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> One can join the dots and have a good idea of exactly what was the purpose of doing this.

The purpose was to avoid rendition to and torture within black sites of ambiguous jurisdiction.

If classified material is so precious then why not lock up the guy who showed off and stored stolen classified material in his golf course bathroom?

The obvious purpose would be to avoid the authorities of the US and our allies, no? If you broke US federal law and hoped to avoid being detained, would you choose to travel to a NATO country or a non-NATO one? This isn't rocket science.

He deliberately planned to travel via countries which were unlikely to extradite him to the US on his way to a country which offered him permanent asylum.

Do you have a suggestion for a better routing? I surely can't. How should he have gotten to Ecuador? (Which, btw, is not a US adversary.)

As for your "drop off" conjecture, we have no evidence that happened, and unless you are attached to the "Snowden was black-hearted liar" fabrication, we can all read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden where he says he did not do that, and explains why:

> In October 2013, Snowden said that before flying to Moscow, he gave all the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong and kept no copies for himself.[110] In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[57] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow.

I take it you believe he lied, and during the last decade-plus his nefarious actions and additional secret files never leaked.

Would you care to explain the basis for your belief?