The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:

> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".

Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.

> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.

( ... )

> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."

IMO the underlying reason for this is one or more of:

1) Americans are [statistically speaking] doing very well, high GDP, lots of consumer products to buy, lots of entertainment, lots of cheap food... and wikileaks is not doing anything to help but maybe destroy this.

2) Americans are also doing very poorly, the bottom 25% have bigger problems to deal with than wikileaks. Why would they care if the CIA is watching them if they can't afford next month's rent?

3) Information overload: Similiar to 1, we get overloaded with things we ought to care about, climate, wiki leaks, wars.... it's too much and people really just want. #1.

Or maybe I'm off...

Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike

Not likely, both political parties hate him.

He may have lost that opportunity when he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically, in a dictatorial police state.

Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.

It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.

Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.

"If the powers that be don't want the boat to rock, it simply will not rock. "

Hear me out, it's not so much the powers, it's the people. If you poll people, they might say they want all this information and government reform.

But if you try to give them even 1 bit of hardship to accomplish this, then will not and it is easily forgotten.

This to me makes a lot more sense than 'the powers' in complete control.

It's all fun and games until the mind wanders to you getting polonium-210'd for your work, and you decide 'my life isn't worth _this_.' It's kind of dumb people choose fear, but I understand it.

You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.

You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)

>We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming.

In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?

Your comment started out well within the Overton window, but in the second paragraph it jumped out.

Can we call that Overton window defenestration?

Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?

I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.

Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).

If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.

India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.

Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.

Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?

That's still a single window. Otherwise what are the radical, unthinkable positions between abhorrent, fine and moot?

(TL;DR: It's just a metaphor).

Plenty of people care.

Empathy is, after all, free.

Action has a price.

That's how it looks at least. It's a good excuse if your goal was always to flee to Russia.

He could have returned to the US. He chose to exile in Russia. He was already fleeing. I posted a bunch about it below

He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.

He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.

But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.

Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.

Eeesh, the propaganda must be strong in the US if you're getting downvoted for this. You're essentially summarising documented facts.

Absolutely not a joke.

Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.

So what? They have Cloudflare. "SSL removed here"

That’s true

Ecuador was his original plan. He had been granted asylum there.

He needs to invent a time machine first. He obviously doesn't have access to the leaked documents anymore.

But I agree that there is no reason for the journalists that have access to not do this.

They're just hiding misconduct because the government does an enormous number of things that would be national scandals if they weren't allowed to bury them.