Ed Snowden Gave An Interview to Brian Williams.

And Brian Williams has freely taken. I'm not any kind of big old national security blogger, and I've never fully made up my mind where to stand on the subject of Ed Snowden, because he is just sui generis.  It is exactly true that his exploits have raised a conversation hitherto unthinkable--and I might add that what we will do exactly about it remains unthinkable, also. But I think the thing that everyone gasped about when it was dropped as a come-on to the rest of the interview was his claim that he is a "spy"--like, having worked for the CIA. NSA, and DOD under cover, what else would you even call him?

I don't know. Since he got treed in an airport after his passport was burned with no alternative but somehow to go to Russia, I'm thinking other terms might apply. I've called him the "Spy who Came in from the Warm" because "spy" is the only thing that makes sense, whether in the old-fashioned "working for a nation-state" sense or even in the less-conventional corporate-spy sense.

After all this, I'm giving it even odds that he's still a limited hang-out for US spy programs that were getting outed anyway and and doing modest and even overlooked tasks as "Our Man in Moscow" currently.

Or whatever. I've read way too many spy novels as a kid and am way too warped by the Cold War mentality now to think anyone is ever a straight-dealer where cloak, dagger, and digital data are concerned. Which is why I can't really appreciate whether this interview actually provided "information" per se.