[Greysard]

Wonder who wrote that statement for him? This guy is a puppet.

Note the format of the date: "1st July 2013." The order of fields is from a non-US locale. But Snowden's computer is, obviously, set to en-us; and he wouldn't naturally write the date like this. Did someone else, for whom this date format is native, write the missive?

This was actually a clue in one of stories of Hercule Poirot.

[Black Agnes]

I think Snowden is dead.

Until I see visual proof otherwise.

[cynwoody]

Note the format of the date: "1st July 2013."

The English do that. They use DMY order, and they sometimes spell out the ordinal day, whereas US usage is MDY with the ordinal spoken but almost never written.

The Germans write 1. Juli 2013, where the period is not a decimal point but an ordinal indicator. The Russians write it 1 июля 2013 (DMY, no written ordinal). In Spanish, it's 01 de julio 2013 (1[st] of July 2013).

My guess as to ghostwriter: Englishwoman Sarah Harrison, who works with the WikiLeaks legal defense team and is traveling with Snowden.