I mean just for the record, there's a LOT of history between Wikileaks / Snowden / Harding and a lot of mutual loathing;
https://www.newsweek.com/assange-how-guardian-milked-edward-snowdens-story-323480Assange called him a self aggrandizing plagiarist who passes off derivative material from actual journalists and boggles the facts to bait out sensationalism and hollywood credit.
The whole thing is worth a read in retrospect now that Harding has put himself front and center with this supposed scoop, but mind the juicy bits;
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Notoriously, as the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, Harding used to ply his trade ripping off work by other Moscow-based journalists before his plagiarism was pointed out by The eXile's Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, from whom he had misappropriated entire paragraphs without alteration. For this he was awarded "plagiarist of the year" by Private Eye in 2007.
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Yet the conclusion cannot be resisted that this work is painfully derivative. Snowden has never spoken to Harding. The two have never met. The story is largely pieced together from more original work by James Risen, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Peter Maas, Janet Reitman, writers from the South China Morning Post and others.
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For most of his narrative, however, Harding is riding on the coattails of other journalists. His is more of a “backside story” than an “inside story.” It reveals a glaring lack of expertise in just about every topic it touches on: the Internet and its subcultures, information and operational security, the digital rights and policy community, hacker culture, the cypherpunk movement, geopolitics, espionage and the security industry. For our author, "computer skills" are about as comprehensible as magical powers in a J.K. Rowling novel. Although examples of this can be found throughout the book, it is nowhere more apparent than in a transparent promo piece in The Guardian where Harding claimed that while he was writing The Snowden Files, his word processor would occasionally start to delete paragraphs while he watched. Mundane explanations abound, but Harding is apparently desperate to attribute the episode to clandestine actors. “Was it the NSA? GCHQ? A Russian hacker?” the article asks breathlessly. Or, a reader might be forgiven for wondering, a bit of clotted cream stuck under the backspace key?
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I was present at these events (Harding was not), and it was Edward Snowden who contacted me for help, not the other way around. This is something Snowden will happily confirm, at least to those who have access to him. The entire chapter is irredeemably specious. "Much is mysterious, but..." writes the self-styled journalist Harding, a polite way of saying that what follows has been made up.
Clues abound that Harding is filling in the blanks himself. All too often, we are presented with sentences such as "Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile," reminding us of the paucity of actual content. The result is a story that is a non-story—a generic rendition of the Snowden cycle where lifeless bromide and imagined melodrama stand in for authentic human narrative.
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How can one reconcile the duty to a source with the mad rush to be the first to market with a lucrative, self-glorifying, unauthorized biography? For all the risks he took, Snowden deserves better than this.
The Snowden Files is a walloping fraud, written by frauds to be praised by frauds. Michiko Kakutani, the renowned New York Times book critic, wrote that it "reads like a le Carré novel crossed with something by Kafka." Really? It's more Tom Clancy meets Dan Brown, but without the crowd-pleasing plot, a thriller without thrills by the man who wasn't there.
So take a man who has a history of compromised journalistic integrity, bullshitting sources and full blown plagiarism (not to mention a real axe to grind), and couple that with Wikileak's full throated denial and the Guardian falling back with stealth edits to cover their asses if this blows up- and it sure looks like a dud