One of the pleasures in writing about Edward Snowden is his predilection for the absurd. The NSA whistleblower abandons his dancer girlfriend for a life in exile, hides in airports, studies Dostoyevsky, appears by teleconference at a technology conference in Texas, and even attempts to learn Russian to acclimate to his new home in Moscow. It's a delicious story, and on Thursday, Snowden delivered his latest morsel: He called in to Vladimir Putin's televised Q&A session with the Russian public.
True to form, Snowden asked the Russian strongman whether his government engages in practices similar to those the whistleblower has exposed at the NSA. Moreover, Snowden inquired, does Putin think that governments are justified in placing entire societies under surveillance rather than just targeting individuals if such dragnet eavesdropping may help combat terrorism?
Putin's reply was a perfect illustration of the inherently bizarre situation: "Mr. Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy. I used to be working for an intelligence service. We are going to talk one professional language."
But that "professional language" could also be described another way: a lie. Putin proceeded to inform Snowden that, no, Russian security services do not engage in dragnet surveillance and that such tactics are against Russian law anyway. "We don't have a mass system of such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist." But even if it wanted to do so, Putin said with a smile, Russia has no where near the money or technological sophistication of the American intelligence services. "I hope we won't do that, and we don't have as much money as they have in the States and we don't have these technical devices that they have in the States."
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