5 years ago today, on June 12, 2013, Snowden made his first overt turn away from whistleblowing with an interview with the South China Morning Post. scmp.com/news/hong-kong… A quick look back at that interview (the details of which trickled out in installments):
On the first anniversary of the interview, SCMP reporter explained how it went down. Someone (likely Snowden lawyer Robert Tibbo) reached out to her and told her: "There's someone I'd like you to meet." scmp.com/news/hong-kong… reuters.com/article/us-usa… 
Lam didn't actually meet Snowden that day, though everyone assumed by the June 2013 reports that she interviewed him in person. Actually, she 'was instructed to be in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui that afternoon' and met with her contact and Laura Poitras.
After some more moving around in the hotel and confiscation of cell phones, she was told to sit down at a laptop and began chatting with "Verax." scmp.com/news/hong-kong…
On June 22, 2013, 10 days after the interview and one day before Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, we learned that Sno gave Lam/SCMP documents that "listed operational details of specific attacks on computers" in HK and mainland China. scmp.com/news/hong-kong…
This was the first Snowden leak that was clearly not whistleblowing or really in the public interest (others were more debateble). "That's simply espionage, everybody's doing it," a internatonal cyber conflict expert told me at the time. businessinsider.com/everybody-is-r…
More recently, a different cyber expert told me that Snowden “killed our programs in China on their routers, which probably set us back years."
Or in the words of @JeremyDuns in his very good book "News of the Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden": "If the NSA shouldn’t spy on China, who should it spy on?” amazon.com/News-Devils-Me…
Anyway, a couple of days later on June 24 — a day after Snowden arrived in Moscow — we learned that Sno obtained his job at Booz Allen so that he could to get "access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked." scmp.com/news/hong-kong…
Furthermore, and still very relevant today, Snowden told SCMP that he didn't give all of his classified docs to American journos and he had even more to go through. (USG estimated that Sno stole about 1.5 million docs and gave 200k docs to media. )
Asked about the leaks to SCMP, Greenwald said he wouldn't have published them — presumably because they couldn't really be spun as relating to civil liberties — and Sno did it out of "a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.” thedailybeast.com/greenwald-snow…
Even Bill Binney, a hero to Snowden who has become increasingly conspiratorial about USG spying over the years, asserted that the SCMP leaks were when Snowden began "transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor." businessinsider.com/william-binney…
tl;dr On 6/12/13, Snowden leaked docs to a Chinese newspaper detailing US ops unrelated to the civil liberties violations he'd become famous for exposing a few days prior. We only learned about these leaks right before and after Sno arrived in Moscow. Huge red flag in hindsight.
A few more relevant details from this time period (June 10 - June 24, 2013) that relate to what Snowden was doing in Hong Kong after he identified himself:
June 10: After Sno leaves the Mira Hotel, WikiLeaks swoops in. rollingstone.com/politics/news/…
June 10: After Sno leaves the Mira Hotel, WikiLeaks swoops in. rollingstone.com/politics/news/…
June 11: Russia becomes the first and only country to offer Snowden asylum consideration without having to first be in that country (which was the case for Iceland and others). foxnews.com/politics/2013/…
At some point, Snowden "met with" Russian officials in Hong Kong. The circumstances of these contacts (including timing) and what came out of them are murky. wsj.com/articles/putin…
Ever since the Oliver Stone move came out in Sept '16, Sno and Tibbo have said that he left the Mira Hotel and stayed with asylum seekers in HK. Three reports came out on the same day explaining the story, tho the details were slightly different in each.
In December, i asked Snowden about when he met with Russian officials and how that worked if he was staying with refugees at the time. His answer: “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear the question but I think it was something about the Russians ..."
