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Thursday, Jun 27, 2013 1:01 PM UTC

Snowden screen name said leakers “should be shot”

His amnesty application to Ecuador may also take months

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Topics: Edward Snowden, Leakers, Ecuador, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Asylum, ,

Snowden screen name said leakers Edward Snowden (Credit: AP/The Guardian)

Someone using Edward Snowden’s screen name on an Internet messaging board said leakers “should be shot” for revealing classified information, just four years before he became an international fugitive for leaking classified information.

During a January 2009 chat, on a ” public Internet Relay Chat” run by the site Ars Technica, which first reported it, the screen name Snowden used, TheTrueHOOHA, was discussing a New York Times article about classified U.S. dealings with Iran with an unidentified user:

< TheTrueHOOHA> HOLY SHIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp
< TheTrueHOOHA> WTF NYTIMES
< TheTrueHOOHA> Are they TRYING to start a war?
Jesus christ
they’re like wikileaks
< User19> they’re just reporting, dude.
< TheTrueHOOHA> They’re reporting classified shit
< User19> shrugs
< TheTrueHOOHA> about an unpopular country surrounded by enemies already engaged in a war
and about our interactions with said country regarding planning sovereignity violations of another country
you don’t put that shit in the NEWSPAPER
< User19> meh
< TheTrueHOOHA> moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?
< TheTrueHOOHA> those people should be shot in the balls.

In other news, Snowden’s asylum application to Ecuador “could take months” since he has not been able to travel from the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to the Ecuadorean embassy to process his application. Despite Snowden’s high profile the country wouldn’t necessarily feel any due haste to make a decision about him, according to Al Jazeera:

Richard Patino, the country’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday during a state visit to Malaysia that it took two months for the country to make a decision in the case of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks, and that Snowden’s case would take at least as long from the time the request was filed.

One complicating factor could be Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D.-N.J., who called on the U.S. to end a trade agreement with the Andean Nation if it shelters Snowden. Ecuador exports billions of dollars of goods to the U.S. under the agreement.

Alex Halperin

Alex Halperin is news editor at Salon. You can follow him on Twitter @alexhalperin. More Alex Halperin.

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