This morning, news cycles were delightfully alighted with reports Ed Snowden had gone on the lamb, international style, a fare-thee well to Hong Kong, and after an airline flight across some vast open spaces, ended up this evening in Moscow, where he apparently staged some stealth moves to avoid detection — a story unfolding like it was scripted.

A standard narrative of people working to help the hero sneak past agents sent by the bad guys.

(Illustration found here).

The rub here: The bad guys are us.

The UK’s Guardian told bits of the story this evening:

The intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden will on Monday attempt to complete an audacious escape to the relative safety of South America after his departure from Hong Kong escalated already fraught diplomatic relations between the United States and China.
In a move that appeared to bewilder the White House, Snowden was allowed to flee Hong Kong on Sunday morning and head to Moscow on a commercial flight despite a formal request from the US to have the 30-year-old detained and extradited to face espionage charges for a series of leaks about the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s spy centre, GCHQ.
Arriving in Moscow, Snowden disappeared again, leaving the aircraft without being spotted, but being pursued by the Ecuadorian ambassador, Patricio Chávez, amid speculation that he will fly to Quito on Monday, possibly via Cuba.
Snowden has asked for political asylum in Ecuador, the country that has also given shelter to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, at its embassy in London.
…
Moscow was also drawn into the controversy after it emerged that Snowden’s passport had been revoked before he left Hong Kong and he did not have a visa for Russia.
But Russia appeared indifferent to the uproar, with one official saying Snowden was safe from the authorities as long as he remained in the transit lounge at the city’s Sheremetyevo airport.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said: “I know nothing.”
…
Washington will also challenge Hong Kong over its decision to let Snowden flee.
In a statement, the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (HKSAR) said it could not have stopped Snowden because America’s request to detain him on a provisional warrant — filed in papers last week — did not fully comply with legal requirements.
“As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong,” the statement said.
Yet the admission that Snowden had been allowed to leave was made five hours after he had boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, and the discovery of the oversight came two days after the papers had been formally sent.

And meanwhile, other shit surfaced:

On Saturday, the South China Morning Post disclosed details of new documents from Snowden, which suggested the NSA had hacked into Chinese phone companies.
For the second time in 10 days General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, had to defend the agency’s activities, and he did not deny the latest allegations.
“To say that we’re willfully just collecting all sorts of data would give you the impression that we’re just trying to canvas the whole world,” Alexander said.
…
But China’s official Xinhua news agency said the revelations had “put Washington in a really awkward situation”.
“They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age,” it said.

Alexander defended the scheme of mass surveillance by non-denial: “The case that Snowden has brought up is in defending this nation from a terrorist attack.”
And he blubbered the standard over-used bullshit of “tremendous oversight” on intelligence-gathering operations.
The good general is full of shit (also from the Guardian):

He read from a 2012 intelligence committee report about a law that broadened the NSA’s authority to perform surveillance even when US communications are involved that said after “four years of oversight, the committee has not identified a single case in which a government official engaged in wilful effort to circumvent or violate the law”.
Yet last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence conceded publicly that the surveillance had violated the fourth amendment on at least one occasion.
The circumstances behind that violation remain classified.
…
Citing statistics on when NSA could query that database in 2012, Alexander said, “Two-thirds of those are foreign. One-third were in the US.”
Yet the NSA has said in the past that it lacked the analytic tools to even make an assessment on how many Americans have had their communications swooped up in its databases, and that doing so would itself violate Americans’ privacy.

Yet they could also be lying out their ass. Big Jim Clapper, director of National Intelligence, already done that.
Via Slate earlier this month:

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.”
As we all now know, he was lying.
We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying.
In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did.
He replied: “I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Least untruthful is still a lie.

As I worked on this post, I also listened to, and occasionally watched ‘The West Wing‘ on Netflix — episodes of the MS controversy as President Barlett finally goes public — forgot about the insertion of the always-wonderful Oliver Platt as White House Counsel Oliver Babish.
Irony is also a good plot device.