Just came across this translation, that Putin implied in a press conference that getting involved could be a case of "shearing a pig":

Why, then, would Russia keep its hands off of Snowden? On Tuesday evening, Putin hinted coyly at an explanation. When asked about the possibility of extraditing the whistleblower back to the U.S., he told a press conference: “Snowden sees himself as a rights activists and claims that he is fighting to spread information. Just ask yourself: is it worth handing people like that over for imprisonment? In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such questions, because it will turn out the same as sheering a pig – lots of squealing, little wool.”

I prefer this quote from the Berenson piece:

We have treated a whistle-blower like a traitor — and thus made him a traitor. Great job. Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial? Maybe he would have gone with President Vladimir V. Putin anyway, but at least he would have had another option. The secret keepers would have won too: a Congressional hearing would have been a small price to bring Mr. Snowden and those precious hard drives back to American soil.

This gets at what I was trying to say about Obama admin. incompetence. Not even chess players much less 3-dimensional.

While it is not totally the executive branch's fault that so much of this stuff has been privatized, with the accompanying loose security clearances, how they played it after it happened strikes me as not just not savvy but stupid.

Seems like with all similar problems, they take the pit bull prosecutorial approach to solving this problem they've been handed,  try to strike fear and loathing in everyone still working by making examples of the leakers. Lefties and libertarians worldwide react to that approach like a bully picking on a heroic underdog. They end up making propaganda heroes when they didn't have to.

The Wikileaks sympathizers et. al. would not have such good P.R. if they were treated less like clever lethal enemies and more like the dopey naifs you say they are and I tend to believe they are. I was just reviewing the Assange situation/story and it strikes me if they were just more transparent about what they are trying to investigate about him in that grand jury, he would have a much harder time looking like the hero to their bogeyman, probably be floundering in a Swedish courtroom to maintain any following at all.