Believe me, Russian government is doing the same thing as NSA did. There are rumors about spying hardware installed in Russian ISPs. There are rumors about Russian organization that produces hardware for logging all internet traffic, decrypting on the fly encrypted data, filtering it and etc. Difference between this and NSA is than information about NSA is now public.
No contradiction to the point that GP made. Nobody said that Putin's Russia is more free than US. They just did the right thing in this particular case and made the "land of the free" look hypocritical as a result. This doesn't imply anything about how Russia citizens are treated by their own state.
Snowden is nothing more than a political pawn for Russia. Once he landed in Moscow he had little power over his own destiny.
Snowden didn't get asylum in Russia out of the goodness of their hearts but rather Putin wanting to annoy USA and score anti-USA points on home turf. It has nothing to do with "doing the right thing" It is a political game, nothing else.
It is naive to believe anything else. It did, however, benefit Snowden, it is probably better to sit in a Russian quasi-house-arrest than a trip to an American prison.
Bad doesn't cancel out good, they exist side by side. I admire the US for it's amazing alternative culture (steampunk, goth, robots, anime, comic books, oh my). I admire it for it's incredible technological innovation. I have often weighed those things against the lack of support for it's citizens (No free healthcare, little to no vacation, often mandatory overtime, rich wins legal system, etc). I don't know as much about Russia and the US but I'm sure that it has a tremendous amount of good and bad living side by side. There's plenty to be proud of as well as ashamed of.
Unfortunately I know about Russia too much. I totally agree with you, but from my point of view and with information that I'm getting about Russia I can't see how to look at that country from positive perspective.
