14 DAY TRIAL // Some of the US and British governments' actions after Edward Snowden leaks have been peculiar. Not the constant lying and attempts to cover up their mess, those were to be expected, at least from the spy agencies involved. But other actions can't be so easily explained or they couldn't be easily explained until today.
For example, you'd hope US President Barack Obama to be a little more careful about the lies he tells. No one expects him to tell the truth, after all, there are things, legitimate things, that must be kept from the public.
But to come out in front of the world's press and say that Americans aren't spied on, only for a leaked document to prove the exact opposite days later doesn't look like something Obama would knowingly risk.
On more than one occasion, Obama said things that were proven to be wrong. At this point, there are only two explanations left, either the president is knowingly lying to the Americans and the world, or he has no clue what's going on and he's being lied to by the NSA.
Most likely, it's a combination of the two and neither case makes the president look good, he's either a liar or an incompetent.
Moving on to more recent events, UK officials detained the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is responsible for most of the Snowden leaks. Greenwald lives in Brazil and his partner was passing through London on his way to Rio de Janeiro.
He was held for nine hours in an airport and then let go, but all his electronics and other possessions were confiscated. He may have been carrying some documents from the Snowden leak at the time.
Separately, the Guardian recounted an event from a few weeks back, when British secret agents forced it to destroy the hard drives and memory sticks that may have contained any of the documents leaked by Snowden.
This even though the Guardian explained that the documents were also available to the US team and that others were in their possession as well, so destroying them in the UK would do nothing to stop the leaks.
But the agents didn't necessarily want the documents destroyed, they first asked the Guardian to hand them over or destroy them if they didn't.
These incidents, quite expectedly, didn't make the UK government look particularly good and sparked international outrage, begging the question “Was it all worth it?”
Well, in the light of the revelation that the NSA and, by extension, the British GCHQ, still don't know what Snowden took, then, yes, it was worth it. The agencies are desperate to find out what's out there, which is why they're willing to bully the partner of a journalist and threaten a newspaper with closure if they don't comply.
This is also why Obama has been making a fool of himself, the NSA simply had no idea that journalists knew or would find out that what Obama was saying was false. On the one hand, that's a good thing, it means that future reveals may catch governments unprepared. On the other, their desperation makes it a lot more dangerous for journalists to keep on revealing the abuses.