Robot Edward Snowden Rescued a Reporter When She Had a Seizure
Hero/traitor/cyberman Edward Snowden is physically still stuck in Russia, but he gives talks and interviews in the U.S. via a telepresence robot that shows his face in real time and allows him to see his interviewers. And help rescue them during seizures.
As part of a longer piece on Snowdenbot and his human handlers, Tagesspiegel reporter Julia Prosinger recounted an incident at the ACLU offices in New York City when her epilepsy triggered and Snowden, Skyping in from Russia, knew exactly what to do.
When he saw Prosinger about to faint, he quickly told his ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, to catch her before she could hit her head on the metal filing cabinets.
"The first fits are always the worst," he said when she came to.
Prosinger writes:
I am lucky: Snowden is not only a patriot or traitor, he is also an epileptic. He instantly recognised what was happening to me. He tells me that he was only diagnosed when he was 28 years old. When he fled the US a little more than a year ago, he told his employer that he had to go away for a few weeks for treatment for his epilepsy. Then Snowden apologises for making me look at the flickering screen, it had triggered the fit, he says.
Snowden also made sure that Wizner put the reporter in the recovery position and brought her a glass of juice.
"For a moment," Prosinger wrote, "Edward Snowden became three-dimensional."
