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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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He was specific in what he released. He released a list of compromised Chinese systems in order to try to gain asylum in Hong Kong, which is the first place he went to. China kicked him out of the country, so he had to change plans. Edit: ~~https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259508/edward-snowden-us-government-has-been-hacking-hong-kong-and-china~~ see below
How do you read into that article that he handed a list of compromised systems to chinese authorities?
Oops. Wrong article. https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266892/exclusive-nsa-targeted-chinas-tsinghua-university-extensive-hacking
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266875/exclusive-us-hacked-pacnet-asia-pacific-fibre-optic-network-operator
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chinese-mobile-phone-companies-steals-sms-data-edward-snowden
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266777/exclusive-snowden-safe-hong-kong-more-us-cyberspying-details-revealed
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" on the slide 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, who is unafraid to file meritless lawsuits. If Snowden just blew the whistle on the single illegal program in his leaks, he would be in the U.S. earning royalties from his book deal.
Dude, you keep arguing as if the Snowden leaks haven't been scrutinized to hell and back. I need to only search once for the US reading the communication of americans and it brings up countless articles like this one making reference to the Snowden leaks. You keep dissing Snowden and Greenwald, as if those two were the only ones analyzing the files. In truth, entire teams of journalists from multiple outlets worked on different parts of those stories. Do I trust you, who can't even provide a source, or hundreds of journalists and the obviously scummy and sometimes downright illegal behavior of the US government to shut those journalists down? And just because it isn't "illegal", because the government gave itself the right to fuck you over, doesn't mean that it is morally permissible. You didn't even address the fact that the US forced the plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Europe due to pressure from the US, because it flies in the face of your narrative that the US is a righteous place where you can trust the law, even when the government itself wants to silence you. You know how they got around not being able to spy on Americans? They got the brits and other countries to do it for them. That is what the Five-Eyes organization is all about. The Wikipedia article I linked detailing the Snowden leaks even break down in which direction the data transfer went between the different spy agencies.
Do not support Snowden's claim that the NSA could read any American's emails or listen to any American's phone calls. Greenwald (through Snowden's insistence) thought that DITU was an NSA computer inside American Internet companies. That's the source of the misconception, which resulted in Greenwald's sensational claim, "But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers."
The article itself is a misreporting of this WaPo article that said half of the communications contained references to American residents. This makes sense of course, because the foreign accounts being surveilled were thought to have national security importance for the U.S.
And the ones who knew what they were talking about disparaged Greenwald's reporting that was based solely on Snowden's ignorance. The first newspaper to get the story right was the New York Times. Then CNET's Declan McCullough repeatedly called Greenwald out on his poor reporting. ZDNet quite reasonably asked why neither Greenwald nor his editor bothered to consult a subject matter expert. The tech blogosphere ripped it apart at the time, to the point that Greenwald kept responding in an unhinged way to open source tech celebrities on Twitter. But you didn't need to be in tech at the time to understand this. This got picked up in mainstream news summary sites like The Week.
That's because it was Bolivia, and each country has a right to police its own airspace. France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can choose which planes they allow to fly over their countries, and that is their right under international law. The US didn't unlawfully down a plane over a European country's airspace.
This is a conspiracy theory that isn't supported by any documents at all, especially nothing in Snowden's documents. This agreement started as BRUSA, which was a no-spy agreement, which Germany requested access to after the Germans and the Americans had been caught spying on each other in the early 2000s. This no-spy provision is alluded to in the WaPo article I linked to above: "At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand."