I’ve been writing out some notes for a piece about the starkly different reactions different people are having to the Snowden story and what different assumptions we bring to it. But first I wanted to flag a couple other points. We’re going to be doing a lot of reporting on Snowden’s pre-leak career, trying to piece together and confirm what we can about his background, what if anything doesn’t match up between his account and what we can find out from other sources and so forth. So that’s coming. One of the basic questions I’m interested in is whether Snowden really had quite the level of access and power he claimed in his interview with the Guardian.

In part this is just because it’s worth knowing the credibility and motives of someone at the center of such a major story. But there are two other reasons I’m particularly interested in this. Read More