Put yourself in his shoes. If you had a choice between being sent back to the US and Bradley Manning'd vs lobbing a softball question that technically exposes a lie (albeit one that isn't surprising) but also improves Putin's image domestically, which would you choose?

Part of the reason the continuing stories about NSA surveilance have been effective is that the NSA doesn't know what's coming. If they had a chance to put him in isolation and waterboard him until he confessed to what he took, the NSA could pre-empt the disclosures and do effective damage control.

Whether the value of that exceeds the impression of being hypocritical is up for debate.

> If you had a choice between being sent back to the US and Bradley Manning'd vs lobbing a softball question that technically exposes a lie (albeit one that isn't surprising) but also improves Putin's image domestically, which would you choose?

The "choice" is being offered to a guy who took an action he claimed to be very difficult, because of the principle of that action.

So yes, I expect him to demonstrate a commitment to his principles. Fleeing justice in pursuit of the greater good of those principles is one thing.

Aiding and abetting a different regime's use of mass surveillance and wiretapping, which violates the very principles he claims to espouse, is another thing entirely.

That he claimed to do this all in order to facilitate the end of mass surveillance in the U.S. only reinforces this point, because American data is also not safe if Russia can wiretap it.

If Snowden's standard is that mass surveillance is hazardous, then that needs to be his global standard on a global Internet.

But that is not Snowden's standard, which I've tried to warn about since a couple of days after his leaks first broke out.