That Snowden gave his files to a journalist gives him some credibility as a whistleblower. But that credibility would be shot if it turned out that his information fell into the hands of a foreign government—like those of the countries he fled to.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s been helping Snowden, insists that the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor was never debriefed by Russian security officials. But the Kremlin doesn’t need to interview Snowden to scrape all his files, as spy novelist and New York Times writer Alex Berenson points out:

“Mr. Snowden has put himself in a terrible spot. Moscow will surely protect him for as long as it feels like irritating Washington. But by the time the Russians are finished sifting through his laptops, he’ll be their spy, whether or not he meant to be. Beijing may have already pulled the same trick; some intelligence officers believe that Chinese spy agencies copied Mr. Snowden’s hard drives during his Hong Kong stay.”