This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
negligence and incompetence can act as very good cover for malice. The same reporter that leaked Reality Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, has also been suspected by multiple other whistleblowers of exposing them as well.
On a tangential note, watching the documentary on her was the first time I viscerally understood that people with very different ideas about how to live can agree on some fundamental political principles, and don't have to stuff themselves into right/left boxes for easy manipulation. They went after her hard because a culturally-conservative, intelligent, hard-nosed soldier type who sticks to virtues that are not completely in-line with our warhawk doctrine is their worst nightmare.
I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The latter applied to many US (and historically British empire wars, from where the US learned).
Greenwald had a Rumble contract for daily videos during the Biden years, so I think it would be fair to say he was a Trump influencer.
He also has many enemies in Brazil (e.g.. Supreme Judge Moraes), so that video could have come from anywhere.
But yes, he could also have been threatened over the Snowden files earlier.
> I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.
Valdai financing in 2023 does look bad. But his 2015 talk "Why Ukraine is the West's fault" does not appear to have any financing and says the same already.
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
I found the debate with Sikorski very illuminating. Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar) and EU (MEP) in addition to Poland. He's been in the dirt too, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an on-location reporter in the 1980s. During the debate, Mearsheimer tried to lecture him about things that went on at diplomatic gatherings where Sikorski was present (and led a delegation) and Mearsheimer was not.
He's a total hack and his brand of "realism" has nothing to do with reality. Dude can't even read Russian, yet thinks he's an expert on Russia. The only reason we're discussing him here right now is because Russian troll army has been promoting him hard; like most charlatans, he has the appearance of someone who knows what they're talking about.
Mearsheimer says that there's no evidence Putin had imperial ambitions before 24 Feb 2022; that the war has forced him into this. Some of the closest people to Putin say that he told them fucking 20 years ago what he was going to do with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer is weird. His book "Israel lobby and US foreign policy" is outstanding. But when he speaks about many other things it feels like he's improvising all the time.
Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.
It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.
That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
> That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
That is a fine example of propaganda: All people, including historians who evaluate different possibilities, surely want to paint Russia as the victim!
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
Makes sense. OP is leaning I to conspiracional adhoc reasoning. I’m sure Pierre would rather keep his Hawaiian island than to field questions from the agencies
This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.
It feels like there is "backpressure" that has been backed into our current world that makes people like Snowden and Assange an impossibility. The collective control of politics, media, and corporations have built a society that is inoculated to truth and no longer have a response to evil.
Even when the truth is told to us directly to our faces, no one seems to care.
IMO the underlying reason for this is one or more of:
1) Americans are [statistically speaking] doing very well, high GDP, lots of consumer products to buy, lots of entertainment, lots of cheap food... and wikileaks is not doing anything to help but maybe destroy this.
2) Americans are also doing very poorly, the bottom 25% have bigger problems to deal with than wikileaks. Why would they care if the CIA is watching them if they can't afford next month's rent?
3) Information overload: Similiar to 1, we get overloaded with things we ought to care about, climate, wiki leaks, wars.... it's too much and people really just want. #1.
Re 2): because you can't have a handful of extremely wealthy people in a completely equal world; so one wonders if enough accidental topplings of foreign democracies would not an "inequality" enforcement agency make?
Reading a bit, it's become somewhat apparent to me that that little independent government agency is the instability enforcer in order to sustain the world as a set of abstractions to keep people artificially poor: from cartels (involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), to toppling of budding democracies (IIRC, Iran 1953) ... further revealing they and their masters consider that progress is a zero-sum game for them.
I'm not sold on anyway we will ever reach inequality, and I don't think it is a actual goal we should have as a target. I think it is a political wedge issue. I'm happy have my mind changed though.
The rest of your reply is getting too much into conspiracy theory for me to reply.
Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since.
I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
Doesn't really seem possible. The two party system is so deeply wound into the structure of the u.s. political machinery that a new party doesn't really stand a chance.
Wrong phrasing, a new political party could absolutely come into power. It would just replace one of the two-parties ideologies but be called the same thing and you still have 2 parties.
His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.
He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.
The Constitution guarantees Snowden an impartial jury trial on the criminal charges against him. It does not guarantee him the right to have the jury decide whether breaking the law was morally justified or beneficial to society. The Sixth Amendment requires a jury to determine the elements of the crimes; it doesn't constitutionalize every defense a defendant would like to make.
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.
As loud as possible? That's naive. They would have black bagged him instantly, no trial. In fact a public trial is his only stipulation for voluntary return - that this has been denied should tell you everything.
Panama papers - a couple token people charged and many more acquited so that also fizzled out
Epstein files - clearly fizzling out
It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you expose and uncover and dump into the press. It doesn't matter how many reddit threads go over the corruption in detail coupled with available documentation. It doesn't matter how many podcasters talk about it.
It just doesn't ever matter. If the powers that be don't want the boat to rock, it simply will not rock. We've seen this time and time again over this past century. As sobering as that is to realize, the current crop of power has an absolute chokehold on this planet. We can openly talk about how corrupt they are and they know we won't do anything material about it.
I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.
It's all fun and games until the mind wanders to you getting polonium-210'd for your work, and you decide 'my life isn't worth _this_.' It's kind of dumb people choose fear, but I understand it.
Being killed for your reporting happens to a lot of journalists. I think your comment about "dumb people choosing fear" is incredibly tone deaf. I don't see you risking your life to expose the Panama Papers and being blown up with a bomb for it. It's easy to write something so brave from behind your keyboard.
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
There is nothing like "the most powerful", though.
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
Corporate Dems lose because they have become indistinguishable from their donor class and have failed to institute significant changes that would actually improve people’s lives. They are a captive opposition.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
> People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."
Yeah, and yet women in both India and China make up a laughable minority of business leadership. There’s a huge gap between getting a degree, which is trivial these days, and running a business and leading others, and it turns out that in general women don’t like/aren’t good at running businesses or leading others.
This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.
Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.
> particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena
Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.
And you are trying to separate them mentally as if they wouldn’t have a close relationship in a society that has existed for many generations. You seem to be suggesting that controlling a populace and ‘hanging on to power’ are necessarily inconsistent with governing a society. I can think of examples where clearly hanging on to power and working advantageously for the society don’t coincide (run of the mill African dictatorships come to mind), but there are other cases where a government’s self-interested control and domination of its population clearly coincide(d) with a society’s well being at the population level (Sparta, China). Perhaps we are referring to difference timescales here - I’m talking about, let’s say, 250 years minimum. But the longer the better (think: certain Chinese or Indian hierarchies).
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)
It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.
The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.
The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".
> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.
The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.
> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.
Based on everything I thus far know about WWII, I do not have the impression that Hitler wanted war [1], nor do I have the impression that their ideology demanded it.
If you also read what they published about themselves, instead of only what others wrote about them, the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced.
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
Easy advice to give as a bystander lacking context (2013!), hard to follow as a "martyr" living in that context. It wasn't even clear whether he'd be a martyr (he could have easily turned the politics around, wouldn't be the first time in the American history).
I was definitely around in 2013. And it was quite clear at the time there will be government persecution for the leaks, I mean that's why he ran in the first place.
If you stand on the path of martyrdom for your people you should be prepared to follow it to conclusion rather than fleeing to the sworn enemy.
Well the sworn frenemy has a crude but fitting idiom for that I suspect you might be familiar with, and Snowden might be too now: пиздеть - не мешки ворочать.
I have huge respect for people that have passed the test of going against their environment and comrades to do what they think is right (even if/when I disagree with it or it harms my interests). You can argue that he was insincere or a double agent (this is definitely wrong), you can argue he's a traitor by endangering people who had nothing to do with it (weak argument IMO), but arguing from an armchair that he must have walked full length is just silly I think. Let's have an extreme and inverted thought experiment to test your views. Imagine someone blows the whistle about FSB's Ryazan sugar [1] today, must he not run and let his head be smashed with a sledgehammer in a prime time TV show?
He gave up his life in the US to tell the people what the gov is doing. It's not like he then went and said hey Putin need some help destroying America? He just fled because otherwise the US would throw him in a hole for the rest of his life. What good would that do? It's not about martyrdom it's about getting the information out there. The information is out. Him being in a hole wouldn't do anything good for anyone.
Gave up his life? Why, he may have been living his best. A fully funded expat life in Moscow with some Jason Bourne cachet instead of scrapping by as a Sharepoint admin in the age of AI.
If I had edited the comment you would see an "edited" tag on it. I'll do it on this one.
Edited to add this. Nevermind, there's no tag now. That's strange, I could swear that's a thing. Maybe I edited too early? Trying again now it's 18 minutes later. Still nothing, guess I've just imagined it?
As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."
Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Did anything change in terms of policies or people responsible seeing criminal charges as a result of these findings?
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.
One thing I know for sure is that those leaks caused a lot of the tech community to go a lot harder into encryption.
The reason practically all sites are HTTPS now can be traced to this. Many, if not most, sites in 2012 were plain http. Which is actually difficult for me to remember despite working on sites as a sysadmin back then.
I don’t think anyone was convicted, maybe some resignations and a lot of very uncomfortable questions from the senate- and likely some policy changes, though I can’t point to them.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.
He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)
Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?
And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.
“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.
They said that Snowden caused a shift in the public debate not that nobody listened to them beforehand (you should know they were raising concerns going back to 2002).
Baltimore Sun was reporting on Drake in 2006. Binney was publicly talking about it to Wired News and Democracy Now in 2012. Snowden happened in 2013.
So that makes my point even plainer than it possibly could have been made. The people who did the right thing by your definition got nothing done (and this was what caused Snowden to do it the way he did) and since Snowden, those previous cases were taken seriously by the government
Well their complaint triggered a formal DoD IG investigation and produced a highly critical audit plus fraud investigations. Trailblazer program was killed in 2006. That all happened well before Snowden. Snowden skipped all of those channels entirely. Binney and Drake were taken seriously but you are glossing over all do the other stuff that Snowden leaked that had nothing to do with the privacy concerns deemed that went beyond what FISA courts authorized (and no court found violation of 4th amendment).
Snowden did it completely wrong and you can’t convince me otherwise. I don’t see this conversation going further as you move the goalposts.
I'm "glossing over it" because you are, I explicitly asked you in another thread what he leaked that wasn't relevant for the public interest.
I'm not sure what your angle is, but the NSA proved that they were beyond contempt when they lied to the Senate and there were people in the room that knew the situation who didn't pull them up on it.
Regarding Binney specifically; the IG's report largely supported his claims, but it was classified and changed little. Thomas Drake, a serving NSA official who raised similar concerns internally, also got nowhere.
The government's serious attention came only after the New York Times revealed warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, and it came as a leak investigation. In 2007 the FBI raided the homes of Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark; Binney has said agents drew guns on him while he was in the shower.
Drake was indicted under the Espionage Act in 2010. The case collapsed in 2011, he pleaded guilty to a minor misdemeanour, and the judge sharply criticised the prosecution's conduct. So the substance of Binney's warnings was mostly ignored or denied.
Binney went fully public around 2012, and NSA officials publicly denied that they kept files on ordinary Americans.
The core contrast is that Binney went through proper channels, took no documents and was not believed. He was investigated anyway and achieved almost no reform. Snowden bypassed every channel, took vast amounts of classified material and was pursued far more aggressively, but he forced a public debate and concrete legal changes.
You can pretend that's not true, but you'd be ignoring reality.
That GCHQ was involved definitely interests me, that GCHQ was being used by NSA to spy on US citizens (and vice-versa) to bypass citizen protections should be of interest to civilians of both countries.
I don’t trust civil servants to not abuse access into everyones communications, the damage a stalker or pedophile can do is immeasurable, and we have some statements that was happening.
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
He said "as Americans, we're better than that", does that sound like defending? That he was conflicted about it isn't too surprising, he was ratting out his colleagues and the institution he had worked for through the entire of his professional life.
To the rest, you've fallen for their trick. Three CIA threw the book at him, and indeed tried to convict him for his leaks: "The five-count indictment against Kiriakou charged him with violations of both the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (for allegedly revealing the identity of a covert agent) and the Espionage Act (for allegedly revealing national defense information to unauthorized individuals such as journalists). He was also charged with making false statements to the CIA about a book that he was seeking to publish."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act is just the charge that stuck. When you're revealing government secrets, it's very, very hard not to accidentally cross the line, especially when you consider that the whole justice system is arranged in their favor, not yours.
The result is that lots of people say they support whistleblowers, but anytime someone actually whistleblows they back the government line and say "they went too far". Why is the onus on whistleblowers, acting in secret and with fear of retribution at every step, to perfectly separate the illegal actions from the legal, and punish only the former? Why is the onus not on our government, the elected representatives who ought to serve us and obey the law, to not commit crimes against humanity in the first place?
If you demand perfection from whistleblowers but accept faults in your government, don't be surprised if you don't get many whistleblowers.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
What the current president does now has no bearing on what was done then, with a somewhat functioning Supreme Court and an adversarial Congress. The conspiracy theories spread by Snowden helped lead to Trump, and that is the main point I want to get across. While spreading his conspiracy theories, he also helped the CCP, and that is something for which he would stand trial for in the U.S.
If he stayed in the U.S., his punishment would already be over. Now with the current president directly telling DOJ what to do, who knows what would happen if Snowden were to stand trial today, but that isn't a possibility Snowden faced when he fled.
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other
>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?
Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?
Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?
Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.
Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).
-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.
I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.
But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.
The "Collateral Murder" video of the unlawful killing of journalists was part of the archive that Wikileaks published that's been attributed to Chelsea Manning. All available evidence supports this was part of the material. Chelsea's leak was the contents of the shared drive, not just diplomatic cables.
The release of the diplomatic cables themselves gravely harmed U.S. interests and is alleged to have led to the deaths of CIA collaborators.
Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.
The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.
It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.
I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.
Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?
>So imagine a censored random variable... D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
This is not a real thing, it's just something you made up. You can see this obviously if you transfer this to another domain. For example, if I get a paper cut at work do you think that means I'm partially dead? Do you think that singular example of a paper cut means "we can be fairly sure" that "a bunch" of my coworkers have died from paper cuts?
Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.
It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.
A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.
There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.
It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.
Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.
I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.
We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal
He likely did do what he was accused of, with two well-meaning (and now presumably former) fans of his (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...), though it's his right to argue against that. It does not seem like a "honeypot" trap, these were genuine supporters.
The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.
I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.
Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.
Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
Only one program went beyond what was originally authorized and shutdown. The rest had no basis to be leaked. It caused grave damage to the national security of the US. Those programs had nothing to do with the privacy of American citizens that everyone keeps latching on here. They are ignoring the rest of the stuff
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
when the secret being leaked is that the united states is spying on its own citizens and violating the 4th amendment.
i find it weird how many Russians, Chinese and Americans are weirdly protective of their own government's oppressive behaviours in the name of patriotism.
Again you are missing the point. Nothing was proven in violation of the 4th amendment. Ninth Circuit didn’t even latch on that argument nor express it. Courts agreed that the metadata collection program went beyond what was approved by the FISA courts. But he leaked a whole host of foreign spying programs that had nothing to do with Americans.
Just as some Chinese people want Ai Weiwei to rot in prison, some Russians wanted Navalny to rot in prison and some Americans wanted or still want Snowden and Assange to rot in prison.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
Her default option was to return to her abuser and face more abuse so she went to the only shelter she could access, having no means to access any other shelter.
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
> if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
It’s really not, because knowing when you edited it is already enough, given that there’s a timestamped edit history. And the size and shape of your request payloads will show that you edited it, not merely performed GET requests.
Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.
Thank you for pointing this out. So often that point gets lost in the weeds of the discussion of trivialities. The absolute irony is that Snowden is more 'ideal American' than 99% of the rest of the population, and the people that cast him in any kind of bad light should be ashamed to call themselves Americans.
> Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out.
The article addresses this argument, and quite thoroughly dismisses it as BS. Read the report about how rapidly the reporting stopped and how much material was left untouched.
In the UK we have the laws around how government documents of historical value go into the national archives after 20 years, documents with personal information are held longer (up to 100 years). I could see a good argument for the Snowden archive to be automatically decrypted and published after 100 years on a similar basis for it's historcial value.
I think the answer to what happened is really straight forward though - they published as much of it as they could, what they published is probably pretty representative of other stuff in the archives and there's no news value to publishing 100 variations of the same story. If they published 1% of the archive, but the other 99% is just a million details about the same basic decisions then I don't think it matters much. It's also a really slow and painful process to make sure you're protecting the identities of people.
Having said that, I could see some value in a team taking a privately hosted open source AI model, feeding into it the archive and any related news articles into it and asking it if there's anything newsworthy that we missed.
They're just hiding misconduct because the government does an enormous number of things that would be national scandals if they weren't allowed to bury them.
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!
> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?
If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?
You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.
Here in the US, "Flock bad" has entered the Algorithm which dictates what people see and care about. People otherwise uninvolved in technology, whose eyes would glaze over in a conversation about mass surveillance, they will light up if you say Flock. It's just in the zeitgeist. My comment was more meta commentary about how recommender algorithms and not people's personal thoughts / opinions are deciding which causes get attention.
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.
This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.
The internet is indeed very good at squandering young people’s passion and energy, directing them towards endless debates about the right sub‑sub‑ideology in blogs and subreddits with 1,000 subscribers, rather than towards actually changing people’s lives.
<meta>
A large share about this HN forum is about Snowden the man. Was he right? Is he a spy? Is he more free in Russia than he would have been in jail? etc.
Contrast that with the article, a long and well documented piece about journalism and the files themselves, with not a single line about Snowden the man.
That reminds me about how hard it was, 10 years ago, to speak about the actual events depicted in the Wikileaked files, in all the deluge about Chelsea Manning and/or Assange.
Part of it is certainly due to our human nature: we love to discuss people, facts or ideas not so much. But one has to wonder: what if it were just a diversion technique?
We will never know; But what we do know is that one should never feed the trolls.
I don't get why they all try to protect it so much. Snowden's identity is already public so sharing the files can't hurt him. Just redact personal info and put it all out there.
A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.
They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.
I deeply hate Noam Chomsky for his hypocrisy, but his 80's analysis that the press as a business can't do its job is profoundly right. It got much worse since then.
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] 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 [0]
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
> It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused.
1. Trump's rise was and is mostly about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does. Claiming its significance here just sets up a fruitless semantic discussion in which you can claim almost anything about whether it applies.
I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?
> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.
> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.
As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.
> I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever."
Both these ideas still stand.
Yes, PRISM was misinterpreted, but the larger matter was exposing a massively overpowered surveillance apparatus. An apparatus that is more powerful than before. Had Snowden known the lack of effect of his actions, he would not have taken them. This is what you seem to miss, tunneling on PRISM and deflecting to Trump's rise.
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed
The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day. The ones who knew better got the phone metadata program shut down, just like the email metadata program that Obama had already shut down according to Snowden's leaks. There were no other programs that could possibly be interpreted as illegal, the government implemented oversight and reporting to make sure the legal programs weren't abused, and the tech companies fixed their security postures to account for state actors that can tap international WANs.
> but they aren't massively limited in what they can do
Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do. Any recent reductions in the effectiveness of the 4th Amendment are due solely to the concentration of power in Trump, which was helped by conspiracy theorists like Snowden and those who fooloshly believed him.
> The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day.
You're in too deep. Most people don't even know about Snowden. The public is much larger than just a bunch of techies. And that public essentially didn't give a fuck.
> Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do.
On paper, not in practice. Every since 9/11 the balance of security vs. liberty has been off. The point stands that Snowden changed nothing fundamentally about that (ongoing) slide into dystopia.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
I'm an American citizen who read news about Ukraine back when it was a niche thing to care about and I have Ukrainian friends who tell me how it's going. You can't imagine how stressful it is to live there and get drafted into their drone target lottery.
This is a classic Russian perspective on the war - that Ukraine is a gang of neo-Nazis that are dead set on eliminating Russian speakers from Ukraine by force. Russians will further claim that this gang of Russophobic neo-Nazis is led by Zelenskyy, a Jewish man who speaks Russian as his mother tongue and Ukrainian as a second language.
The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.
FYI "Jewish Nazi" isn't actually an oxymoron. In WW2 there were hundreds of thousands of Nazi party members who were Jews - they mostly got gassed along with the other Jews. Plus the whole Palestine thing.
Zelenskiy isn't a Nazi, but the reason he isn't a Nazi isn't because he's Jewish.
However this is one of the weakest possible grievances you could raise because Putin also released rapists and murderers from prison to raise manpower, most famously during the spring 2023 Bakhmut offensive. There is no moral highground on that point.
Actually, this is actually a near universal issue with Russian grievances against Ukraine. Virtually any grievance that Russia can claim against Ukraine, Ukraine can claim that exact grievance back at equal or greater measure.
You're finally getting it. Russia and Ukraine are truly the same when it comes to seeking their own interests. Ukraine was happy to fund far-right psychos to go terrorize Russian citizens of Ukraine after 2014 because that's the bargain they made. Russia invaded to stop NATO/EU from ending the kleptocracy because they are horrible shit stain oligarchs.
While I respect Snowden and find many of the claims plausible much of the evidence and story didn’t add up. Here are a few doubts I have, and I’d like to see the rebuttal.
First, he seemed to embellish his role and authority at NSA. Based on his vernacular, and the artifacts that he presented, I believe he was an IT admin, who happened upon these files. His archive was predominantly design / spec docs with screenshots, rather than code artifacts (compiled code, 1st hand screenshots, configs). In his interviews he didn’t seem to have a deep technical grasp of the systems, and he was cagey about his areas of responsibility.
Second, XKeyScore and other system implementations seemed too primitive for the claimed capability. It was claimed they could google everyone’s email (or some large share of the population, let’s say 100-500m individuals, in real time), but the designs were primitive collegiate level , single-instance mySQL databases and CRUD UIs. I didn’t see any indications the system capability met the claims .
I’m not an expert, I’ve read No Place to Hide, watched some interviews, and used to follow him on Twitter.
I’d like to see how this community assessed him personally and the artifacts he shared.
He was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.
can you elaborate on this ? what were his responsibilities and what role did he have in setting up the system?
He seemed to imply that he helped deploy these systems (though he never authored them), but from his interviews & the evidence provided, I don't even think that was the case. I got the impression he was sort of a backup & storage manager.
Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.
Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.
He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.
What's your overall take? do you think evidence was presented to confirm these systems were active around his tenure e.g. 2012? I'm maybe 20% confident they were active.
The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.
Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.
I mean about the historiography, and your personal verdict on whether those systems were active, based on the evidence Snowden provided.
A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.
I wasn't there and have never had a security clearance. But I doubt Dick Cheney would have been satisfied with a non-functional query system during the war on terror, many years after giving direct orders to build one. Yes, I believe they were active.
I highly recommend the documentary "The United States of Secrets" by PBS Frontline, it digs into this time period and government motivations after 9/11. Usually free on Kanopy.
Believe here that all the tech was available by y2k and security was even worse than now. Just needed the funding and a willingness to break the law, which the govt had in abundance after 2001.
SQL alone is just a query language. the MySQL design docs Snowden shared were primitive installations that did not meet the claimed capability of their surveillance system.
There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.
Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.
I’m talking about the evidence presented and whether it met the extraordinary claims.
The amount of compute and indexing needed was extraordinary, and the evidence presented didn’t meet that bar.
Yes I believe that the NSA, in theory, had the budget to complete this task, and to a lesser degree, the competence. . But I only believe claims with complete evidence.
I don't think the compute/indexing were extraordinary, what may have been was the storage required. There was a large NSA facility built for purpose early in the century, and the cost of storage dropped significantly at the time.
Google had already demonstrated such a system by the late 90s, using off the shelf technology.
* and I don’t remember Snowden presenting evidence that NSA (et al) had the datacenter / compute capacity to surveil these targets. Even a fraction of the target traffic (3+ wireless carriers, dozens of messaging email software firms) would require a fraction of their datacenter capacity to sniff, trace, index, analyze . Was that capacity presented in the archive?
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Not just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.
As I recall he became fixated on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, to the extent that he got himself fired from The Intercept over it. Maybe he saw the pictures of naked Biden and became absolutely obsessed with the photo gallery of coke and dong.
Hard to say whether he resigned, or "resigned". And I'm not sure there's a huge difference, practically speaking. By Greenwald's account, it was the former, I think. Either way, he took his marbles and went home. In fairness, I can imagine why, after having spent 7 years of his life mining through the Snowden archive, spending another few years mining the Biden hard disk might have been attractive.
It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
Defending your client is not vile, and making statements that contribute towards that defense is part of the game, even if they are harsh.
Funny to see someone who seems to be on the left engaging in “kink-shaming.” Glenn has the right to a personal sexual life, including whatever exotic sexual proclivities he may have. Frankly, the film you mentioned sounds pretty tame for gay porn.
I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
One of the accusers refused to sign their written statement, then disappeared. The other kept making contradictory statements and changed her story, and recently said she was “happy” that he was free, although she did not recant her accusation. Prosecutors also allegedly changed one of the statements to make it sound more serious, per the later UN investigation.
They put out an Interpol notice and had him on the “most wanted” list for this, which is ridiculous. There is documented communication between the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service and Swedish authorities where the CPS is goading the Swedes into continuing the case, warning them not to get “cold feet.”
The prosecution eventually dropped the case because they believed that the evidence was too weak, blaming the long gap in time. I’m not clear on how they thought the passage of time had weakened their evidence, which was limited to victim statements from the very beginning, AFAIK.
A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
>A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.
Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.
If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.
Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
Glenn, along with many others in the left-libertarian camp, correctly identified that “wokeness” was being used to fracture the left between the old guard, focused on economic justice and ending imperialism, and the “groups” who focused solely on racial and cultural agendas and were actively hostile towards traditional left agendas. These groups were also often hostile towards traditional liberal concepts of rights, such as freedom of speech and equal treatment under the law.
I agree that his reporting on this was sub-par. It’s not his beat and he should probably leave it to others.
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
See that's the thing: bad faith requests for presence in the marketplace of ideas almost always more the discourse towards authoritarian views, reactionary and racist views. Smashing it metaphorically means that monarchists and authoritarians flood the marketplace with garbage.
We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.
Socialist, communist, and reactionary views should all be equally allowed, along with bizarre views like Posadism and whatever Alex Jones believes.
I want to see a debate stage with Haz Al-Din, AOC, Ezra Klein, Thomas Massie, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Fuentes. Let the best one win.
> We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views
And this is why only reactionaries gain a foothold. Powerful people benefit from it, so reactionary views are let in while the rest of the “window” remains intact. Smash the window.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
The original comic didn't really resonate with me for a couple of reasons. The first is that the obvious metaphors it seems to have (which I assume you're alluding to here) are in quite poor taste. The second is because I think public debate is critical for a healthy society, and so am quite averse to anything that justifies making statements and then being unwilling to engage with challenges to them. Obviously outright harassment would be not only wrong but also illegal, so I think that's largely a nonexistent extreme.
In general I think if people were more regularly challenged on their claims, it might help reign in some of the self radicalization, intolerance, and so forth that's growing in society. When somebody only acknowledges 'friendly' voices, you end up in a scenario where they're effectively surrounding themselves with a baseline that's heavily biased, but that baseline will (from their perspective) be normal. That's just not healthy.
I think they're currently victims of a genocidal effort, but also like most conflicts it's one where both sides can be wrong. The narrative of good guys and bad guys is always shown to be nonsense in hindsight.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
First, the conversation was about the DNC, so what centrist Dems think is more important than "Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left". But beyond that, what specific policies are you talking about? Because without naming specific parts of the DNC platform, what you're saying sounds completely indistinguishable from "my niece corrected my pronoun usage and that made me angry".
Your point about the DNC is taken, although these groups do have sway there, as Yglesias often complains about.
Support for hate speech laws is common among leftists who primarily focus on social causes, as is support for “deplatforming” political opponents. Some also support German-style laws regarding politically extreme speech, which is funny, because those laws would almost certainly be used against them if they weren’t plainly unconstitutional.
I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.
> Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
But to answer your question about conservative opposition to free speech, some conservatives are now showing support for hate speech laws, specifically laws against antisemitic speech, which is new. So this is actually a current “both sides” issue. Time will tell if the poles fully reverse on this; I think it depends on what form post-Trump politics takes.
Edit: wow, TIL. Apparently there were local laws against “race hatred” on the books in the early 1900s, and some conservative segregationists found that they could use those laws against “anti-white” speech (like supporting integration) in the 40s and 50s. So believe it or not, they became supportive of these laws until the Warren court overturned them, thanks to the work of the ACLU.
Mind you their version of "antisemitism" that they are banning is not hate speech, it is actually the opposite of hate speech and their ban makes hate speech mandatory.
Fair enough if you consider your comment a start of a new thread, but that is ignoring the context in which the comment you replied was made.
>specifically laws against antisemitic speech
As a Jewish person, I have a bridge that fights antisemitism to sell you if you genuinely believe this. Just the simple fact that they are only against antisemitism and not all hate speech should tell you there is no genuine conservative desire for hate speech laws. And your second example is just more evidence of that. Conservatives cynically abusing existing laws does not show a conservative value eventually becoming liberal or vice versa. You can argue it shows how these laws create problems, but it isn't evidence of any sort of switch in values.
This is similar to how many on the left don’t believe that “hate speech” restrictions should apply to speech against whites. This is the problem with laws that apply to the realm of speech and ideas; it is a very small step towards abuse that undermines equal treatment under the law, the free exchange of information, and the democratic process.
Both major US factions like to use selective enforcement and/or targeted taxation or regulation to attack their political rivals, while wrapping their actions in flowery language. This is a longstanding tradition here. If you don’t see it, I urge you to take a closer look and shed your bias.
Edit: I’ll add that this selective application is probably what creates the illusion of a change in values. In reality, it’s two tribes jockeying for power using whatever tools happen to be in front of them; naturally, the available tools shift over time. The ideological justification for a particular position or action is created after the fact.
>This is similar to how many on the left don’t believe that “hate speech” restrictions should apply to speech against whites.
These comparisons always seem to set up an equivalency between mainstream Republicans saying something extreme and what a random leftist said to their 50 followers on Bluesky. Like seriously, what mainstream Democrat is advocating for hate speech laws which only apply to non-white people?
Officially, there were only some small things like a house resolution that supported one-sided (minority only) hate crime protection, as well as some papers and op-eds that suggested that hate crime protection should only apply to minorities. These were about hate crimes, not hate speech, of course. It’s been a while, and I can’t find any records of statements from mainstream Dems.
What I saw in my personal experience was an army of trolls baiting this kind of response from left activists, with identity-focused activists readily complying, and with others then amplifying the message through retweets. Including many who should have known better, people I had formerly respected. There was zero condemnation or pushback on this from nearly anyone on the left, in fact there was often a sort of winking agreement with the message by the time it had trickled up to candidates and officials.
The worst offenders were the grifters in the “white fragility” consulting sphere, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.” This is made worse by the lack of a substantial platform or position statement in many campaigns nowadays, so it’s hard to identify what anyone really stands for at all.
Feel free to take your point on this, as I have no hard proof. But I and many others saw this happen first hand.
>Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.”
It seems like you are very close to getting it, so maybe spend some time brainstorming on possible reasons why Republican politicians say "terrible... awful things" much more frequently than Democratic politicians. There's probably some other explanation there outside one side simply enjoying subtlety more than the other for no particular reason.
If you look at actions rather than words, Dems have been equally complicit in the things that are destroying the country, namely the offshoring of US industry and weakening of domestic labor, privatization of public services (especially Clinton/Third Way), the financialization of the US economy, the expansion of the security state (especially Obama), the erosion of civil liberties, the continuation of “forever wars.” They also failed to correct course after the GFC, despite holding the trifecta, probably dooming the country in the long run by using endless QE to temporarily float the economy. We needed a hard landing and we didn’t get one.
The one good thing I have to say about the Republicans is at least they don’t fuck around. They are speedrunning the inevitable collapse, and we might actually be better off for it. With the rate they are going, there will be no time to finish constructing a fully integrated police state before the bottom falls out.
I think a practical issue you have to deal with on this sort of topic is what is done versus what is said. Illegal immigration is a great example. There's no part of any official DNC that overtly supports illegal immigration, yet policies and behaviors show an intent to enable and facilitate exactly that.
On the speech issue, here [1] is a rather great bit on DNC efforts to censor speech by the WSWS/World Socialist Web Site. The article mentions the ongoing obsession with censoring "disinformation" when disinformation itself is often little more than truths that counter the official lies of the day.
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
This article certainly did not improve my perception of Glenn Greenwald. Unprofessional, wild narratives in his reporting, and a changing story about why the Intercept fired their research division in charge of the files.
The Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians").
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
And yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
Is war of the scale of WWI and WWII a cleansing of, and temporary innoculation against, the natural tribalist fracturing of human psychology that occurs in times of peace? ("Peace is war" and all that goes along with that).
Does the insanity just continue until some traumatic event shocks (what remains of) the world population into a relatively normalised, shared worldview? Until enough time has passed that the cracks start to reappear.
Feels to me like a pattern in nature. I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.
I think tribalism is inherent in humans, as we our species evolved in a tribal fashion. It is also certain that billions and billions of dollars have been invested by the CIA (and their equivalent in other countries) to perfect propaganda techniques by taking advantage of the tribal instincts (among other things).
>I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.
Couldn't agree more. The more insular a group is, the more severe the tribalism is. The bifurcation of information sources has certainly added to this. If the people in your tribe all listen to the same networks and sources of information, and all of the people in the other tribe listen to entirely different networks and sources of information, you end up with people that have very little sense of shared reality. Any dissension from tribal dogma very quickly renders someone a heretic or an outcast. This is also what makes tribalism so powerful as a propaganda tool. The dehumanization and "othering" of a person, or a group, or a country renders them intrinsically evil and worthy of attack by the tribe. Which in my opinion is the real danger of so-called AI. We've already seen what happens when people outsource their judgement and critical thinking to media and government institutions. When the masses outsource their judgement and critical thinking to a glorified autocomplete that is programmed with "weights" by those with an agenda, the masses will believe whatever is spit out by this machine and act accordingly.
I'm not entirely (ie. at all) comfortable with the fact that that the frontier AIs are completely under the umbrella of US tech-broligarchy.
Diversity has become a divisive topic (probably always was), but some diversity in the leadership of the AI arena would be sorely welcome. The current crop are essentially clones of each other with some minor variance that's probably carefully curated 'points of difference' for the tribalists to attach to.
Musk and Altman may hate each other, but I get the feeling their motivations and vision for the future overlap almost 100% (it's just the throne that they're fighting over, or what to rename the Gulf of Mexico).
I was also thinking about this. Did Snowden share his files with Wikileaks? Do the insurance files partly contain the Snowden files. Actually does Snowden himself have access to the files?
The "Snowden Docs" were just a wget --mirror of the internal wiki. So there was a lot of cruft in there.
Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
Apart from his news: if Snowden want to get out of exile and return to the US; the current administration can be bought. The next president will probably still wants to jail him (or worse)
It certainly would have kept the leaks in the news cycle for much longer and not delegitimized his motives. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would have had any real effect on policy.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
I doubt he could have been disappeared after all of the attention. Chelsea Manning wasn’t disappeared despite causing a similar black eye for the US government.
I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone.
That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
The first part massively reinforced by the second. Maybe "because" is a stretch. Obama not Trump was the president when the Snowden leaks happened. Bush was president when it was going on. There was a lot of real evidence of crime there that went un-prosecuted. Crimes kept going. Extra-judicial droning of US citizens seems like a bigger deal that burglary of a psychiatrist office.
Something else to consider is that Watergate is orders of magnitude more of a scandal and has the mindshare to match compared to COINTELPRO.
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
By what standards are the files "overhyped" ? Also to what hysteria do you refer? What would we experience if it was a massive pedo conspiracy of extremely rich and powerful people? Would they all just line up and turn themselves in?
That and "ordinary" prostitution and "sleeziness" aren't important plus ignoring that Epstein wasn't just a pimp, he was very much a human trafficker, in the sense that he effectively coerced women into continuing their involvement with his operation.
When the Epstein news first really broke into the mainstream in 2019/2020, there were a ton of victim testimonials that were absolutely harrowing (and pointed to much weirder and more consequential stuff than "just" sex trafficking), it's been really surreal and disheartening to see the Trump-era releases successfully trivialize and downplay it.
By the standards of "jaw dropping things we heard" for which we now know there is no evidence. Not even any leaks of suggestive circumstantial evidence. Nothing to back the awful fantasies of things done to children. Zero.
Most, if not all of the highly compensated victims were adults when they met the turd Epstein and made decisions as adults. Their claims are untested and uncorroborated but they are massively compensated. Good for them, they're getting paid but the hysteria and panic cost us all. Note how none of the massively compensated can manage to claim anything verifiable involving crimes of sleazebags still living?
Dig up his ranch, sure, why not? Would you bet on anything resembling evidence being found? On the Island? In his NY appartments? All just a massive, highly coordinated, perfectly executed cover-up? Is the govt really that good to get perfectly right, 100% no errors? Under this kind of spotlight with so many looking out for it?
It's a great distraction and there is zero doubt that plenty in washington are taking full advantage. The corruption rages across the aisles.
Everything you think you know about Epstein's crimes, ask yourself "Where is the actual evidence for that?" When you start ignoring the podcast-claims for which there is nothing at all to back it. It starts to look more mundanely awful. Than some monumental bonfire of evil previously un-imagined. He went whoring with Bill Gates who got an STD and it's there in the files trashing Bill's reputation. That was left alone in the cover-up but their pedo ring behaviour perfectly removed without the suggestion of a trace?
People think there is this big conspiracy to conceal the evidence of a grand pedo ring but they didn't protect the moron formerly known as prince andrew from the fall, he'll be well angry if he knows things about a pedo ring so that would be hugely risky. Unbelievably so. Literally.
People want to believe all the worst fabrications. You don't need it, it's bad enough without all that. There's sleaze enough with evidence to prosecute. Prosecutions, starting with Andrew and Mandelson, should happen. And also for everyone else identified by evidence.
Not so much the completely innocent, ordinary people named by Massie and Khanna who aren't in those circles and for whom it seems vanishingly unlikely had anything much to do with Epstein at all, let alone involved in these most hideous of crimes. And who they've now gone completely quiet about having pointed squarely at them and yelled "Evil!"
It's a real shame the extent to which it has polluted rational policy discussion. There's a cost. The cost is larger than you think.
All of the evidence that I've personally seen is on the DOJ website. When you repeat "zero" and "none" over and over... where are you getting that information? It's very very definitive and I'm not sure how anyone could be so confident about something impossible like proving a negative. Do the victim statements not count for you because you've decided that they're "highly compensated" ... an assertion for which you provide no evidence?
A great distraction from what?
You can choose to dismiss the evidence that does exist because of your biases, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
What is the cost you mention that's larger than I think? You keep doing this sort of thing... throwing out these weighty statements, but they're never concrete; never backed up with anything other than your conjecture. Why should anyone listen to you?
I can't call the grandparent account a shill bot because it's against HN rules, but some people bury their heads deep in the sand because they are unwilling to face the ugly reality.
So why was he arrested in 2008 if there was no evidence? And again in 2019? And why would he hang himself if there was no evidence against him? That's a wild conspiracy theory you have, bud.
What was he arrested for? What was the evidence for it?
Was it a pedo blackmail ring of the powerful (who are all pedos so that is universal weakness to get control) at the behest of the Mossad and CIA involving throwing children from a plane over epstein island to remove the witness testimony?
Or something that isn't quite that.
Something which is itself a crime for which there is evidence, you can assess (and a court did!), to support it and is totally believable?
By this method you can begin to weed out the bullshit. Soon you look at the mountain of bullshit that you, yourself reject on your own terms, not necessarily agreeing with me or anyone else. A mountain just by looking.
--------
"Pol Pot was actually being controlled by the scientologist-mormon conspiracy to conquer Sweden to get total herring control."
"Wow? Really? What's the evidence?"
"He killed millions! Why are you defending Pol Pot and the conspiracy?!?! You must be in league with Tom Cruise and Mitt Romney!"
(I'm not completely convinced Epstein did kill himself as you seem to be for what it's worth. There seems to be some real evidence he did, it seems like the most likely explanation but I have some doubt. Based on evidence. What I don't have is any evidence of who did it and why _IF_ it wasn't suicide. Again suicide the most likely. I have enough imagination to invent cool stories involving MI5, the cia, the mossad and the french secret service but choose not to. I've heard plenty of other people's cool stories but yeah, not how I want to consume fiction).
You haven't shown any EVIDENCE why someone who had done nothing wrong would commit suicide. Someone who has hundreds of millions to fund a legal defense, quit before even trying to win in court. You are projecting the very thing you claim against others (lack evidence).
Ok, so Trump continues to flout the law in order to conceal the files, and had his AG lie that there were no files, and had FBI redact the files for months, and 'accidentally' failed to release the specific files of witness testimony naming Trump in the sexual assault of a minor ... why?
Exactly the behaviour you'd expect of a convicted sex offender and best friend of a paedophile, husband to an illegal immigrant apparently trafficked by that paedophile who was not covering anything up, huh. /s
I guess you also think the early closing of Congress to prevent any vote on Hegseth and Trump's war crimes to also just be a coincidence?
Aside from everything else, Trump is a convicted rapist - it's just shocking to me that people like yourself choose to support a person like that who is entirely unrepentant.
I do not now, nor have I ever supported the corrupt crooked politician known as Donald J. Trump.
Any and all evidence of Donald Trump's crimes (for which there is a very large amount of the actually credible variety, ie not this, not Russian collusion involving pissing prostitutes in Steele files) should result in his prosecution and Jailing. I would like to see that.
Let's re-phrase that more sensibly.
Any and all evidence of politician and senior public servant criminal corruption (for which there is a very large amount of the credible variety) should result in prosecution and Jailing.
Washington corruption? No! Look over there! Epstein pedo ring!
I remember that being reported in newspapers in 2020 but did those allegations make it into "The Epstein Files"? (I have paid almost no attention since it's the most obvious limited hangout ever hung out.)
Some junky news site claimed nine, but saw eleven and thirteen more widely reported. Read some JMail but didn’t dig into the files beyond that. Sick stuff, respect to those whose jobs demand they closely follow everything.
Epstein was primarily a money man, but you’ll notice that this gets zero coverage. I guarantee there’s a lot of serious dirt there that will never see the light of day.
It’s almost better for the people involved if the public keeps focusing on the most outrageous aspects of the story. (And it is quite outrageous, and terrible, to be fair.)
This more than some cia/mossad front of blackmailing the powerful with horrific acts done to children.
IDK, the CIA/mossad pedophile part seems significant.
I don't think ordinary people upset at young girls being exploited for the purpose of blackmailing people are being 'naive' or something. Sure, it all pales in comparison to genocide X foreign land but people getting riled by that stuff too.
Quite a large amount of people have little empathy. Someone getting blown up somewhere else is a them problem. "I've never been blown up, they must have done something wrong to deserve it (I have heard things like this come out of peoples mouths)". Now, quite often those same people with little empathy have their own children therefore have an empathetic connection to the theoretical victim allowing them to contemplate the terror those children experienced. This allows the situation to be much more viceral to them. Also, pedophila is an act that is highly stimtized in most places in the world so the social shame and disgust phenomenon also applies.
Everyone should be incandescent with rage about that as soon as there's some evidence of it. And 100% it should be fully investigated.
Is it real? Are you being played with a lie? The further out we get the more it looks like the latter. But hey, I'll take evidence of a cover up. Not seeing anything much there either.
Maybe some real evidence will come soon? Thet can't keep dark forever, it's too big, too many people have touched it.
Moderately wild speculation: the genocide is directly related to the Epstein stuff. We know he had close ties to Mossad, and material that can blackmail the current president. All Mossad has to do is say: do this or we release the surveillance video. And they have been trying to get the USA to invade Iran for decades.
- why there are these bizarre humiliation rituals like the FBI saying beastiality will not DQ you from working for the agency (some top FBI person likely screwed up something related to mossad and were forced to humiliate their agency).
- why the UFC thing happened on the Whitehouse. That's a caricature of our culture, like if we wanted to humiliate mexico by making them have a Mariachi festival or something.
It's not that wild. It's pretty obvious he was collecting blackmail, and trump was his closest confidant, so it doesn't take "wild speculation" to come to this conclusion.
He had deep ties with Israel and Mossad and it's very likely the dirt they have on Trump is possibly the reason we are at war with Iran and bringing the world to the brink of WW3. It's wild to call it underhyped, if anything quite the opposite. It's heavily redacted and the worst half of it hasn't even been released.
He had close ties with Mossad and Ehud Barak. The Israeli embassy specifically helped him wire up his apartment in New York with microphones and cameras to collect evidence.
And the evidence of a coverup is the heavily redacted half release of the files, all the fake theater around the release, the head of the FBI perjuring himself and lying about the files, and DoJ leadership lying and failing to act on the files.
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
That doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example.
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
Snowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
There seems to be a lot of continued misunderstanding how Snowden managed to end up in Russia.
> On June 22, 2013, 18 days after the publication of Snowden's NSA documents began, officials revoked his US passport.[205] On June 23, Snowden boarded a commercial Aeroflot flight, SU213, to Moscow, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, with an intended final destination of Ecuador arranged in an Ecuadorian emergency travel document that Snowden had acquired. However, Snowden became initially stranded in Russia upon his landing in Moscow when his US passport was revoked[0]
It's the US' fault that he ended up in Russia. That's the irony.
Also, at some point they were just done reporting on what was there.
Remember that Snowden got three journalists involved so they could make a decision on what to release, so they didn't expose details of people undercover etc and put real lives in danger. It was not meant to go to the public in its entirety.
> You seriously believe he's still just happily living in Russia? Today?
I mean, Bashar al-Assad is. If he can escape thousands of highly-motivated revenge campaigns to see him strung up like Gadaffi, I can believe in Snowden sipping tea from his dacha.
In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Be afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence
For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.
We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".
The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.
This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".
Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
> Bayesian phylogenetic analyses indicate that intensive agriculture was as likely the result of state formation as its cause. By contrast, grain cultivation most likely preceded state formation.
It seems you hold a much stronger position than the paper you cite. Anyway paper's interesting, thanks.
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency
According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB.
Nor was it put to any other minister.
"This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
[0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/
Why does it post the Intercept in a bad light?
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
The Intercept later also leaked Reality Winner's identity, so that sounds plausible.
Not through malice, but through negligence.
negligence and incompetence can act as very good cover for malice. The same reporter that leaked Reality Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, has also been suspected by multiple other whistleblowers of exposing them as well.
Hanlon's Razor is the domain of fiction authors. It sounds sophisticated but has no basis in reality.
> "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
They also published a federal whistleblowers medical history showing, and when called out on it said it was sourced from the IC.
The intercept is a joke and so are those that work there.
On a tangential note, watching the documentary on her was the first time I viscerally understood that people with very different ideas about how to live can agree on some fundamental political principles, and don't have to stuff themselves into right/left boxes for easy manipulation. They went after her hard because a culturally-conservative, intelligent, hard-nosed soldier type who sticks to virtues that are not completely in-line with our warhawk doctrine is their worst nightmare.
EDIT: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reality_winner
Greenwald was probably blackmailed with something worse than the foot video he posted.
Is that's why he constantly reposts russian propaganda and conspiracy theories?
I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The latter applied to many US (and historically British empire wars, from where the US learned).
Greenwald had a Rumble contract for daily videos during the Biden years, so I think it would be fair to say he was a Trump influencer.
He also has many enemies in Brazil (e.g.. Supreme Judge Moraes), so that video could have come from anywhere.
But yes, he could also have been threatened over the Snowden files earlier.
Valdai financing in 2023 does look bad. But his 2015 talk "Why Ukraine is the West's fault" does not appear to have any financing and says the same already.
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...
All is in line with his realist great powers philosophy (the 1993 analysis differs of course because there was no significant NATO expansion yet).
I'm sure he would take CNN money, too, but they don't invite him. That is the problem if you isolate people.
I found the debate with Sikorski very illuminating. Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar) and EU (MEP) in addition to Poland. He's been in the dirt too, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an on-location reporter in the 1980s. During the debate, Mearsheimer tried to lecture him about things that went on at diplomatic gatherings where Sikorski was present (and led a delegation) and Mearsheimer was not.
He's a total hack and his brand of "realism" has nothing to do with reality. Dude can't even read Russian, yet thinks he's an expert on Russia. The only reason we're discussing him here right now is because Russian troll army has been promoting him hard; like most charlatans, he has the appearance of someone who knows what they're talking about.
Mearsheimer says that there's no evidence Putin had imperial ambitions before 24 Feb 2022; that the war has forced him into this. Some of the closest people to Putin say that he told them fucking 20 years ago what he was going to do with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer is weird. His book "Israel lobby and US foreign policy" is outstanding. But when he speaks about many other things it feels like he's improvising all the time.
> Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar)
So an American paid polish minister. Nothing new here. /s
Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.
It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.
That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
> That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
That is a fine example of propaganda: All people, including historians who evaluate different possibilities, surely want to paint Russia as the victim!
You are literally forbidding people to think.
Tragic: "No Way To Prevent This" Claims Only World Superpower Losing 10,000+ Personnel Per Month
According to the other side.
10,000/month is a conservative estimate. The Kremlin isn't denying it.
As long as theyre criminals or drunks it's considered a positive. In Russia the value of life is often negative.
The consistent through-line of Greenwald's journalism from the Bush era through to the Trump era is an anti-u.s pro Russia narrative.
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
I'm not surprised that this billionaire was actually surprised by this.
Makes sense. OP is leaning I to conspiracional adhoc reasoning. I’m sure Pierre would rather keep his Hawaiian island than to field questions from the agencies
>The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities
Proving again that the billionaire class is more lucky than smart, and has now more money than sense.
I'm confident there's significant variation within the cohort.
This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.
It feels like there is "backpressure" that has been backed into our current world that makes people like Snowden and Assange an impossibility. The collective control of politics, media, and corporations have built a society that is inoculated to truth and no longer have a response to evil.
Even when the truth is told to us directly to our faces, no one seems to care.
IMO the underlying reason for this is one or more of:
1) Americans are [statistically speaking] doing very well, high GDP, lots of consumer products to buy, lots of entertainment, lots of cheap food... and wikileaks is not doing anything to help but maybe destroy this.
2) Americans are also doing very poorly, the bottom 25% have bigger problems to deal with than wikileaks. Why would they care if the CIA is watching them if they can't afford next month's rent?
3) Information overload: Similiar to 1, we get overloaded with things we ought to care about, climate, wiki leaks, wars.... it's too much and people really just want. #1.
Or maybe I'm off...
Re 2): because you can't have a handful of extremely wealthy people in a completely equal world; so one wonders if enough accidental topplings of foreign democracies would not an "inequality" enforcement agency make?
Reading a bit, it's become somewhat apparent to me that that little independent government agency is the instability enforcer in order to sustain the world as a set of abstractions to keep people artificially poor: from cartels (involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), to toppling of budding democracies (IIRC, Iran 1953) ... further revealing they and their masters consider that progress is a zero-sum game for them.
I'm not sold on anyway we will ever reach inequality, and I don't think it is a actual goal we should have as a target. I think it is a political wedge issue. I'm happy have my mind changed though.
The rest of your reply is getting too much into conspiracy theory for me to reply.
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My hopeful side sees a future where he's pardoned and can live here as a hero.
Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since. I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
Not likely, both political parties hate him.
Maybe Americans will rid of both of them...
Doesn't really seem possible. The two party system is so deeply wound into the structure of the u.s. political machinery that a new party doesn't really stand a chance.
Wrong phrasing, a new political party could absolutely come into power. It would just replace one of the two-parties ideologies but be called the same thing and you still have 2 parties.
And especially treating political parties like sports teams that must defeat the other, regardless of whether it's in the best interest of the country
It might be time to throw the machinery out the window.
> Maybe Americans will rid of both of them...
There are recent trends to suggest they could
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
He may have lost that opportunity when he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically, in a dictatorial police state.
His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.
He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/461578-snowden-ultimate-go...
The Constitution guarantees Snowden an impartial jury trial on the criminal charges against him. It does not guarantee him the right to have the jury decide whether breaking the law was morally justified or beneficial to society. The Sixth Amendment requires a jury to determine the elements of the crimes; it doesn't constitutionalize every defense a defendant would like to make.
In another comment, you said that he should try to enter the US despite his passport being cancelled, which is also breaking the law.
Russia actually did the legally correct action, in giving refuge to a stateless person.
Snowden did not take refuge in Russia. He was trapped there when his passport was cancelled by the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...
He still accepted their asylum rather than voluntarily going back to the us. His original intention does not exculpate him.
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Why would he go back to the US lmao. He's foolish enough to trust the US people but not that foolish.
Rather easy to say from your couch.
Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
> He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that.
A hero of the world, not a hero of the US. That's what I wanted to say.
I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.
Not wanting to be subjected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... doesn't unmake someone a hero
As loud as possible? That's naive. They would have black bagged him instantly, no trial. In fact a public trial is his only stipulation for voluntary return - that this has been denied should tell you everything.
Funny how this always seems to happen.
Chelsea manning leaks - fizzled out
Edward Snowden leaks - fizzled out
Panama papers - a couple token people charged and many more acquited so that also fizzled out
Epstein files - clearly fizzling out
It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you expose and uncover and dump into the press. It doesn't matter how many reddit threads go over the corruption in detail coupled with available documentation. It doesn't matter how many podcasters talk about it.
It just doesn't ever matter. If the powers that be don't want the boat to rock, it simply will not rock. We've seen this time and time again over this past century. As sobering as that is to realize, the current crop of power has an absolute chokehold on this planet. We can openly talk about how corrupt they are and they know we won't do anything material about it.
"If the powers that be don't want the boat to rock, it simply will not rock. "
Hear me out, it's not so much the powers, it's the people. If you poll people, they might say they want all this information and government reform.
But if you try to give them even 1 bit of hardship to accomplish this, then will not and it is easily forgotten.
This to me makes a lot more sense than 'the powers' in complete control.
I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.
It's all fun and games until the mind wanders to you getting polonium-210'd for your work, and you decide 'my life isn't worth _this_.' It's kind of dumb people choose fear, but I understand it.
Being killed for your reporting happens to a lot of journalists. I think your comment about "dumb people choosing fear" is incredibly tone deaf. I don't see you risking your life to expose the Panama Papers and being blown up with a bomb for it. It's easy to write something so brave from behind your keyboard.
I think the real answer is the Overton window shifted to accommodate what was previously scandalous,
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
>We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming.
In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?
Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
Your comment started out well within the Overton window, but in the second paragraph it jumped out.
Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
I like that terminology.
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
There is nothing like "the most powerful", though.
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
Corporate Dems lose because they have become indistinguishable from their donor class and have failed to institute significant changes that would actually improve people’s lives. They are a captive opposition.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
> People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
> Perceived cultural and societal decline
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."
Half of university graduates in India and China are women now. The percentage is higher in GCC nations.
Yeah, and yet women in both India and China make up a laughable minority of business leadership. There’s a huge gap between getting a degree, which is trivial these days, and running a business and leading others, and it turns out that in general women don’t like/aren’t good at running businesses or leading others.
This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.
Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.
> particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena
Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.
That purpose is to further entrench and protect the power of those in power.
Ok? And?
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.
And you are trying to separate them mentally as if they wouldn’t have a close relationship in a society that has existed for many generations. You seem to be suggesting that controlling a populace and ‘hanging on to power’ are necessarily inconsistent with governing a society. I can think of examples where clearly hanging on to power and working advantageously for the society don’t coincide (run of the mill African dictatorships come to mind), but there are other cases where a government’s self-interested control and domination of its population clearly coincide(d) with a society’s well being at the population level (Sparta, China). Perhaps we are referring to difference timescales here - I’m talking about, let’s say, 250 years minimum. But the longer the better (think: certain Chinese or Indian hierarchies).
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Neither American nor (mercifully) european.
But congrats on managing to pull out the ad hominem and being wrong to boot, that takes special skill.
here's a bogeyman for you, accepting money in a representative democracy for political action is maybe mere nanometers from the definition of bribery.
Perhaps a bit ahistorical, but I'm put in mind of the quote "Not even Masada began as a suicide attempt."
Interesting times indeed.
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
You're clutching your pearls far too hard.
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)
It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.
The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.
The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".
> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.
The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.
> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.
Is slavery a war? Yes or no?
Is genocide a war? Yes or no? (Its definitely worse, but is it actually war if one side does not resist?)
Without “once a guy said …”, neither of them are a war.
War involves battles, it involves fight, it involves opposition.
This answer is not for you personally, but for me and other readers. I see you are not interested in other opinions.
Based on everything I thus far know about WWII, I do not have the impression that Hitler wanted war [1], nor do I have the impression that their ideology demanded it.
If you also read what they published about themselves, instead of only what others wrote about them, the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced.
[1] https://yle.fi/a/20-270673
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
That's still a single window. Otherwise what are the radical, unthinkable positions between abhorrent, fine and moot?
(TL;DR: It's just a metaphor).
thats the tough thing about investigative journalism / whistleblowers. You have to hope there's an audience who will care.
Plenty of people care.
Empathy is, after all, free.
Action has a price.
It's a figure of speech. It's short for "care enough to to take action."
No it’s not.
It’s short for: post on the internet to strangers.
> You have to hope there's an audience who will [post on the internet to strangers].
No, I don't think that's what they're saying.
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
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Easy advice to give as a bystander lacking context (2013!), hard to follow as a "martyr" living in that context. It wasn't even clear whether he'd be a martyr (he could have easily turned the politics around, wouldn't be the first time in the American history).
I was definitely around in 2013. And it was quite clear at the time there will be government persecution for the leaks, I mean that's why he ran in the first place.
If you stand on the path of martyrdom for your people you should be prepared to follow it to conclusion rather than fleeing to the sworn enemy.
Well the sworn frenemy has a crude but fitting idiom for that I suspect you might be familiar with, and Snowden might be too now: пиздеть - не мешки ворочать.
I have huge respect for people that have passed the test of going against their environment and comrades to do what they think is right (even if/when I disagree with it or it harms my interests). You can argue that he was insincere or a double agent (this is definitely wrong), you can argue he's a traitor by endangering people who had nothing to do with it (weak argument IMO), but arguing from an armchair that he must have walked full length is just silly I think. Let's have an extreme and inverted thought experiment to test your views. Imagine someone blows the whistle about FSB's Ryazan sugar [1] today, must he not run and let his head be smashed with a sledgehammer in a prime time TV show?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing...
I have a clear, experience based understanding of my personal limits that makes me feel entitled to comment.
Cowardice is the greatest of the sins for it begets many of the others. Or if you insist on colloquial Russian: не можешь срать - не мучай жопу.
these are potentially the same people that killed epstein?
now, i don't believe that but you never know.
Noone in position of power was threatened by the contents of Snowden's leaks.
This is plain false. NSA was threatened and many more.
He gave up his life in the US to tell the people what the gov is doing. It's not like he then went and said hey Putin need some help destroying America? He just fled because otherwise the US would throw him in a hole for the rest of his life. What good would that do? It's not about martyrdom it's about getting the information out there. The information is out. Him being in a hole wouldn't do anything good for anyone.
Gave up his life? Why, he may have been living his best. A fully funded expat life in Moscow with some Jason Bourne cachet instead of scrapping by as a Sharepoint admin in the age of AI.
Gave up his life in the US yes. You should read the whole sentence before responding. Ideally even the whole comment.
I could swear "in the US" part wasn't there when I replied. Oh well.
If I had edited the comment you would see an "edited" tag on it. I'll do it on this one.
Edited to add this. Nevermind, there's no tag now. That's strange, I could swear that's a thing. Maybe I edited too early? Trying again now it's 18 minutes later. Still nothing, guess I've just imagined it?
I don't think it ever was a feature on HN. Although I've seen that on Lobsters and some other forums.
That's how it looks at least. It's a good excuse if your goal was always to flee to Russia.
As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
Well it sort of hints that Snowden was a Russian agent from the start.
And maybe that's why the Snowden documents are not being fully released, because they've gone from responsible disclosure to irresponsible disclosure.
I'm 100% convinced the US is evil imperialists, but in this particular case the "Snowden being a Russian agent"-angle isn't finding much resistance.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
its just too convenient.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."
Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.
He could have returned to the US. His citizenship wasn’t revoked.
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Did anything change in terms of policies or people responsible seeing criminal charges as a result of these findings?
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.
One thing I know for sure is that those leaks caused a lot of the tech community to go a lot harder into encryption.
The reason practically all sites are HTTPS now can be traced to this. Many, if not most, sites in 2012 were plain http. Which is actually difficult for me to remember despite working on sites as a sysadmin back then.
I don’t think anyone was convicted, maybe some resignations and a lot of very uncomfortable questions from the senate- and likely some policy changes, though I can’t point to them.
USA FREEDOM Act ending bulk phone-records collection, Presidential Policy Directive 28, and the Second Circuit's 2015 ruling in ACLU v Clapper.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
At the cost of immediate and longterm imprisonment.
Decisions made at gunpoint are not usually preplanned choices.
It was his choice to leak as himself. He could have used whistleblower routes (which was investigated and he only sent 1 email but never reported it)
Really have to question his motives
> He could have used whistleblower routes
Against... the NSA. Do you genuinely believe that anyone could leak that amount of NSA data anonymously?
It’s wasn’t anonymous back then iirc and I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything
> I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything
What is whistleblowing, then?
There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.
He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)
Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Funny, I consider him a national hero. Agree to disagree I guess.
> There are secure ways to whistleblow
... when your adversary is the NSA? We're circling back to my original message.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?
And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.
“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.
Snowden did it completely the wrong way.
Binney and Drake only got listened to as a result of Snowden though.
They say so themselves.
That’s not what they said.
They said that Snowden caused a shift in the public debate not that nobody listened to them beforehand (you should know they were raising concerns going back to 2002).
Baltimore Sun was reporting on Drake in 2006. Binney was publicly talking about it to Wired News and Democracy Now in 2012. Snowden happened in 2013.
… and nothing happened.
So that makes my point even plainer than it possibly could have been made. The people who did the right thing by your definition got nothing done (and this was what caused Snowden to do it the way he did) and since Snowden, those previous cases were taken seriously by the government
Well their complaint triggered a formal DoD IG investigation and produced a highly critical audit plus fraud investigations. Trailblazer program was killed in 2006. That all happened well before Snowden. Snowden skipped all of those channels entirely. Binney and Drake were taken seriously but you are glossing over all do the other stuff that Snowden leaked that had nothing to do with the privacy concerns deemed that went beyond what FISA courts authorized (and no court found violation of 4th amendment).
Snowden did it completely wrong and you can’t convince me otherwise. I don’t see this conversation going further as you move the goalposts.
I'm "glossing over it" because you are, I explicitly asked you in another thread what he leaked that wasn't relevant for the public interest.
I'm not sure what your angle is, but the NSA proved that they were beyond contempt when they lied to the Senate and there were people in the room that knew the situation who didn't pull them up on it.
Regarding Binney specifically; the IG's report largely supported his claims, but it was classified and changed little. Thomas Drake, a serving NSA official who raised similar concerns internally, also got nowhere.
The government's serious attention came only after the New York Times revealed warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, and it came as a leak investigation. In 2007 the FBI raided the homes of Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark; Binney has said agents drew guns on him while he was in the shower.
Drake was indicted under the Espionage Act in 2010. The case collapsed in 2011, he pleaded guilty to a minor misdemeanour, and the judge sharply criticised the prosecution's conduct. So the substance of Binney's warnings was mostly ignored or denied.
Binney went fully public around 2012, and NSA officials publicly denied that they kept files on ordinary Americans.
The core contrast is that Binney went through proper channels, took no documents and was not believed. He was investigated anyway and achieved almost no reform. Snowden bypassed every channel, took vast amounts of classified material and was pursued far more aggressively, but he forced a public debate and concrete legal changes.
You can pretend that's not true, but you'd be ignoring reality.
It’s clear you want the last word with AI help so I’ll let you have it.
Since you have no actual answer to anything, even provably true things.
Thanks!
Exactly coming from a London-Swedish guy the spewing nonsense is what I should have expected. What business of the US is what we do anyways?
That GCHQ was involved definitely interests me, that GCHQ was being used by NSA to spy on US citizens (and vice-versa) to bypass citizen protections should be of interest to civilians of both countries.
I don’t trust civil servants to not abuse access into everyones communications, the damage a stalker or pedophile can do is immeasurable, and we have some statements that was happening.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782476
He could have returned to the US. He chose to exile in Russia. He was already fleeing. I posted a bunch about it below
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
He isn’t deserving of a pardon or exile by the damage he did. But he could have stayed and faced the consequences if the cause was sincere
What exactly was the damage he did?
He exposed massive unconstitutional dragnets that made the unaccountable agencies look bad.
If the damage is "makes the US look bad from their illegal surveillance of citizens", then the NSA did that to themselves.
Needs of the state outweigh needs of the people? That's crazy talk.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
He said "as Americans, we're better than that", does that sound like defending? That he was conflicted about it isn't too surprising, he was ratting out his colleagues and the institution he had worked for through the entire of his professional life.
To the rest, you've fallen for their trick. Three CIA threw the book at him, and indeed tried to convict him for his leaks: "The five-count indictment against Kiriakou charged him with violations of both the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (for allegedly revealing the identity of a covert agent) and the Espionage Act (for allegedly revealing national defense information to unauthorized individuals such as journalists). He was also charged with making false statements to the CIA about a book that he was seeking to publish."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act is just the charge that stuck. When you're revealing government secrets, it's very, very hard not to accidentally cross the line, especially when you consider that the whole justice system is arranged in their favor, not yours.
The result is that lots of people say they support whistleblowers, but anytime someone actually whistleblows they back the government line and say "they went too far". Why is the onus on whistleblowers, acting in secret and with fear of retribution at every step, to perfectly separate the illegal actions from the legal, and punish only the former? Why is the onus not on our government, the elected representatives who ought to serve us and obey the law, to not commit crimes against humanity in the first place?
If you demand perfection from whistleblowers but accept faults in your government, don't be surprised if you don't get many whistleblowers.
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That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
The lesson in all this? Stay in school.
>and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment.
Haha. Tell us another one. I don't have enough comedy in my life.
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
>the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
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If a commenter posts a thing that I disagree with, then their motives are bad. Whereas all opinions of mine are pure and in good faith.
For some reason people think psychological operations are some kind of urban legend.
i just had that conversation about 'industrial' effort and 'actors', we have recent examples of monetary corruption in the sacklers.
If one country wants to kill you why wouldn't you flee to a different one and give them everything you have against the first country?
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
Execution? A few years of imprisonment at worst. Trump has pardoned worse people (the guy from SilkRoad for instance).
Russia may execute him anytime though. And his family. Easy to pretend he was killed by an Ukrainian bombing.
Well when Trump pardons him, he'll come back. Trump won't pardon him, because Trump supports deep state mass surveillance.
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Your president literally does illegal things all the time and your Supreme Court just declares it’s legal because it’s the president.
You have zero moral ground or credibility to stand on.
What the current president does now has no bearing on what was done then, with a somewhat functioning Supreme Court and an adversarial Congress. The conspiracy theories spread by Snowden helped lead to Trump, and that is the main point I want to get across. While spreading his conspiracy theories, he also helped the CCP, and that is something for which he would stand trial for in the U.S.
If he stayed in the U.S., his punishment would already be over. Now with the current president directly telling DOJ what to do, who knows what would happen if Snowden were to stand trial today, but that isn't a possibility Snowden faced when he fled.
That's a conspiracy theory I haven't heard before which I'm pretty sure I'll never hear a shred of evidence for.
It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...
Snowden wasn't stupid. He was the world's best Sharepoint administrator.
It was probably unwise of him to insult the T group director publicly, which led to the entire subsequent chain of events.
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...
Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Crimes? What a strong word.
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
If a person does an illegal thing, that cancels out the illegal things other people did.
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other
>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?
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Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?
Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?
Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?
Which crimes had Manning exposed? There has to be a list somewhere.
Two of my former colleagues (both Reuters journalists) were murdered by U.S. soldiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zYTxuW2vmzk
Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.
Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).
-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.
I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.
But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.
That was not a part of the cables released by Manning.
The "Collateral Murder" video of the unlawful killing of journalists was part of the archive that Wikileaks published that's been attributed to Chelsea Manning. All available evidence supports this was part of the material. Chelsea's leak was the contents of the shared drive, not just diplomatic cables.
The release of the diplomatic cables themselves gravely harmed U.S. interests and is alleged to have led to the deaths of CIA collaborators.
Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.
The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.
Your transphobia hardly makes you look unbiased, shill
It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.
I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
No.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
>Assange didn't commit a crime
Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.
Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
No, it does not.
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.
So imagine a censored random variable.
Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?
>So imagine a censored random variable... D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
This is not a real thing, it's just something you made up. You can see this obviously if you transfer this to another domain. For example, if I get a paper cut at work do you think that means I'm partially dead? Do you think that singular example of a paper cut means "we can be fairly sure" that "a bunch" of my coworkers have died from paper cuts?
Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.
It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.
A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.
There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.
It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.
Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.
> And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion
Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.
I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.
We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal
> pretend that plea deals are coercion
That's exactly what they are.
> Assange didn't commit a crime
Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is
He'd served his time for that.
didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time
one is true and one is false
We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges
He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy
You mean the rape charges that were dropped? Incredible that people still tout this obvious psyop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50473792
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He likely did do what he was accused of, with two well-meaning (and now presumably former) fans of his (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...), though it's his right to argue against that. It does not seem like a "honeypot" trap, these were genuine supporters.
The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.
I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.
Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.
Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
"Only had a few years behind bars"
He's now spent years and is looking at spending the rest of his life in Russia.
The OP was right - avoiding a unfair trial is still fleeing.
The word "flee" is not a pejorative in any way. For example flee North Korea all the time.
No. It is pejorative in the way it is used. Context is important.
Is Snowden able to talk freely in Russia?
About Russia? Nope.
*Bradley Manning
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
>But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart.
It was not the original intent from what i understand.
But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
> But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
As i wrote he probably took the easiest way out for himself. We are in agreement.
I just say what's better for himself is not necessarily better for the debate/cause. I don't know how that is controversial.
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
Nepal UAE Belarus Mongolia Vietnam Laos Montenegro Indonesia
the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th... 'What the United States Did in Indonesia', The Atlantic
Where else can we move the goalposts?
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
> he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report
He didn't, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782465
"doesn't have a public interest defence".
Can't be serious.
There isn’t one under the law so no.
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
What he exposed was found illegal by US courts. And the govt had to stop it. What more evidence do you want?
Only one program went beyond what was originally authorized and shutdown. The rest had no basis to be leaked. It caused grave damage to the national security of the US. Those programs had nothing to do with the privacy of American citizens that everyone keeps latching on here. They are ignoring the rest of the stuff
A single program he leaked was illegal. The vast majority was not, including the hacking of Chinese targets that he leaked directly to SCMP.
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
> I am still a citizen and so was he.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
I get it I didn’t leak national security information but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t stateless. That’s the part I was referring to
That just feels like a slightly different false equivalence - and having said that, I may be making yet another version of it by saying this:
If a person has a 'state', but that state would immediately jail the person for treason upon their return, is that materially different to stateless?
That feels like the reason that many countries allow 'political asylum'.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
Russia offers asylum to stateless people.
The only problem with getting asylum anywhere while being stateless is proving who you are. And it wasn't a problem for him.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.
> He just faced arrest if he returned
You seem to continue to minimise the seriousness of the situation.
Oh it was very serious what he did. But it was odd he went to Hong Kong then to Russia on his was to Ecuador. It wasn’t well thought out
It wasn't odd at all the list of places he could flee to was very limited because of his job.
It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.
He didn’t have to flee at all
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
What about leaking secrets of the United States has anything to do with morals? He might as well been a foreign adversary
when the secret being leaked is that the united states is spying on its own citizens and violating the 4th amendment.
i find it weird how many Russians, Chinese and Americans are weirdly protective of their own government's oppressive behaviours in the name of patriotism.
Again you are missing the point. Nothing was proven in violation of the 4th amendment. Ninth Circuit didn’t even latch on that argument nor express it. Courts agreed that the metadata collection program went beyond what was approved by the FISA courts. But he leaked a whole host of foreign spying programs that had nothing to do with Americans.
Just as some Chinese people want Ai Weiwei to rot in prison, some Russians wanted Navalny to rot in prison and some Americans wanted or still want Snowden and Assange to rot in prison.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
(inb4: No, you're wrong, he wasn't stateless.)
Words mean things.
If you decide your words mean something else to the common usage, people will react to that.
Wasn’t he departing from Hong Kong to Ecuador and was stuck in Russia because his passport was revoked in transit?
I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.
Yes so his default option was to return to the US and face arrest so he applied for asylum (as a US citizen still)
Her default option was to return to her abuser and face more abuse so she went to the only shelter she could access, having no means to access any other shelter.
"Her" is Snowden.
Let's not be so sneaky in how we word things ;)
He wasn’t being abused.
I'm pretty sure one or more members of congress called for his execution.
One did. But he was declared a traitor and treasonous. I agree with them.
> If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"
Hence established! ^
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
Eeesh, the propaganda must be strong in the US if you're getting downvoted for this. You're essentially summarising documented facts.
It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.
Russians had a joke about him back then: "For the crimes against the US Snowden was sentenced to the life in Russia"
Absolutely not a joke.
I would say Snowden's legacy is the push to get HTTPS everywhere.
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
Of course it can. Just not without the user's knowledge and consent. Let the user load your CA and you can cache and repeat whatever you want.
In practice, those caches were all done for malicious purposes, usually for injecting ads and selling tracking information through injected headers.
Those shared caches were monitored just as strongly, if not stronger, by the people doing internet surveillance.
What???
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
> in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
> We kill people based on metadata.
Sure, but they also kill people based on content.
> It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
I wholeheartedly disagree :)
If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...
One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lol> If you will refer to the “survivability onion”
> I am here → Don't be seen
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
I too ran Squid. It was more annoying than not (except for images, where I do think it was quite useful)
It seem you concede the point about survivability though?
Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
> if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing
Just visiting, sure but if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
Say you are on your school network and leak something damaging about the school on Wikipedia.
Prior to Wikpedia switching to HTTPS, both the school and any intermediate network could see
After HTTPS, your school could see That's strictly better in every way.> if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
It’s really not, because knowing when you edited it is already enough, given that there’s a timestamped edit history. And the size and shape of your request payloads will show that you edited it, not merely performed GET requests.
Doesn't encrypted DNS make a lot of that metadata moot ?
And of course the additional options available
No, it doesn't. You still see the domain name in the TLS headers.
Encrypted Hello will close that bit given time.
Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.
So what? They have Cloudflare. "SSL removed here"
That’s true
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
Ecuador was his original plan. He had been granted asylum there.
He got stuck in Russia. He didn’t flee to Russia. Don’t twist facts.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
You could literally watch the snowden movie alone and get half of facts right. Don't have to even read good journalist pieces. Just a movie. Come on.
I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.
Thank you for pointing this out. So often that point gets lost in the weeds of the discussion of trivialities. The absolute irony is that Snowden is more 'ideal American' than 99% of the rest of the population, and the people that cast him in any kind of bad light should be ashamed to call themselves Americans.
No good deed goes unpunished.
> Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out.
The article addresses this argument, and quite thoroughly dismisses it as BS. Read the report about how rapidly the reporting stopped and how much material was left untouched.
He didn't flee. Just went home.
According to his wiki, Snowden was born in Elizabeth City in North Carolina.
GP is implying that Russia is his canonical home because Snowden was acting like a spy
In the UK we have the laws around how government documents of historical value go into the national archives after 20 years, documents with personal information are held longer (up to 100 years). I could see a good argument for the Snowden archive to be automatically decrypted and published after 100 years on a similar basis for it's historcial value.
I think the answer to what happened is really straight forward though - they published as much of it as they could, what they published is probably pretty representative of other stuff in the archives and there's no news value to publishing 100 variations of the same story. If they published 1% of the archive, but the other 99% is just a million details about the same basic decisions then I don't think it matters much. It's also a really slow and painful process to make sure you're protecting the identities of people.
Having said that, I could see some value in a team taking a privately hosted open source AI model, feeding into it the archive and any related news articles into it and asking it if there's anything newsworthy that we missed.
In current age there is no reason for Snowden not to do this:
1. Use all variants of local AI to categorize documents and remove PII. Different AI's can be used to doublecheck results
2. Publish output as a torrent
Then wider community can find whatever patterns exist there.
He needs to invent a time machine first. He obviously doesn't have access to the leaked documents anymore.
But I agree that there is no reason for the journalists that have access to not do this.
100 years?
Except for all the exceptions, which are many, like the Jack the Ripper police files which where denied to the public.
They're just hiding misconduct because the government does an enormous number of things that would be national scandals if they weren't allowed to bury them.
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
> Who are these people that you talk about?
Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!
> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?
If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?
You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.
Here in the US, "Flock bad" has entered the Algorithm which dictates what people see and care about. People otherwise uninvolved in technology, whose eyes would glaze over in a conversation about mass surveillance, they will light up if you say Flock. It's just in the zeitgeist. My comment was more meta commentary about how recommender algorithms and not people's personal thoughts / opinions are deciding which causes get attention.
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
People don't care about things unless/until they become part of the Omnicause.
What's that?
This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.
This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.
I still don't understand what the comment means.
The internet is indeed very good at squandering young people’s passion and energy, directing them towards endless debates about the right sub‑sub‑ideology in blogs and subreddits with 1,000 subscribers, rather than towards actually changing people’s lives.
<meta> A large share about this HN forum is about Snowden the man. Was he right? Is he a spy? Is he more free in Russia than he would have been in jail? etc.
Contrast that with the article, a long and well documented piece about journalism and the files themselves, with not a single line about Snowden the man.
That reminds me about how hard it was, 10 years ago, to speak about the actual events depicted in the Wikileaked files, in all the deluge about Chelsea Manning and/or Assange.
Part of it is certainly due to our human nature: we love to discuss people, facts or ideas not so much. But one has to wonder: what if it were just a diversion technique?
We will never know; But what we do know is that one should never feed the trolls.
I don't get why they all try to protect it so much. Snowden's identity is already public so sharing the files can't hurt him. Just redact personal info and put it all out there.
A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.
They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise
Free journalism in a democracy is inherently political, which means there is always an ethical balance between the duty to inform and potential harm.
For example: the name of a secret foreign agent
It is a fact. It is news. It has potential harm. What are the pros and cons of publishing it?
I think it's quite obvious that journalism is mostly PR for the current things in politics by now. It probably died around 2020 at the latest.
I can give you an exact date: 16 October 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
Was that the first time a journalist was assassinated?
No. Would you like to answer your own question?
This article (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/why-ame...) is basically canonical for things wrong with the media and it was written in 96.
More like died around 1920, if it was ever alive.
The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.
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I deeply hate Noam Chomsky for his hypocrisy, but his 80's analysis that the press as a business can't do its job is profoundly right. It got much worse since then.
> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
There's a difference between caring about NS, and letting the government dictate how to do so.
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] 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 [0]
Also, please refer to a reply to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
> it changed absolutely nothing.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
> I take him at his word.
Your interpretation of his words is lacking.
> It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused.
1. Trump's rise was and is mostly about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does. Claiming its significance here just sets up a fruitless semantic discussion in which you can claim almost anything about whether it applies.
> Your interpretation of his words is lacking.
I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/05/11/2013-edwa...
> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.
> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.
As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.
You disguise deflection with pedantry.
Let me repeat:
> I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever."
Both these ideas still stand.
Yes, PRISM was misinterpreted, but the larger matter was exposing a massively overpowered surveillance apparatus. An apparatus that is more powerful than before. Had Snowden known the lack of effect of his actions, he would not have taken them. This is what you seem to miss, tunneling on PRISM and deflecting to Trump's rise.
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed
The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day. The ones who knew better got the phone metadata program shut down, just like the email metadata program that Obama had already shut down according to Snowden's leaks. There were no other programs that could possibly be interpreted as illegal, the government implemented oversight and reporting to make sure the legal programs weren't abused, and the tech companies fixed their security postures to account for state actors that can tap international WANs.
> but they aren't massively limited in what they can do
Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do. Any recent reductions in the effectiveness of the 4th Amendment are due solely to the concentration of power in Trump, which was helped by conspiracy theorists like Snowden and those who fooloshly believed him.
> The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day.
You're in too deep. Most people don't even know about Snowden. The public is much larger than just a bunch of techies. And that public essentially didn't give a fuck.
> Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do.
On paper, not in practice. Every since 9/11 the balance of security vs. liberty has been off. The point stands that Snowden changed nothing fundamentally about that (ongoing) slide into dystopia.
Could you explain PRISM? I don’t understand PRISM either.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
It's right there on the leaked slide: https://imgur.com/setOJIm
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/no-evidence-of-nsas-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mini...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-did-mainstream-media-get-t...
https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...
https://medium.com/prism-truth/the-prism-details-matter-82a1...
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
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For somebody staying quiet as fuck he sure likes to repost russian bs.
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I can't even tell if this is posted in earnest, or satire, or some sort of highly advanced shitpost I am failing to grasp the nature of.
I'm an American citizen who read news about Ukraine back when it was a niche thing to care about and I have Ukrainian friends who tell me how it's going. You can't imagine how stressful it is to live there and get drafted into their drone target lottery.
And your proposed solution to that is, uh, surrender to Stalin in the hopes he stops hurting your guys when you surrender?
I'm gonna let you in on some new info about Stalin...
This is a classic Russian perspective on the war - that Ukraine is a gang of neo-Nazis that are dead set on eliminating Russian speakers from Ukraine by force. Russians will further claim that this gang of Russophobic neo-Nazis is led by Zelenskyy, a Jewish man who speaks Russian as his mother tongue and Ukrainian as a second language.
The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.
FYI "Jewish Nazi" isn't actually an oxymoron. In WW2 there were hundreds of thousands of Nazi party members who were Jews - they mostly got gassed along with the other Jews. Plus the whole Palestine thing.
Zelenskiy isn't a Nazi, but the reason he isn't a Nazi isn't because he's Jewish.
Yes. Zelensky is a kapo.
Remind me and other readers, what did the Tornado battalion do, and what did Zelensky do with them?
Also, remind me, when did the Ukrainian parliament last celebrate the Nazi collaborator (Bandera) during its new years posts?
I don't think Zelenskyy is a saint - far from it.
However this is one of the weakest possible grievances you could raise because Putin also released rapists and murderers from prison to raise manpower, most famously during the spring 2023 Bakhmut offensive. There is no moral highground on that point.
Actually, this is actually a near universal issue with Russian grievances against Ukraine. Virtually any grievance that Russia can claim against Ukraine, Ukraine can claim that exact grievance back at equal or greater measure.
You're finally getting it. Russia and Ukraine are truly the same when it comes to seeking their own interests. Ukraine was happy to fund far-right psychos to go terrorize Russian citizens of Ukraine after 2014 because that's the bargain they made. Russia invaded to stop NATO/EU from ending the kleptocracy because they are horrible shit stain oligarchs.
While I respect Snowden and find many of the claims plausible much of the evidence and story didn’t add up. Here are a few doubts I have, and I’d like to see the rebuttal.
First, he seemed to embellish his role and authority at NSA. Based on his vernacular, and the artifacts that he presented, I believe he was an IT admin, who happened upon these files. His archive was predominantly design / spec docs with screenshots, rather than code artifacts (compiled code, 1st hand screenshots, configs). In his interviews he didn’t seem to have a deep technical grasp of the systems, and he was cagey about his areas of responsibility.
Second, XKeyScore and other system implementations seemed too primitive for the claimed capability. It was claimed they could google everyone’s email (or some large share of the population, let’s say 100-500m individuals, in real time), but the designs were primitive collegiate level , single-instance mySQL databases and CRUD UIs. I didn’t see any indications the system capability met the claims .
I’m not an expert, I’ve read No Place to Hide, watched some interviews, and used to follow him on Twitter.
I’d like to see how this community assessed him personally and the artifacts he shared.
He was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.
> He was a sysadmin who built a system
can you elaborate on this ? what were his responsibilities and what role did he have in setting up the system?
He seemed to imply that he helped deploy these systems (though he never authored them), but from his interviews & the evidence provided, I don't even think that was the case. I got the impression he was sort of a backup & storage manager.
Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.
Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.
He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.
That sounds believable.
What's your overall take? do you think evidence was presented to confirm these systems were active around his tenure e.g. 2012? I'm maybe 20% confident they were active.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.
Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.
I mean about the historiography, and your personal verdict on whether those systems were active, based on the evidence Snowden provided.
A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.
I wasn't there and have never had a security clearance. But I doubt Dick Cheney would have been satisfied with a non-functional query system during the war on terror, many years after giving direct orders to build one. Yes, I believe they were active.
I highly recommend the documentary "The United States of Secrets" by PBS Frontline, it digs into this time period and government motivations after 9/11. Usually free on Kanopy.
Star Wars was non functional. It was effective strategically (and led to the USSR's demise, partially) , but totally impotent technically.
It's just as likely that XKeyscore was a strategic public relations effort to intimidate the enemy .
Oh yeah, I remember that.
Believe here that all the tech was available by y2k and security was even worse than now. Just needed the funding and a willingness to break the law, which the govt had in abundance after 2001.
SQL alone is just a query language. the MySQL design docs Snowden shared were primitive installations that did not meet the claimed capability of their surveillance system.
There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.
Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.
I’m talking about the evidence presented and whether it met the extraordinary claims.
The amount of compute and indexing needed was extraordinary, and the evidence presented didn’t meet that bar.
Yes I believe that the NSA, in theory, had the budget to complete this task, and to a lesser degree, the competence. . But I only believe claims with complete evidence.
I don't think the compute/indexing were extraordinary, what may have been was the storage required. There was a large NSA facility built for purpose early in the century, and the cost of storage dropped significantly at the time.
Google had already demonstrated such a system by the late 90s, using off the shelf technology.
that's an interesting perspective thanks for sharing
* and I don’t remember Snowden presenting evidence that NSA (et al) had the datacenter / compute capacity to surveil these targets. Even a fraction of the target traffic (3+ wireless carriers, dozens of messaging email software firms) would require a fraction of their datacenter capacity to sniff, trace, index, analyze . Was that capacity presented in the archive?
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Not just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
> Greenwald had to shift to alt media
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.
Very generous indeed.
As I recall he became fixated on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, to the extent that he got himself fired from The Intercept over it. Maybe he saw the pictures of naked Biden and became absolutely obsessed with the photo gallery of coke and dong.
Hard to say whether he resigned, or "resigned". And I'm not sure there's a huge difference, practically speaking. By Greenwald's account, it was the former, I think. Either way, he took his marbles and went home. In fairness, I can imagine why, after having spent 7 years of his life mining through the Snowden archive, spending another few years mining the Biden hard disk might have been attractive.
far-right lunatic? do you have a source for this or an example
I read his substack, he seems to be critical of the US security state and not inline with alt-right principles at all
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It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
https://masternotions.com
Defending your client is not vile, and making statements that contribute towards that defense is part of the game, even if they are harsh.
Funny to see someone who seems to be on the left engaging in “kink-shaming.” Glenn has the right to a personal sexual life, including whatever exotic sexual proclivities he may have. Frankly, the film you mentioned sounds pretty tame for gay porn.
So are you saying Applebaum was framed?
I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
Did the Assange allegations fall apart? I thought he just hid until it became pretty irrelevant.
One of the accusers refused to sign their written statement, then disappeared. The other kept making contradictory statements and changed her story, and recently said she was “happy” that he was free, although she did not recant her accusation. Prosecutors also allegedly changed one of the statements to make it sound more serious, per the later UN investigation.
They put out an Interpol notice and had him on the “most wanted” list for this, which is ridiculous. There is documented communication between the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service and Swedish authorities where the CPS is goading the Swedes into continuing the case, warning them not to get “cold feet.”
The prosecution eventually dropped the case because they believed that the evidence was too weak, blaming the long gap in time. I’m not clear on how they thought the passage of time had weakened their evidence, which was limited to victim statements from the very beginning, AFAIK.
Stop the conspiracy talk. This was Jake's chaotic personal life coming home to roost. It's not more complicated than it seems.
A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
>A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
> a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork
It wasn't one. It was eight women who put themselves in the firing line of (mostly) men, who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
I believe them.
Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
> Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges...
Citation required to prove the untested charges were bogus. Until then, I believe 8 women over one man.
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> Greenwald had to shift to alt media
Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
dont confuse 'anti right' with 'left'.
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
Is that Glenn Greenwald's form?
It's Jeff Sachhs, a bit Greenwald, Chomsky and a bit late-stage Assange.
If you listen enough you can hear the ego, and some other things going on at least as much as some ostensible 'principle'.
Or maybe he just realized that politics is just one big club and he ain't in it. And neither are the people.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
if he is slightly left leaning than Bernie is farthest of the far right US politicians
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
Here is him ranting about how destructive "peak wokeness" is because apparently we need to save black people from each other, not from white people or the cops: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...
Conservative enough for you?
Not really.
The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.
Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.
If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.
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Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
If this is a team sport issue, Glenn made it that way by ranting with little substance about wokeness: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...
Glenn, along with many others in the left-libertarian camp, correctly identified that “wokeness” was being used to fracture the left between the old guard, focused on economic justice and ending imperialism, and the “groups” who focused solely on racial and cultural agendas and were actively hostile towards traditional left agendas. These groups were also often hostile towards traditional liberal concepts of rights, such as freedom of speech and equal treatment under the law.
I agree that his reporting on this was sub-par. It’s not his beat and he should probably leave it to others.
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
If these interviews actually helped share perspectives I might agree. But they're not psychology journal articles, they're (paid) ads.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
The Overton window should be smashed to pieces.
See that's the thing: bad faith requests for presence in the marketplace of ideas almost always more the discourse towards authoritarian views, reactionary and racist views. Smashing it metaphorically means that monarchists and authoritarians flood the marketplace with garbage.
We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.
Socialist, communist, and reactionary views should all be equally allowed, along with bizarre views like Posadism and whatever Alex Jones believes.
I want to see a debate stage with Haz Al-Din, AOC, Ezra Klein, Thomas Massie, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Fuentes. Let the best one win.
> We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views
And this is why only reactionaries gain a foothold. Powerful people benefit from it, so reactionary views are let in while the rest of the “window” remains intact. Smash the window.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
[1] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
[2] - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Have you heard of "sealioning" though? This is where you push an agenda using the surface appearance of a rational discussion.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
The original comic didn't really resonate with me for a couple of reasons. The first is that the obvious metaphors it seems to have (which I assume you're alluding to here) are in quite poor taste. The second is because I think public debate is critical for a healthy society, and so am quite averse to anything that justifies making statements and then being unwilling to engage with challenges to them. Obviously outright harassment would be not only wrong but also illegal, so I think that's largely a nonexistent extreme.
In general I think if people were more regularly challenged on their claims, it might help reign in some of the self radicalization, intolerance, and so forth that's growing in society. When somebody only acknowledges 'friendly' voices, you end up in a scenario where they're effectively surrounding themselves with a baseline that's heavily biased, but that baseline will (from their perspective) be normal. That's just not healthy.
What do you think about Palestine?
I think they're currently victims of a genocidal effort, but also like most conflicts it's one where both sides can be wrong. The narrative of good guys and bad guys is always shown to be nonsense in hindsight.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left
Centrist Dems are more supportive, as are the (sizable) segment of socialists who understand history
Left libertarians are broadly supportive of free speech
First, the conversation was about the DNC, so what centrist Dems think is more important than "Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left". But beyond that, what specific policies are you talking about? Because without naming specific parts of the DNC platform, what you're saying sounds completely indistinguishable from "my niece corrected my pronoun usage and that made me angry".
Your point about the DNC is taken, although these groups do have sway there, as Yglesias often complains about.
Support for hate speech laws is common among leftists who primarily focus on social causes, as is support for “deplatforming” political opponents. Some also support German-style laws regarding politically extreme speech, which is funny, because those laws would almost certainly be used against them if they weren’t plainly unconstitutional.
I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.
The comment that I replied to:
> Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
But to answer your question about conservative opposition to free speech, some conservatives are now showing support for hate speech laws, specifically laws against antisemitic speech, which is new. So this is actually a current “both sides” issue. Time will tell if the poles fully reverse on this; I think it depends on what form post-Trump politics takes.
Edit: wow, TIL. Apparently there were local laws against “race hatred” on the books in the early 1900s, and some conservative segregationists found that they could use those laws against “anti-white” speech (like supporting integration) in the 40s and 50s. So believe it or not, they became supportive of these laws until the Warren court overturned them, thanks to the work of the ACLU.
Mind you their version of "antisemitism" that they are banning is not hate speech, it is actually the opposite of hate speech and their ban makes hate speech mandatory.
>The comment that I replied to:
Fair enough if you consider your comment a start of a new thread, but that is ignoring the context in which the comment you replied was made.
>specifically laws against antisemitic speech
As a Jewish person, I have a bridge that fights antisemitism to sell you if you genuinely believe this. Just the simple fact that they are only against antisemitism and not all hate speech should tell you there is no genuine conservative desire for hate speech laws. And your second example is just more evidence of that. Conservatives cynically abusing existing laws does not show a conservative value eventually becoming liberal or vice versa. You can argue it shows how these laws create problems, but it isn't evidence of any sort of switch in values.
This is similar to how many on the left don’t believe that “hate speech” restrictions should apply to speech against whites. This is the problem with laws that apply to the realm of speech and ideas; it is a very small step towards abuse that undermines equal treatment under the law, the free exchange of information, and the democratic process.
Both major US factions like to use selective enforcement and/or targeted taxation or regulation to attack their political rivals, while wrapping their actions in flowery language. This is a longstanding tradition here. If you don’t see it, I urge you to take a closer look and shed your bias.
Edit: I’ll add that this selective application is probably what creates the illusion of a change in values. In reality, it’s two tribes jockeying for power using whatever tools happen to be in front of them; naturally, the available tools shift over time. The ideological justification for a particular position or action is created after the fact.
>This is similar to how many on the left don’t believe that “hate speech” restrictions should apply to speech against whites.
These comparisons always seem to set up an equivalency between mainstream Republicans saying something extreme and what a random leftist said to their 50 followers on Bluesky. Like seriously, what mainstream Democrat is advocating for hate speech laws which only apply to non-white people?
Officially, there were only some small things like a house resolution that supported one-sided (minority only) hate crime protection, as well as some papers and op-eds that suggested that hate crime protection should only apply to minorities. These were about hate crimes, not hate speech, of course. It’s been a while, and I can’t find any records of statements from mainstream Dems.
What I saw in my personal experience was an army of trolls baiting this kind of response from left activists, with identity-focused activists readily complying, and with others then amplifying the message through retweets. Including many who should have known better, people I had formerly respected. There was zero condemnation or pushback on this from nearly anyone on the left, in fact there was often a sort of winking agreement with the message by the time it had trickled up to candidates and officials.
The worst offenders were the grifters in the “white fragility” consulting sphere, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.” This is made worse by the lack of a substantial platform or position statement in many campaigns nowadays, so it’s hard to identify what anyone really stands for at all.
Feel free to take your point on this, as I have no hard proof. But I and many others saw this happen first hand.
>Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.”
It seems like you are very close to getting it, so maybe spend some time brainstorming on possible reasons why Republican politicians say "terrible... awful things" much more frequently than Democratic politicians. There's probably some other explanation there outside one side simply enjoying subtlety more than the other for no particular reason.
If you look at actions rather than words, Dems have been equally complicit in the things that are destroying the country, namely the offshoring of US industry and weakening of domestic labor, privatization of public services (especially Clinton/Third Way), the financialization of the US economy, the expansion of the security state (especially Obama), the erosion of civil liberties, the continuation of “forever wars.” They also failed to correct course after the GFC, despite holding the trifecta, probably dooming the country in the long run by using endless QE to temporarily float the economy. We needed a hard landing and we didn’t get one.
The one good thing I have to say about the Republicans is at least they don’t fuck around. They are speedrunning the inevitable collapse, and we might actually be better off for it. With the rate they are going, there will be no time to finish constructing a fully integrated police state before the bottom falls out.
Who doesn't believe that
I think a practical issue you have to deal with on this sort of topic is what is done versus what is said. Illegal immigration is a great example. There's no part of any official DNC that overtly supports illegal immigration, yet policies and behaviors show an intent to enable and facilitate exactly that.
On the speech issue, here [1] is a rather great bit on DNC efforts to censor speech by the WSWS/World Socialist Web Site. The article mentions the ongoing obsession with censoring "disinformation" when disinformation itself is often little more than truths that counter the official lies of the day.
[1] - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/09/pers-n09.html
Why must there be?
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
In what way is PRISM a nothingburger? You’ve been making this claim repeatedly in this thread.
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This article certainly did not improve my perception of Glenn Greenwald. Unprofessional, wild narratives in his reporting, and a changing story about why the Intercept fired their research division in charge of the files.
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It's really never been the worst thing. From MKUltra to Operation Sea-Spray and many, many more.
The Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians").
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids
Two dead and few dozen ill doesn't quite sound like the worst thing. Random street cops do that to more people for no good reason in any given year.
The level of desensitisation…
Not really? It's just trying to make an honest ranking.
Those are all conspiracy theories. ;)
Neither of those are theories. Both are well documented and have had public hearings and governmental disclosure.
What? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.
I'm assuming the winking emoji was used to indicate sarcasm.
doh!
They are saying it tongue-in-cheek, and even added an emoji for additional emphasis of that point.
If you leak it, leak it everywhere!
IIRC he tried to find people he could trust to redact in a way that would protect US national security interests.
And yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
(although of late my surprise is decreasing).
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
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Thought experiment:
Is war of the scale of WWI and WWII a cleansing of, and temporary innoculation against, the natural tribalist fracturing of human psychology that occurs in times of peace? ("Peace is war" and all that goes along with that).
Does the insanity just continue until some traumatic event shocks (what remains of) the world population into a relatively normalised, shared worldview? Until enough time has passed that the cracks start to reappear.
Feels to me like a pattern in nature. I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.
I think tribalism is inherent in humans, as we our species evolved in a tribal fashion. It is also certain that billions and billions of dollars have been invested by the CIA (and their equivalent in other countries) to perfect propaganda techniques by taking advantage of the tribal instincts (among other things).
>I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.
Couldn't agree more. The more insular a group is, the more severe the tribalism is. The bifurcation of information sources has certainly added to this. If the people in your tribe all listen to the same networks and sources of information, and all of the people in the other tribe listen to entirely different networks and sources of information, you end up with people that have very little sense of shared reality. Any dissension from tribal dogma very quickly renders someone a heretic or an outcast. This is also what makes tribalism so powerful as a propaganda tool. The dehumanization and "othering" of a person, or a group, or a country renders them intrinsically evil and worthy of attack by the tribe. Which in my opinion is the real danger of so-called AI. We've already seen what happens when people outsource their judgement and critical thinking to media and government institutions. When the masses outsource their judgement and critical thinking to a glorified autocomplete that is programmed with "weights" by those with an agenda, the masses will believe whatever is spit out by this machine and act accordingly.
Well said.
I'm not entirely (ie. at all) comfortable with the fact that that the frontier AIs are completely under the umbrella of US tech-broligarchy.
Diversity has become a divisive topic (probably always was), but some diversity in the leadership of the AI arena would be sorely welcome. The current crop are essentially clones of each other with some minor variance that's probably carefully curated 'points of difference' for the tribalists to attach to.
Musk and Altman may hate each other, but I get the feeling their motivations and vision for the future overlap almost 100% (it's just the throne that they're fighting over, or what to rename the Gulf of Mexico).
Parochialism.
Besides the undisclosed portions of the Snowden archives, I was also disappointed that the Assange/Wikileaks insurance files were never decrypted.
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance+torrent
Those insurance files were probably as real as the supposed russian files they newer released.
I was also thinking about this. Did Snowden share his files with Wikileaks? Do the insurance files partly contain the Snowden files. Actually does Snowden himself have access to the files?
Btw doesn’t Ryerson University in Toronto have a copy?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517166668...
The "Snowden Docs" were just a wget --mirror of the internal wiki. So there was a lot of cruft in there.
Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
Nothing here on two different connections. Your ISP/DNS provider seems to be interfering.
You can try this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260921054500/https://libroot.o...
Thanks that works
Using FF here, no such warning on my side. Likely your ISP?
Xfinity's Advanced Security service is blocking it because it believes that the site is malicious: https://spa.xfinity.com/check_url_status
The site owner should appeal the block here: https://spa.xfinity.com/report
Apart from his news: if Snowden want to get out of exile and return to the US; the current administration can be bought. The next president will probably still wants to jail him (or worse)
It was a mistake to flee the US and a bigger mistake to never return.
He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.
Had he stayed in the US whatever could he have done? The US are not known for their ability to accept wrongdoing.
It certainly would have kept the leaks in the news cycle for much longer and not delegitimized his motives. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would have had any real effect on policy.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
I doubt he could have been disappeared after all of the attention. Chelsea Manning wasn’t disappeared despite causing a similar black eye for the US government.
I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone.
That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
Eh, the outrage never really materialized into anything worth continuing the leaks. Look at the Epstein files. "They" can just wait it out.
The banality of the day after outrage.
JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
Both.
The first part because the second part.
The first part massively reinforced by the second. Maybe "because" is a stretch. Obama not Trump was the president when the Snowden leaks happened. Bush was president when it was going on. There was a lot of real evidence of crime there that went un-prosecuted. Crimes kept going. Extra-judicial droning of US citizens seems like a bigger deal that burglary of a psychiatrist office.
Something else to consider is that Watergate is orders of magnitude more of a scandal and has the mindshare to match compared to COINTELPRO.
Should that have been? Should it be now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
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By what standards are the files "overhyped" ? Also to what hysteria do you refer? What would we experience if it was a massive pedo conspiracy of extremely rich and powerful people? Would they all just line up and turn themselves in?
"It's not in the officially released files that the government itself provided, therefore it didn't happen" is the level of 'reasoning' going on here.
That and "ordinary" prostitution and "sleeziness" aren't important plus ignoring that Epstein wasn't just a pimp, he was very much a human trafficker, in the sense that he effectively coerced women into continuing their involvement with his operation.
When the Epstein news first really broke into the mainstream in 2019/2020, there were a ton of victim testimonials that were absolutely harrowing (and pointed to much weirder and more consequential stuff than "just" sex trafficking), it's been really surreal and disheartening to see the Trump-era releases successfully trivialize and downplay it.
> the ~government~ implicated itself provided
FTFY. Almost one and the same here but gives more context.
By the standards of "jaw dropping things we heard" for which we now know there is no evidence. Not even any leaks of suggestive circumstantial evidence. Nothing to back the awful fantasies of things done to children. Zero.
Most, if not all of the highly compensated victims were adults when they met the turd Epstein and made decisions as adults. Their claims are untested and uncorroborated but they are massively compensated. Good for them, they're getting paid but the hysteria and panic cost us all. Note how none of the massively compensated can manage to claim anything verifiable involving crimes of sleazebags still living?
Dig up his ranch, sure, why not? Would you bet on anything resembling evidence being found? On the Island? In his NY appartments? All just a massive, highly coordinated, perfectly executed cover-up? Is the govt really that good to get perfectly right, 100% no errors? Under this kind of spotlight with so many looking out for it?
It's a great distraction and there is zero doubt that plenty in washington are taking full advantage. The corruption rages across the aisles.
Everything you think you know about Epstein's crimes, ask yourself "Where is the actual evidence for that?" When you start ignoring the podcast-claims for which there is nothing at all to back it. It starts to look more mundanely awful. Than some monumental bonfire of evil previously un-imagined. He went whoring with Bill Gates who got an STD and it's there in the files trashing Bill's reputation. That was left alone in the cover-up but their pedo ring behaviour perfectly removed without the suggestion of a trace?
People think there is this big conspiracy to conceal the evidence of a grand pedo ring but they didn't protect the moron formerly known as prince andrew from the fall, he'll be well angry if he knows things about a pedo ring so that would be hugely risky. Unbelievably so. Literally.
People want to believe all the worst fabrications. You don't need it, it's bad enough without all that. There's sleaze enough with evidence to prosecute. Prosecutions, starting with Andrew and Mandelson, should happen. And also for everyone else identified by evidence.
Not so much the completely innocent, ordinary people named by Massie and Khanna who aren't in those circles and for whom it seems vanishingly unlikely had anything much to do with Epstein at all, let alone involved in these most hideous of crimes. And who they've now gone completely quiet about having pointed squarely at them and yelled "Evil!"
It's a real shame the extent to which it has polluted rational policy discussion. There's a cost. The cost is larger than you think.
All of the evidence that I've personally seen is on the DOJ website. When you repeat "zero" and "none" over and over... where are you getting that information? It's very very definitive and I'm not sure how anyone could be so confident about something impossible like proving a negative. Do the victim statements not count for you because you've decided that they're "highly compensated" ... an assertion for which you provide no evidence?
A great distraction from what?
You can choose to dismiss the evidence that does exist because of your biases, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
What is the cost you mention that's larger than I think? You keep doing this sort of thing... throwing out these weighty statements, but they're never concrete; never backed up with anything other than your conjecture. Why should anyone listen to you?
Wait what? Are you saying that everything I have seen on the Epstein files through 'public discourse' is BS? Like, all of it?
I can't call the grandparent account a shill bot because it's against HN rules, but some people bury their heads deep in the sand because they are unwilling to face the ugly reality.
You look for the actual evidence and work out how much of what you've heard is BS.
So why was he arrested in 2008 if there was no evidence? And again in 2019? And why would he hang himself if there was no evidence against him? That's a wild conspiracy theory you have, bud.
What was he arrested for? What was the evidence for it?
Was it a pedo blackmail ring of the powerful (who are all pedos so that is universal weakness to get control) at the behest of the Mossad and CIA involving throwing children from a plane over epstein island to remove the witness testimony?
Or something that isn't quite that.
Something which is itself a crime for which there is evidence, you can assess (and a court did!), to support it and is totally believable?
By this method you can begin to weed out the bullshit. Soon you look at the mountain of bullshit that you, yourself reject on your own terms, not necessarily agreeing with me or anyone else. A mountain just by looking.
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"Pol Pot was actually being controlled by the scientologist-mormon conspiracy to conquer Sweden to get total herring control."
"Wow? Really? What's the evidence?"
"He killed millions! Why are you defending Pol Pot and the conspiracy?!?! You must be in league with Tom Cruise and Mitt Romney!"
(I'm not completely convinced Epstein did kill himself as you seem to be for what it's worth. There seems to be some real evidence he did, it seems like the most likely explanation but I have some doubt. Based on evidence. What I don't have is any evidence of who did it and why _IF_ it wasn't suicide. Again suicide the most likely. I have enough imagination to invent cool stories involving MI5, the cia, the mossad and the french secret service but choose not to. I've heard plenty of other people's cool stories but yeah, not how I want to consume fiction).
You haven't shown any EVIDENCE why someone who had done nothing wrong would commit suicide. Someone who has hundreds of millions to fund a legal defense, quit before even trying to win in court. You are projecting the very thing you claim against others (lack evidence).
Ok, so Trump continues to flout the law in order to conceal the files, and had his AG lie that there were no files, and had FBI redact the files for months, and 'accidentally' failed to release the specific files of witness testimony naming Trump in the sexual assault of a minor ... why?
Exactly the behaviour you'd expect of a convicted sex offender and best friend of a paedophile, husband to an illegal immigrant apparently trafficked by that paedophile who was not covering anything up, huh. /s
I guess you also think the early closing of Congress to prevent any vote on Hegseth and Trump's war crimes to also just be a coincidence?
Aside from everything else, Trump is a convicted rapist - it's just shocking to me that people like yourself choose to support a person like that who is entirely unrepentant.
I do not now, nor have I ever supported the corrupt crooked politician known as Donald J. Trump.
Any and all evidence of Donald Trump's crimes (for which there is a very large amount of the actually credible variety, ie not this, not Russian collusion involving pissing prostitutes in Steele files) should result in his prosecution and Jailing. I would like to see that.
Let's re-phrase that more sensibly.
Any and all evidence of politician and senior public servant criminal corruption (for which there is a very large amount of the credible variety) should result in prosecution and Jailing.
Washington corruption? No! Look over there! Epstein pedo ring!
> Seems Epstein was a more commonplace sleazy creep into young prostitutes getting him into age of consent trouble in some states but not others.
Age of consent is eleven in which states?
I remember that being reported in newspapers in 2020 but did those allegations make it into "The Epstein Files"? (I have paid almost no attention since it's the most obvious limited hangout ever hung out.)
Some junky news site claimed nine, but saw eleven and thirteen more widely reported. Read some JMail but didn’t dig into the files beyond that. Sick stuff, respect to those whose jobs demand they closely follow everything.
Epstein was primarily a money man, but you’ll notice that this gets zero coverage. I guarantee there’s a lot of serious dirt there that will never see the light of day.
It’s almost better for the people involved if the public keeps focusing on the most outrageous aspects of the story. (And it is quite outrageous, and terrible, to be fair.)
> Seems Epstein was a more commonplace sleazy creep into young prostitutes getting him into age of consent trouble in some states but not others
As I understand it, the victims weren't prostitutes, but were just kids groomed into doing this.
This more than some cia/mossad front of blackmailing the powerful with horrific acts done to children.
IDK, the CIA/mossad pedophile part seems significant.
I don't think ordinary people upset at young girls being exploited for the purpose of blackmailing people are being 'naive' or something. Sure, it all pales in comparison to genocide X foreign land but people getting riled by that stuff too.
Quite a large amount of people have little empathy. Someone getting blown up somewhere else is a them problem. "I've never been blown up, they must have done something wrong to deserve it (I have heard things like this come out of peoples mouths)". Now, quite often those same people with little empathy have their own children therefore have an empathetic connection to the theoretical victim allowing them to contemplate the terror those children experienced. This allows the situation to be much more viceral to them. Also, pedophila is an act that is highly stimtized in most places in the world so the social shame and disgust phenomenon also applies.
Everyone should be incandescent with rage about that as soon as there's some evidence of it. And 100% it should be fully investigated.
Is it real? Are you being played with a lie? The further out we get the more it looks like the latter. But hey, I'll take evidence of a cover up. Not seeing anything much there either.
Maybe some real evidence will come soon? Thet can't keep dark forever, it's too big, too many people have touched it.
He served a jail sentence for this, wtf are you talking about? Are you that ignorant, or do you have an agenda?
Epstein served a jail sentence for running a pedo blackmail ring with the cia and mossad??
Got a plausible link to back that?
Moderately wild speculation: the genocide is directly related to the Epstein stuff. We know he had close ties to Mossad, and material that can blackmail the current president. All Mossad has to do is say: do this or we release the surveillance video. And they have been trying to get the USA to invade Iran for decades.
The blackmail theory explains:
- why congress itself voted to cover it up
- why there are these bizarre humiliation rituals like the FBI saying beastiality will not DQ you from working for the agency (some top FBI person likely screwed up something related to mossad and were forced to humiliate their agency).
- why the UFC thing happened on the Whitehouse. That's a caricature of our culture, like if we wanted to humiliate mexico by making them have a Mariachi festival or something.
The bestiality thing is obviously because the FBI is really trying to hire a specific person, and bestiality came up on their background check.
Asserted without evidence and dismissed without evidence.
Not even evidence at the standard of proof, just anything at all other than a cool sounding story.
edit: clarity
It's not that wild. It's pretty obvious he was collecting blackmail, and trump was his closest confidant, so it doesn't take "wild speculation" to come to this conclusion.
He had deep ties with Israel and Mossad and it's very likely the dirt they have on Trump is possibly the reason we are at war with Iran and bringing the world to the brink of WW3. It's wild to call it underhyped, if anything quite the opposite. It's heavily redacted and the worst half of it hasn't even been released.
That would be massive if true.
What evidence leads you to think Epstein ran blackmail rings on a loathsome and loathed sitting US president that led to him starting a war?
If that were true and you were looking for evidence of a cover up, what would you look for?
He had close ties with Mossad and Ehud Barak. The Israeli embassy specifically helped him wire up his apartment in New York with microphones and cameras to collect evidence.
And the evidence of a coverup is the heavily redacted half release of the files, all the fake theater around the release, the head of the FBI perjuring himself and lying about the files, and DoJ leadership lying and failing to act on the files.
Related: what happened to Snowden?
“The Media” is a bunch of diaper wearing cowards that capitulate to the feds. Plain and simple.
This is so important. Thanks for reviving this, and all the other work that you do!!
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
Therefore there should be no harm in releasing it.
That doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example.
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
You are correct of course.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
Someone should ask Russian citizen Ed Snowden.
Snowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.
what kinds of things?
Men in black: it never existed... BLITZ!
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
I wish I had the Millennium Falcon to fly off this fucking planet.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
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Given what he does in public, I'm not sure there's any limit to what they're all doing in private.
Buy stocks in paper-shredder companies.
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There seems to be a lot of continued misunderstanding how Snowden managed to end up in Russia.
> On June 22, 2013, 18 days after the publication of Snowden's NSA documents began, officials revoked his US passport.[205] On June 23, Snowden boarded a commercial Aeroflot flight, SU213, to Moscow, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, with an intended final destination of Ecuador arranged in an Ecuadorian emergency travel document that Snowden had acquired. However, Snowden became initially stranded in Russia upon his landing in Moscow when his US passport was revoked[0]
It's the US' fault that he ended up in Russia. That's the irony.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the...
Did he even have access to Russian intelligence?
Also, at some point they were just done reporting on what was there.
Remember that Snowden got three journalists involved so they could make a decision on what to release, so they didn't expose details of people undercover etc and put real lives in danger. It was not meant to go to the public in its entirety.
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Living? Probably. Happily? Probably not.
> You seriously believe he's still just happily living in Russia? Today?
I mean, Bashar al-Assad is. If he can escape thousands of highly-motivated revenge campaigns to see him strung up like Gadaffi, I can believe in Snowden sipping tea from his dacha.
Snowden promotes zcash and distrusts monero.
If that's not enough proof that he's a government plant, I don't know what else to tell you.
So his whistleblowing is actually a deliberate act of government transparency, in your estimation?
People can be wrong about things
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In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Be afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
That’s a gross misrepresentation of their point.
I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
They are talking about tradeoffs.
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence
For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.
We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".
The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.
This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".
Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
Here you go: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12846917/
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
> Abstract
> Bayesian phylogenetic analyses indicate that intensive agriculture was as likely the result of state formation as its cause. By contrast, grain cultivation most likely preceded state formation.
It seems you hold a much stronger position than the paper you cite. Anyway paper's interesting, thanks.
I wouldn't call Five eyes very democratically supervised.. It seems there is hardly any oversight at all.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/512315/updates-foreign-a...
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB. Nor was it put to any other minister. "This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
> the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
Surely you mean oligarch-supervised institutions.
Our institutions are supervised by representatives elected on the dime of corporate and billionaire benefactors. They pull the strings.
It became a banana republic when money became speech.