Snowden Granted 3 More Years of Russian Residency

SiggyRadiation writes Edward Snowden is allowed to stay in Russia for three more years. According to the NYPost:"His lawyer, Analtoly Kucherena, was quoted by Russian news agencies on Thursday as saying Snowden now has been granted residency for three more years, but that he had not been granted political asylum. That status, which would allow him to stay in Russia permanently, must be decided by a separate procedure, Kucherena said, but didn't say whether Snowden is seeking it." The question that remains, of course, is did the Russians use this as leverage over him to get to more information or influence him? Or is the positive PR in itself enough for the Russians in the current climate of tensions and economic sanctions relating to the Ukraine crisis?"

Comments

Re:Meanwhile ...

[AchilleTalon]

Just because the revealing of an illegal practice modifies the behavior of others does not make that illegal practice legitimate.

Of course not, however it means Snowden has reveal much more than necessary to make his point and has grabbed an insane quantity of data to make it leaking this data to external sources.

This being said, I am not convince you can link the change in encryption software from Al-Qaida and the likes to Snowden's stunt. In the meantime there were also cryptography courses that were made available through MOOC offerings and one thing these courses emphasize on is: don't do your own crypto software use commercial or open source crypto software which will happen to be much more secure than anything you can develop unless you are an expert within a team of experts with considerable means. It is perfectly plausible they switched to open source crypto after someone of them enrolled into such a course instead of listening at Snowden's leaked stuff.

Circumstancial proofs must be taken with caution.