Snowden\'s Whereabouts: No Laughing Matter

LONDON - “We seek him here, we seek him there . . .” A BBC news reader was not alone in borrowing a line from “The Scarlet Pimpernel” to describe America's so-far-fruitless quest to pin down the whereabouts of the elusive Edward J. Snowden.

European media and the Twittersphere could not resist reflecting on Washington's discomfiture on Tuesday as the location of the former U.S. intelligence contractor remained unknown after his flight to Moscow from Hong Kong.

“Edward Snowden, the Invisible Man,” France's Libération headlined a news-agency story describing a plethora of contradictory reports about Mr. Snowden's fate since he left Hong Kong for the Russian capital on Sunday.

The Guardian, the British daily that published Mr. Snowden's revelations about the extent of online su rveillance by U.S. and British security agencies, said the quest for the 30-year-old whistleblower descended into farce when he “outpaced the world's biggest intelligence apparatus in a round-the-world chase.”

An #OurManNOTinHavana hashtag was set up to record the wild goose chase by more than a score of the world's press who took an alcohol-free flight to Havana with nothing to show for their enterprise but photographs of Mr. Snowden's empty seat.

Piers Morgan, CNN's British presenter, found it extraordinary that the full might of U.S. intelligence agencies had failed to catch a geeky guy with a laptop.

Michael Hartt, a London-based New Yorker, suggested that Sarah Palin might have helped, given her past claim to be able to see Russia from Alaska.

The online levity leavened some more serious discussion of an affair that is proving to be a major diplomatic issue for the Obama administration.

In the latest reaction to his revelations, Liberty, a British civil rights group, called on Tuesday for an investigation into whether British intelligence services unlawfully accessed its communications.

Information that Mr. Snowden leaked to the Guardian suggested that Britain's GCHQ intelligence listening post was able to tap into and store Internet data from fiber-optic cables for 30 days in an operation called Tempora.

Since publication of his revelations began, Mr. Snowden has been cast as both hero and villain by commentators in Europe.

Nick Cohen, a British columnist and civil libertarian, this week said Mr. Snowden claimed to be engaged in civil disobedience. If that were the case, he urged him not to run.

“The hardest part of civil disobedience is that you must respect the law as you break it and face the consequences of your actions,” Mr. Cohen wrote in the weekly Spectator.

“I accept it is easy for a journalist sitting in safety in London to urge others to be brave,” Mr. Cohen acknowledged. “But the point remains that if you run away your chances of arousing ‘the conscience of the community' decline.”