Joshua Foust has another post up about Snowden — this time burning it in even more that he is naive, and in fact dangerously naive — so it's not really his fault. It's other people's fault who exploited him.

To be sure, he adds "or a liar," but then, that would mean the problem is merely Snowden and his character and nothing larger (like the American hacker movement which helped him, and WikiLeaks).

In case you didn't come away from his previous post on Snowden with the subliminal message that Snowden is naive, Snowden is naive, and therefore it's just that he's a crazy mixed-up goofy kid and we shouldn't focus on him too much, Foust reiterates the point multiple times in his latest post:

o "So either Snowden is either lying about the nature of the data he stole or he is dangerously naïve, since a newspaper [Der Spiegel] clearly aghast at those documents nevertheless chose not to publish some."

o "Interestingly, the only party casually discussing Edward Snowden’s torture and execution is, apparently, Edward Snowden"

o "That he also brags of being immune to torture (a laughable claim), while spouting delusions of assassination, just makes the whole affair terribly odd."

o "Meanwhile, Snowden’s increasingly bizarre stunts are having the fascinating side effect of alienating many Russian human rights activists."

Actually, that's an odd remark, when the leading human rights activists in Russia and internationally all greeted him at the airport when he invited them to come and were happy to serve as a foil for his bid for unconditional asylum.

Putin got the extra added benefit of discrediting human rights activists once again, even as they were doing something in his interest, because they were consorting with a "foreign agent". While you can't claim human rights groups like Human Rights Watch are "foreign agents," who is a more quintessential foreign agent than Edward Snowden? That he's a defecting foreign agent doesn't cure it for Putin — as a KGB chief, he knows once a spy, always a spy, and you might be a double agent.

There were strange things about that "meeting with lawyers" event at Sheremetyevo, to be sure, but one thing accomplished is in fact to both denigrate human rights NGOs as associates of a "foreign spy" for the common man, but increase their credibility with the intelligentsia — which has been propagandized to hate them — now that they are being propagandized to love Snowden. If you lost me there, I totally understand.

Foust continues:

o "What does this mean? I’m remain entirely unsure what to make of Snowden as a person — is he lying about his actions and intentions or just gob-smackingly naïve about the world and his own role in it? And who gave him the patently foolish advice to try to enter Russia on a revoked passport? More must come out before we can say."

Oh, really? Well, why is the source of the advice to go to Russia so elusive for Foust? Obviously, it's WikiLeaks – Assange himself or one of his lieutenants. As it has been pointed out, follow the money — and watch the dates that the WL coffers empty out and then replenish after December 2012 thanks to Freedom of the Press Foundation when they have to start shuttling Snowden around the world. WikiLeaks people have guided him every step of the way. They were the ones who told him to go to Moscow, most certainly. Why does more need to be coming out? He put himself in the hands of WikiLeaks; they delivered him to their masters — or the foreign power that they imagine they as super kool hacker dudes are exploiting with their leet skillz.

Okay, we got it — Snowden (who is pretty leet himself!) is naive, naive, naive! And therefore not to blame…and yet WikiLeaks isn't being blamed either…

But at the same time, Foust is also dropping the idea — picked up by Business Insider here and here ("mind-boggling naivite!) and others who have reprinted his theses — that this story is a "sophisticated intelligence operation". By…the Kremlin, from all indications.

So now retired or tired spooks everywhere are retweeting Foust as if he is now the go-to guru on the Kremlin and defectors with an ostensible critical stance toward Russia — when in fact he has never been anything of the kind.

Remember, he wrote that outrageously sinister post on Pussy Riot — and not four months ago, he was snuggling with the Kremlin's approved "perestroika liberals" like Dmitry Trenin at a Kumbaya (as it has been called by Nathalie Vogel) in Moscow arranged by Carnegie Europe. Yes, at the height of the crackdown on NGOs, and arrests of demonstrators, these folks were having thinky discussions about how trans-Atlanticism could be advanced (of the kind advantageous to Moscow).

From there, Foust filed another nasty-gram about Pussy Riot, this time for UN Dispatch, which was also reprehensible — the rest of the world is at least defending them on grounds of principle and not sneering that Hollywood stars defend them.

It's hard to get people to "get it" about Foust precisely because he is always, um, refashioning himself. Since he was let go from American Security Project when Kerry, who headed it, became Secretary of State, he first turned to writing about Yemen and drones — and turning in terribly immoral pieces — and then began pontificating about Russia, because that's in the news.

And there's this — his stronghold of Registan.net, a site which I could describe as a kind of open-source project to enable intelligence agents and regime tools East and West to speak with their sock-puppets to real people –  has collapsed. All the main protagonists of this project have fled the site, and they all lost their real-life jobs. All of them are freelancing in the wilderness or doing various "projects". Basically, the field of Central Asian studies which has been Foust's stomping grounds for years began to be defunded. He began to flip-flop accordingly, as some thought, but here I expained, too, that it was connivance.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and other fine upstanding pillars of the Twitter community think I'm all wrong about my theory of Foust's distractions and propagandizing on Snowden as being about serving some deeper agenda. And mind you, this "deeper agenda" need not involve "Moscow gold" but could merely be about positioning himself to appear pro-NSA to get his next gig (he was a DoD contractor in the past).

But now that he's told us about 14 more times that "Snowden is naive" — and "it's all a sophisticated intelligence operation" then let's speculate what this could really be about, since Foust is not trust-worthy:

1. Snowden isn't really a sophisticated intelligence operation by the Russians, but the Russians want us to think it is.

2. Snowden isn't really a sophisticated intelligence operation by the Russians, but the Russians want to try to play catch-up on this and turn it into one.

3. Snowden is in fact a sophisticated intelligence operation by the Russians, but the NSA doesn't want us to think it is because it's embarassing to them.

4. Snowden is only a pawn in the hands of Julian Assange or others in the network — Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, etc. — they're the runners of this sophisticated intel op!

5. Snowden is really a sophisticated intelligence operation run by WikiLeaks, which is a "sovereign group" (to use Jacob Appelbaum's term), but neither Russia nor the US want us to know that, and therefore it helps to portray Snowden as naive.

6. Confusion for — whatever.

My operating theory is that somebody — and it could be in US or Russian intelligence or both, and Foust talks to all kinds of odd people in that regard — would like us to think that Snowden is naive so that we don't have to think this leak is so serious (because he's a goof and really has no "crown jewels).

Or so that we'll look to Putin, and not study Snowden and his networks more closely.

And you can't rule out that even though they are at loggerheads, and seem to be in a period of greater antagonism now with a number of incidents (from the expulsion of our CIA agent to the, er, short-fall in intelligence from the Russians on the Tsarnaevs), the two countries' agencies could collude on certain things such as making this entire Snowden thing out to be not as bad as it looks. They each may have their reasons for this, starting with the fact that both keep citizens under surveillance — and Russia does more of it even with American superior technical capacity.

I can only call this as I've seen it at the beginning:

1. Snowden was always going to Moscow, because that is the logical and ideological destination for anarchist hackers.

2. WikiLeaks colloborates with the Kremlin willingly, and it is not even a case of them being used unwittingly.

3. Possibly Putin may let him go to Belarus, or even Venezuela, which are under Kremlin control, but that will be for tactical reasons.

4. He is now in a safehouse in Yasenovo where military intelligence (GRU) is located or some other intel safe house and is being shaken down, as are his laptops — which have encrypted comms on them most likely, not files. The files are elsewhere, and can be accessed in various ways from the Internet.

5. Putin will go on capering in various charades, pretending to be concerned or not self-interested, but of course, this is a windfall and he will milk it – if he hadn't scripted it from the beginning.

 So, how can we know that Snowden isn't "naive"?

Because you can't confuse the infantalism of the hacker, the self-aggrandizement of the anarchist, and the myopia of the radical about America versus Russia as "naivete" — they really are different phenomenon, and the hacker nihilists are as cynical and in fact worldly-wise as they come.

It's more about affirming the virtual as the real — but then, hackers have had really great successes doing this again and again, and putting facts on the ground (as WikiLeaks did).

I think as more facts come out about Snowden, we will see his huge caper had more planning and more help than is visible to the naked eye now.

I think his disappearance for three or four years from the Internet after 2009 and his culmination at Booz, Allen Hamilton lets us know that there is planning here, and more than a little sophistication.

Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum can seem clueless and childishly idealistic at times but then around them are people whose names we don't know (yet) who are far more sophisticated and driven. "Naive" would imply that none of these people made choices, or knew what they were getting into. Of course they do; they see the world in these terms, and try to wish it into being.

People like Manning and Snowden do as much damage as they do because they have help. And the institutions that have been harmed by them are the least motivated to illustrate how much help they have, because they want to make it appear as if they are one-offs, or lone-wolves, or aberrations, not repeated targets of sophisticated networks.

It's very, very easy for intelligence and military agencies from Russia, China, Iran, etc. to get into the stream of the whole hacker/open source/anarchist/anti-war milieu on the Internet and make suggestions to impressionable minds.

But in Snowden's case, he planned — and that means it's not lack of awareness about repercussions, it's about magical belief in hacker powers that actually isn't always proved wrong.