago by former CIA spy, Philip Agee—who published information after defecting to Cuba that outed undercover CIA officers. “He was very insistent he does not want to publish documents to harm individuals or blow anyone’s undercover status,” Greenwald said. He added that Snowden told him, “Leaking CIA documents can actually harm people, whereas leaking NSA documents can harm systems.”
Greenwald also said his newspaper had no plans to publish the technical specifications of NSA systems. “I do not want to help other states get better at surveillance,” Greenwald said. He added, “We won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing.”