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Its called a false flag operation, commonly used to implicate a nation rather than an individual.

The Snowden camp is rather well defended at this point. He has received asylum in a country where US forces can't simply collect him from. The leaks are given out carefully, with lessons learned from the events surrounding Wikileaks. The news are given out in pace with readers ability to absorb them.

So what can a government do? Stopping airplanes with national leaders in them only caused more uproar. Trying to strong-arm journalist just created more news articles. Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file". I guess they tried next with a false flag operation, hoping that it could go unnoticed. I wonder the think tanks will think of next.




>Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file".

If you buy the plausible argument that this was a UK govt leak designed to discredit Snowden while stating that the stolen information and the handling of it is a national security threat, then the grandiose and very public destruction of the hard drives actually makes sense. It was the gov't calling attention to its "attempt to destroy the information to limit harmful disclosure." The public grandstanding of that act would be a sensical precursor to a controlled leak of the sort the Independent published.




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