You may know that notorious whistle-blower Edward Snowden conducted an interview last Friday in which he responded to questions submitted to him on Twitter. Or you may not: what a surprise, any coverage of that was hard-to-find on the main US Internet media outlets.

That’s not the case in Germany, where they just LOVE Edward Snowden and can’t get enough of his doings and pronouncements. In fact, German Snowden-mania went on to reach a peak of sorts shortly thereafter.

OK, tief in die Nacht, or “deep into the night”: the exclusive Snowden interview (filmed in Moscow, of course) shown in the name of the ARD, which is the German national association of public broadcasters, did start at 23.00 hours on a Sunday night. Yet, as this piece in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes, executives at Germany’s first public television channel pulled out all the stops to ensure a sizeable audience, such as scheduling it in the period after the Sunday evening news and just after a six-person panel-discussion show at which Snowdon (“Hero or Traitor?” – with a former US Ambassador to Germany present to argue for the latter) was topic #1.

That having been accomplished – and viewer figures were around 2 million – afterwards they have turned rather protective of their vaunted “world exclusive.” If you click through the tweet to go to the SZ article, you immediately see the YouTube video of the interview, but you can’t watch it (nor on YouTube itself) because the ARD has taken care to restrict it geographically, likely only to viewers in Germany.

On the other hand, this SZ article provides a link to a transcript of the interview (only in German, of course), and the piece itself is itself a précis: it summaries what it views as the highpoints, eleven of them. (more…)

One leading complaint about the ongoing NSA data-collection scandal from those truly in the know is how the press has focused so much on Edward Snowden’s own story (e.g. his views towards his native land, his struggle to find asylum, etc.) to the detriment of setting out and analyzing for the public just what it is that American intelligence agencies have been getting away with and why that matters.

Unfortunately, we can today see a further example of this from no less than Die Welt. The headline to their particular piece reads “Kofi Annan was also spied upon”, and the lede:

The NSA eavesdropping scandal continues to enrage minds. But the past shows us that large-scale spy-actions are nothing new. Even UN General Secretary Kofi Annan was spied upon.

And sure enough, there he is: a head-shot of Annan looking serious and pensive is right there at the top.

It’s really rather bizarre if you go on and read into the article that reporters Ansgar Graw* and Julia Smirnova actually wrote, though. “Kofi”? Who’s that? It’s Snowden, Snowden, and more Snowden. Will he get asylum? Will he just stay in Russia? What has happened to change Ecuador’s mind about accepting him? Did he himself even write the letter which was recently made public in which he complained about how the US government was treating him? (It is riddled with British spellings which he presumably would not use.)

In short, there is this strange, wide cleft between headline and lede (and picture) on the one hand, and the article’s actual body of information. Of course, it is editors who generally provide the former as a piece is whipped into shape for publication. It’s also true that the fact that Kofi Annan (and all other UN Secretaries-General) were spied upon by US authorities is returned to at the article’s very end (under the section-heading “Eavesdropping happened always and everywhere”).

But that attitude of “nothing new here” itself seriously downplays the sheer ignominy of the new surveillance developments that Snowden revealed, e.g. how wide-ranging the survellance abuse was (including its coverage of leading European allies), to what lengths Obama administration officials were willing to go to lie about them, and the like. As does of course the People magazine-style obsession with Snowden’s own personal tale – we are being let down by our journalists, in whichever language.

* Doesn’t his name seem like it got mangled in a spelling-machine somewhere? Or that perhaps it should really be spelled backwards?

Get ready!

That’s “Edward Snowden ready to leave for Iceland?”, from Belgium’s leading French-language business newspaper, L’Echo. And then the first paragraph:

A private jet paid by contributions collected by Wikileaks stands ready to take Edward Snowden to Iceland. However, the authorities of that country have not given the green light for the arrival on their territory of the ex-CIA agent [note: this is an incorrect characterization], responsible for unprecedented US intelligence leaks. As he waits, Snowden still is in hiding in Hong Kong.

“The plane can take off tomorrow,” is the further claim of one Olafur Sigurvinsson quoted here, an executive with an Icelandic company responsible for collecting funds for Wikileaks. As to the important question of “From where?”, the answer is apparently “already from China” (i.e. it does not have to fly there first from Iceland, or anywhere else), since it has been rented from a Chinese company.

Please note again: “a Chinese company.” For the key question here concerns the 10,000+ km journey that would take Snowden to Iceland: whichever way they take, there would be plenty of opportunities for interception by the US Air Force, should President Obama so order. And that fact of a Chinese plane adds a delicious dash of potential Sino-American confrontation to the mix; you might not recall, but those two countries already had a serious air-interception incident between them (that time the Chinese forcing down a US military spy-plane) more than ten years ago.

So, will Obama give that order? You’d have to expect so, meaning that Snowden will swiftly be diverted to the usual regime of pre-trial torture at a US military prison somewhere, à la Bradley Manning. Thankfully for him – for Obama, that is – his grand speech before that hand-picked audience at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate will already be in the past. The German public seemed remarkably content to ignore the latest NSA spying revelations during his visit there, but they could not ignore a slap-in-your-face gesture like that. Nor will the world at large, when it happens, sometime soon now.

By the way, there is also some uncertainty as to whether Iceland might not just reward Snowden for his long flight – even if they allow his arrivel – by promptly turning him over to American authorities themselves. As this L’Echo piece points out, in 2010 the Icelandic Parliament (a.k.a. the Althing) did adopt a resolution declaring the country a refuge for defenders of freedom of expression and transparency. Then again, in the words of Interior Minister Hanna Kristjansdottir (i.e. the official who would be directly in charge of the matter), “[That] resolution has nothing to do with the laws that apply to asylum-seekers.” Oh – well OK, then.

UPDATE: Nevermind. Snowden turns out to be too clever for that, at least when it comes to the means he intends to take to get to Iceland, if that is even where he is heading.