Where in the world is Edward Snowden?

[Administrator]

Was Edward Snowden morally justified in leaking secret documents that revealed, with the help of phone and internet companies, the British and US governments had spied on its citizens without their knowledge or consent? It is a question yet to be legally resolved. Snowden remains holed up in an undisclosed location in Russia, the country to which he fled in 2013. He refuses to return to the US where he is wanted on three charges (two counts of espionage, and one of theft of government property). While thumb-twiddles under assumed names in bleak hotels, the world continues to reel in the aftershocks of his revelations. Was Snowden justified in his actions? Come to think of it: would you have helped him?
It's a question with which James Long, a British graduate in theoretical physics, thinks everybody should be reckoning. His forthcoming game, Top Secret, casts you as an employee of the NSA at the precise moment at which Snowden began to leak government documents. You are tasked with following the intelligence all the way to the source, finding out who knows what and, most pressingly, deciding whether to help or hinder the whistleblower. The game blurs the line between fiction and documentary. While some of your surveillance targets are made-up, many are living journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, all of who were involved in the scandal.
Like 2015's sudden hit, Her Story, a game that asks its player to piece together the narrative from a thousand scattered fragments, Top Secret is a disjointed, non-linear journey that is unique to each individual. Unlike Her Story, which simulated an anachronistic PC desktop to frame the game, Top Secret is played out entirely in your actual email programme. To begin playing, you simply send an email to another member of your NSA team, perhaps listing the name, email address and phone number of a suspect whose files you wish to check. When the reply arrives in your inbox, you analyse the intelligence and, from the clues therein, choose your next target.
Read more…


More...