Actually I thought the article put him in a better light than most of the other pieces about him. It makes him out to be more in tune with the ways the gov could track him. If they wanted to smear him then NYT could just come out with a short piece saying "Snowden made his Lawyers put their Phones in the Fridge", and then just spend the rest of the article speculating about his growing paranoia and questioning the decision.
Instead they explained the logic behind the seemingly unreasonable request. How is that being malicious?
I'm from the UK. We have tabloids. They will take a fact like (made up example) Snowden wanted all phones turned off, and simply make up the rest. 1) to demonize the subject, and 2) to put a more sexy sounding story in the paper. So, my natural default is to hope to believe the simplest "fact" in the story, if that.
Maybe you have faith in your newspapers, and to be totally honest I don't actually know how Americans feel about their news papers. But you do have Murdoch floating around, so Americans are being manipulated somewhere. But I sure as hell dont take them at their word. For me, newspapers are as accurate as "the internet".
But to me, that read like a slightly more sophisticated that a UK tabloid smear job.
I do how ever accept that my UK perspective on the press might well be very different to a US one.
