[For NSA – when I was in the Agency we actually targeted a real enemy, not the delusions of politicians and cranks.]

I’m old, it’s my job to annoy people.

Marcy Wheeler wonders about Zero’s ‘stubbornness’ in the pursuit of Edward Snowden, but I feel that this White House blew by ‘stubbornness’ years ago and is in the deep end of the ‘obsessiveness’ pool.

I seriously doubt he has a ‘doomsday’ file stuffed away somewhere that will reveal all kinds of nasty things if he doesn’t check on it occasionally, but I wouldn’t bet US national security on it, unless I knew exactly what he accessed while he was at both the CIA and NSA. The CIA stuff is very likely to be nastier than anything he was doing at NSA, so I’m sure that someone at the CIA has been looking at the logs that they have naturally preserved against such a problem … eh, right?

On another site it was noted that the Ecuadoran foreign minister was in Hanoi for discussions while Snowden was in Hong Kong, so if Ecuador was inclined to give him asylum, he may already have the necessary travel documents.

Not for nothing, but Hong Kong is a rather major seaport, and people can still book passage on ships. While everyone is checking airports, Mr Snowden could be on a freighter headed to South America. With the necessary travel documents, it wouldn’t be difficult to reach Ecuador.

It looks like Aeroflot and the Cuban Ministry of Tourism just pulled off a great goof and scored some major hard currency by ‘leaking’ that Edward Snowden was listed as a passenger on a flight between Moscow and Havana.

Apparently dozens of journalist took the bait and didn’t figure out until after the aircraft left the gate that Snowden wasn’t on board. Then after a 12-hour alcohol-free flight to Cuba, they learned that they would have to stay in Cuba 3 days.

So, Vladimir is happy that there are fewer journalists in Russia. Aeroflot is happy that they filled up an aircraft at the highest price for tickets. Cuba is happy that they have dozens of extra visitors who will be paying for rooms and food for three days.

It’s nice that someone has figured out how to make money from the lemming ‘journalism’ that currently infests the Western press.