I havent read the full transcript, but I find it terrifyingly fascinating how the US has managed to turn Snowden into a pariah, owing in part to its own revoking of his passport while in transit through Russia.
Anybody who saw him speak knows he was doing everything possible to make it about the content, and not him as a person- only putting his name to the light to prove it wasn't false or the result of some disgruntled employee trying to stick it to his manager.
Yet the narrative very quickly focused on him; the content of his character, his upbringing, his connection to the government, the fact that he is in Russia and decidedly not on the content of the leaks which quickly got glossed over and to date I am unaware of single arrest due to it- despite clear evidence of lawbreaking (including but not limited to: deliberately lying to the Senate).
Lets not forget that diplomatic plane that was downed across international territories because they suspected Snowden was inside.
Despite posing no continued threat to the US, they sure spent a lot of effort making him as uncredible as possible yet anyone who has eyes sees it as completely transparent.
The scariest part of it all is that people actually are falling for that narrative, do not look at the leaks for what they are (proof of unconstitutional behaviour by a branch of government) and call Snowden a plant or a terrorist- ironically the kinds of people who would otherwise argue against government interference. Boggles my mind, and scares me to death how clearly susceptible the population is to disinformation.
Not to wander too far off topic, but it also frustrates me when I encounter people who somehow rate Edward Snowden behind (in favorability) figures like Julian Assange.
Edit: To clarify my own frustration, I see Snowden as more of a true whistleblower, and Assange as more of a fame-seeking middleman willing to promise or withhold information based on his own self-interest.
the Assange thing also reeks of US/UK joint government interference.
Its totally possible that he’s a massive rapist, and its a great cover to be a known enemy to governments with your journalistic endeavours.
But its terribly convenient for the US government that the circumstances landed where they did, and it was even told to us that it would land this way and those saying it were branded as conspiracy theorists.
One might consider that Snowden went in knowing exactly what was possible, came prepared was completely “clean”, additionally he has not had a particularly difficult living situation. Yet even he is able to get massacred by certain sections of the media. Assange is living in (self-imposed, sure) exile and doesnt have the luxury of maintaining a lifestyle that promotes mental well-being, and the media are very quick to jump on his transgressions and blow them to insane proportions. Please keep that in mind when talking about him.
This is the first time I've ever seen anyone defining "being in prison" as "self-imposed exile".
Assange has been in an English prison for 4 years now. The only thing for which he was actually convicted (skipping bail during extradition proceedings) accounts for only 1 of those.
People who are awaiting trail or extradition are typically held during that process if they're considered a flight risk, which I think that's been shown to be a real risk since he was convicted for that.
My information is a few years out of date but I've been assured that at least he is only being extradited to Sweden for wild sex crimes and not the United States! Now let me check the Wikipedia arti... oh, turns out he is being extradited to the United States. A lot of people didn't see that coming (never really understood why not, but that is people for you).
The situation is in this awkward position where there was an obvious conspiracy to get Assange and making predictions on the assumption of a conspiracy has had great predictive power. The only change is it is isn't a conspiracy any more because everything is playing out publicly in British courts.
So while Assange is certainly being subjected to a lot of usual processes, the usual processes are being turned on him because he embarrassed the US government by bringing its activities to light. I have no doubt that is illegal. If I was a government, I too would want to criminalise people trying to hold me accountable. The issue is that punishing people for encouraging transparency is an inescapably political act.
And Assange is on the right side of history on this one. It is easy to see him as a footnote in every textbook one day as "and this was the moment when people started to find out what was going on".
In fact, people said at the time that it was ridiculous to believe that the Sweden case (where charges were never laid, and the whole case was dropped due to lack of evidence, picked up by another prosecutor, run with for several years with all sorts of procedural irregularities, and then dropped again for lack of evidence before the statute of limitations expired) might just be a ruse to make it easier to extradite him to the States.
Because people very strongly said this was only about accusations of sex crimes and the US would never lay charges for publishing - because that would mean what the New York Times does is illegal, we were told.
It's insane to see the level of malice directed at Passage and say anything being done to him is justified. I can only see the mottled opinion of him here as the effect of successful smearing.
I do not remember him being alleged to be a massive rapist. Certainly, one charge of any kind of rape should be enough to have him brought to the jurisdiction where the charge is made.
The person who approached Swedish police never claimed rape. She was worried that he may have had HIV and didn't use a condom and wanted to know if she had any legal recourse to force him to undergo an HIV test. Her testimony was changed after the fact by Swedish police without her knowledge or consent.
> Its totally possible that he’s a massive rapist, and its a great cover to be a known enemy to governments with your journalistic endeavours.
> But its terribly convenient for the US government that the circumstances landed where they did, and it was even told to us that it would land this way and those saying it were branded as conspiracy theorists.
I wonder if its both. He could be a massive rapist who would have gone unnoticed without us gov involvement. I imagine if you want to discredit someone it is much easier to find their real sins than to make something up wholesale.
Of course if that's true it still doesn't really matter how it was dragged to the light, he would still be a dirt bag.
Assange is incoherent. Why would Sweden frame him for a rape that he didn't commit?
Why would the USA need to get him extradited through Sweden if the UK can extradite him to the USA directly without any sort of fake criminal charges?
Also why the hell did he go to the Ecuadorian embassy without an exit plan?
He has spent more than 10 years in prison and self-imprisonment. And for what?
That helicopter combat footage? Is that it? Sure - it doesn't look good, but...that's Tuesday for the Russians in Ukraine.
>Why would the USA need to get him extradited through Sweden if the UK can extradite him to the USA directly without any sort of fake criminal charges?
Currently the extradition of Assange has been refused on humanitarian grounds, as the US can't guarantee that they won't stick him in an ultramax facility and/or drive him to suicide. It's still facing appeal, but it's entirely possible the UK refuses to extradite.
I believe historically Sweden has been more willing to ignore such concerns when dealing with the US, which is why there would have been an incentive to fake charges that could get him moved to Swedish custody.
> It's still facing appeal, but it's entirely possible the UK refuses to extradite.
Extradition has actually been approved by all relevant UK authorities, after formal reassurance from the US about his treatment. Assange is appealing that decision, arguing then-Home Secretary Priti Patel was an id-- could not seriously accept some meaningless words that they can renege a minute after getting him.
Meanwhile, the Australian government is trying to vaguely save face by making some noise, probably to extract some extra money from Biden to just shut up.
The US has even said if convicted he can serve in Australia. Australia could probably release or pardon him if they wanted to. I don't understand why people are so against him seeing a court room.
Because he's a journalist who's being unjustly pursued for revealing the US government's dirty secrets. Secrets such as: American helicopter pilots gunned down two Reuters journalists in Iraq, and then killed a random civilian who came across and tried to rescue one of the wounded journalists. The pilots shot up a van with kids in the process (thank God the kids survived, though they lost their father), and then joked and laughed about it. The military covered it up.
The US is trying to set the precedent that if you air our dirty laundry, we can go after you, wherever you are in the world. Not in the US? No problem. Not an American? No problem.
You are right that this is probably not the worst thing they did. I’m absolutely sure the US armed forces are a highly sought playground for psychopaths and people with sadistic tendencies. Furthermore military tends to attract people with a predisposition for authoritarian and/or facist mindset. We saw the snapshots of unspeakable torture - made by people that were so entertained by the atrocities that they just had to make commemorative pictures of it.
But collateral damage is something else: if I blow up a house with a terrorist leader in it, weil the debris kill a bystander? It happens in every war and it’s the main reason why a ‘just war’ still can’t be fought without tainting conscience.
> the main reason why a ‘just war’ still can’t be fought without tainting conscience.
Not to mention a completely unnecessary war sold using lies, and launched in violation of international law (not in self-defense, no UN Security Council authorization).
it's a little more nuanced than that, but for starters Assange already held the right to apply to serve any sentence in Australia.
What is crucial to understand is that prisoner transfers (IE; to Australia in this case) are eligible only after all appeals have been exhausted. For the case to reach the US supreme court it could easily take a decade, even two. What the US has proposed is a formula to keep Assange in prison effectively for the rest of his life, and in a US prison.
Ross Ulbricht - the infamous Silk Road guy:
1. Arrested in 2013.
2. Sentenced in 2015.
3. First unsuccessful appeal in 2017.
4. The case reached the Supreme Court and was denied in 2018.
So - 5 years. Fewer than Assange spent in the embassy.
The US government also said that there were WMDs in Iraq. I don't understand why anyone would believe anything they say in a case like that of Assange, where the "national interest" concerns override any other consideration.
At the time, the UK couldn't just arrest him at the behest of the US, for exposing state crimes such as torture and extra-judicial killing. He was a popular and respected figure, so public opinion wouldn't allow it. The rape charges served to smear his reputation and erode public support. Now they can do what they want with him.
> if the UK can extradite him to the USA directly without any sort of fake criminal charges?
My understanding is that Assange:
1) Isn't a US citizen
2) Had never set foot within the United States
3) Committed no acts that could be construed (even to idiots) as violating US law
It makes it a little difficult to genuinely extradite. More than likely there was a plan to use extraordinary rendition once he was off UK soil, but before he had arrived in Sweden.
Given what happened in Sweden when he was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy and the UK arrested him for extradition to the US, I believe the Swedish accusations were made, and the prosecutions were done, in good faith.
Assange's argument against going to Sweden should've logically also applied to the UK, where he physically was while trying to make the argument to avoid extradition to Sweden, as demonstrated by the UK not even bothering to inform the Swedish authorities when they finally did arrest Assange.
>Given what happened in Sweden when he was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy and the UK arrested him for extradition to the US, I believe the Swedish accusations were made, and the prosecutions were done, in good faith.
Just picking a nit here, but IIRC Assange was not arrested by UK authorities to be extradited to the US (that's just a "bonus" for the US), but because he broke UK law by "jumping bail,"[0] which is a crime in the UK.
There are a raft of other details/issues around Assange and his Swedish/British/Ecuadorian odyssey, and those have been endlessly discusssed/litigated in the press.
I won't address those issues, as I don't think it would add productively to this discussion.
Assange did violate the terms of his bail in the UK and was convicted and sentenced accordingly, regardless of other issues.
> Just picking a nit here, but IIRC Assange was not arrested by UK authorities to be extradited to the US
Ok, fair. My recollection was that they did both at about the same time, though subsequent focus on the (clearly motivated) US extradition rather overshadow the Swedish issues (which don't look politically motivated to me; though obviously that's what they want me to think :P).
That the UK didn't bother to tell Sweden is even more egregious given what you say.
I hope you are aware of the multi-pronged smear campaign against Assange. The US government hired Palantir and HB Gary to infiltrate WikiLeaks and cause rifts, and put out negative press about him. This is just what leaked, let alone their entire strategy.
Even if he were guilty of some information crime, the level of persecution against him by the US government is way overboard and not in proportion to the supposed offense.
But it is clear to me and many others that what he was doing was journalism, even if you don't like his message and methods. He should be protected at all costs.
Assange is just a reporter/press. Someone gives him information and he publishes it. He didn't crack or break or copy or steal any of the information he published.
> let's focus on the crimes they both uncovered. please.
Well, since you phrase it that way, sure:
* Snowden uncovered mass-surveillance programs and intelligence agencies lying to congress.
* Manning uncovered Iraq War records, such as a helicopter attacking civilians.
* Assange uncovered... What? What pieces of information do you specifically credit to Assange which puts him in the same position as those first two whistleblowers?
According to The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL, Assange exposed the corruption of the US State Department. This is apart from his exposing the war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq [1].
"Cable gate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US State Department disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale." [0]
Why are you taking credit from Chelsea Manning and giving it to Julian Assange?
Maybe I wasn't explicit enough: Assange is categorically not a whistleblower, but rather a publicist at best, figurehead at worst. Other people did the important uncovering, putting themselves in far more legal jeopardy.
> "putting themselves in far more legal jeopardy."
I have to disagree. The US govt and its national security state have done a pretty good job of persecuting Manning, Assange and Snowden alike albeit in differing ways.
1. Manning is already free.
2. Snowden fled to Russia
3. Assange hasn't even been to the USA yet and he imprisoned himself for almost a decade in that embassy.
Snowden did not flee to Russia. He was on his way to Berlin with a stop in Moscow, but before he was able to board the plane (if I remember correctly even before his plane landed in Moscow) the US revoked his passport so he couldn’t get on the plane to Berlin. It was not his choice to be stranded there.
At this point why bother? He was in Russia 7 years when he finally applied and got a passport, his (now) wife was pregnant, it was the height of COVID.
Russia has also shown that they're not interfering with him as long as he doesn't speak about anything Russia is doing.
Contrast that with his destination countries that he originally wanted to go to, all of which are also of course "enemies of the US" (which is the only reason he's safe there), one of which has been strongarmed by the US directly (Bolivian prime minister forced to land and be searched, breaking international law[0]) and one of which has already permitted one of it's refugees to be captured on sovereign soil.
I should also add that a lot of countries would not grant asylum to a person who is in what they would consider a safe country. I know for instance it's a point of much contention in the UK that an asylum seeker must stop in the first safe country.
Additionally, since Putin's "special military action" (invasion of another sovereign country) there actually are a lot of restrictions for Russian citizens travelling, both outbound and inbound. -- and even if you manage to wave away all of that: he isn't in a better position anywhere else and he still has to travel over US Allied countries to get there.
That's a completely different topic, separated by 7 years.
Back to what you said:
> those stories about him "being stranded" are bullshit
He really really was stranded. He had no passport, and the only place he could go without one would send him directly to prison without even a right to raise his defence of "public good" in his trial.
So unless you're saying "he wasn't stranded, he could choose to go to prison forever", that's not really true.
And as we later found out, the US would force even diplomatic planes to land and be searched for Snowden.
Sweden was playing US lapdog with Assange, so presumably would be the case for Finland too, even if not NATO at the time.
Assange didn't "imprison himself." He had asylum, because the world's most powerful state was out to get him. It has even come out that the Trump administration seriously considered kidnapping or assassinating Assange. As it turns out, Assange's fears of being handed over to the US were 100% justified.
He went into that embassy without an exit plan. What did he expect to happen? That everyone is going to forget about him if he sits there long enough or what?
And he will be handed over to the USA sooner or later. The UK has already approved the extradition.
If I follow your comments, the journalists and random passer-by who were killed by gleeful American helicopter pilots in Baghdad are just collateral damage, and Assange is to blame for his own predicament and should just let the US have its way with him (maybe locking him up for life, or maybe taking pity, as the President wishes). Apparently, all is fine and this is how it should be.
Your question makes no sense. Assange is the one who published Manning's leaks. That's precisely why the US is trying to put him behind bars for 175 years.
Great points. I too saw it as very sus that, instead of addressing the content of leaks from WikiLeaks and Snowden, et al, the United States went on an offensive, because apparently it's more important to cover up embarrassing things than it is to get one's ship in proper working order.
I have nothing but respect for individuals that put countries on blast. We all know they are corrupt in their dealings. You don't seize control of a territory and 300 million people by dotting your i's and crossing your Ts.
Like it or not, every sovereign government had to engage in terrorism and one-sided treaties against natives to "build its country". They are not moral actors.
It also makes very clear the fact that pro-US propaganda exists, it’s not just Russia and other quasi fascist states that engage in propaganda against their people.
What Snowden did was very damaging to the Obama admin’s “hope and change” brand. Of course they were gonna go after him with everything they had.
> But the US isn’t invading a country to wipe it off the planet
Libya today is a violent country with slavery and all other kinds of horrors. Before the US wiped the previous gov't off the map it was prosperous country. Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Yemen. We've been a part of 11 coups on the African continent. You really need to read more.
Are you sure ? Because nobody asked those countries (as people) if they want the US military. US just changed the government (colour revolutions) and then, suddenly, those country wanted "to be defended" by NATO without any public debate regarding this issue.
We definitely want more NATO military on our soil. It's the only thing that prevents a Russian invasion. NATO is more popular than ever. Nobody is saying that NATO is braindead now.
> nor is it committing genocide to an ethnic minority within its own borders.
America's treatment of Native Americans in general was extremely dehumanizing and brutal, but it was especially so under the command of Andrew Jackson, who enacted the Trail of Tears. (NB: And then we put his damn face on the twenty dollar bill... smh) Could you say the Natives of today are of the same health and status they were 300-400 years ago? We made that happen, as part of building up America. Most reservations now have high alcoholism, poverty, and some rely on fringe businesses like casinos or firework stands, etc. Those conditions aren't natural or endemic to their cultures. Our country is squarely responsible for the downfall of Native cultures.
That's not even touching what we did with African slave trade.
One could also argue that the concentration camps America had during the World War eras were only a few steps away from genocide. There was no legitimate reason to round people up the way they did.
There are also other events where American interests have disrupted activities, like in Panama, Haiti, Cuba, etc. Meddling with other countries trying to influence their leadership isn't just a Russian thing. America has thrown its weight around in many places it had no business in.
Maybe we could tweak our discourse into a more concrete direction? Pointing out some American propaganda might be a good start for us.
My go-to for this stuff is the way bills are named in Congress. There's bullshit like the CARES Act, EARN It Act, No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, I'm sure there's more obvious ones I'm missing, but it's deliberately named to pre-load bias on the legislation, and to use as petty political weapons ("Wow, you voted against CARES? Why don't you care?").
The Patriot Act might be the most relevant, in the modern age. It gave so much to the government and nothing to the people. Our rights were gravely injured when that was passed and I resent our government for manipulating language in such a way to push it through.
You're digging up very old stuff. Other countries did far worse things back then. The USA isn't perfect, but it hasn't done anything nearly as bad as the Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Maybe not currently, but the US has been guilty of both of those things in the past. The thing is that nobody invades a country desiring to wipe it off the planet. One could argue the legitimacy of such invasions happening today, and many of those same arguments would apply to the US invasion of Iraq, or the fact that we destabilized the Middle East to the point that it allowed ISIS to come to power. Was our invasion for oil any more moral than what Putin is doing today?
And genocide? Need we discuss the native Americans?
> but the US has been guilty of both of those things in the past.
Is America doing this right now? I mean in the past. When 9/11 happened we didn’t really have internet and social media like we do today. But if it happened today I’m pretty sure there would be a lot of people against going to Iraq. Especially with what we have learned over the last 20 years.
> The thing is that nobody invades a country desiring to wipe it off the planet.
Putin said Ukraine is not a country. He wants it gone. It’s literally his desire… or do you believe it’s NATOs on the door step conspiracy theory? Lol
> And genocide? Need we discuss the native Americans?
Is America doing this today? Is anyone alive today that looks back on history and thinks “gee wiz that was a great period of time! We should do that again!!!”
You’re right. I completely forgot about the left allowing genital mutation but walking out of the committee when one of the politicians wants to play a video of a doctor claiming they don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to gender reassignment because there’s no studies.
You had to resort to hyperbole and slander to make the Democrats look half as bad as the Republicans, though, and most of your list is stuff Trump was also involved in. Both sides are problematic but they aren't the same.
"forcing experimental medications on the general public?" Grow up, FFS.
Stop defending genital mutation on children. I usually agree with the left more than the right but when it comes to this gender affirming care on children it’s sickening.
The population wants to be protected and honestly doesn't sweat the details much. In a big way, 9/11 robbed Americans of their belief they had control of the world's affairs and replaced the distrust that had been built up by Watergate with far, far more deference to authority than their predecessors demonstrataed.
A nation that looked the other way when its leadership engaged in torture and relocation of people to nations where they could be tortured out of sight was already a nation that wasn't going to care over-much about being spied on. If civil rights mattered so little to them when it was actual pain and disfigurement being inflicted on human beings, why would we expect them to bust out the pitchforks for a little traffic-skimming?
Only one of those is something that foreigners did to the people of the US on its own soil, and that's narrowly what those who are afraid of another 9/11 are willing to give up significant freedoms to escape. Americans feel much less existentially threatened by messes they make in their own backyards and things they do to themselves.
I believe what you're vocalizing is a younger-generation mindset (one that didn't feel the whiplash of 9/10 being a day everyone felt safe in their beds and 9/12 being a day nobody did). That younger mindset is one that I'm only too eager to see become the dominant mindset in American politics.
From an older generation, we have: 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'
Governments are responsible for more than protection for foreign threats. I think the remaining items on the GP's list are legitimate in light of Jefferson's words.
>I believe what you're vocalizing is a younger-generation mindset (one that didn't feel the whiplash of 9/10 being a day everyone felt safe in their beds and 9/12 being a day nobody did). That younger mindset is one that I'm only too eager to see become the dominant mindset in American politics.
As an American who was in his mid-thirties on 9/11, I have to disagree with your assertion about 9/10 vs. 9/11. I was (especially as a native New Yorker who worked across the street[0] from the World Trade Center for several years prior to 9/11, and provided IT support and services to several companies impacted by the events of 9/11) appalled and angry at the death and destruction wrought by those bloodthirsty scum.
However, I applauded the decision to not only rebuild WTC, but to build an even bigger building than the ones that came down. When challenged on that opinion (with the idea that it was just painting an even bigger target on a new building), my thought was that 'freedom isn't safe, and to ensure liberty risks are necessary.'
As such, I was disgusted with the Patriot Act[1] and the various other surveillance mechanisms and security theater (cf. the TSA[2]) implemented after 9/11.
I think that many folks felt a loss of control (control which they never actually had) and sought out means to regain that feeling of control. One friend refused to fly after 9/11, not because she believed that driving 1000 or 1500 miles rather than flying was actually safer (she knew the statistics as well as I did), but because she felt more in control in doing so.
And that's dumb, especially when it comes to making laws. I wish more of my fellow Americans understood that.
As traumatic as 9/11 was for me (I still avoid the WTC whenever possible, not because I'm afraid, but because it's still painful to think about 22 years later), I believe that a free and open society is important enough to accept some risk to preserve it.
Whether you agree or disagree with their overall claim, do you really think that either you or they couldn't find a 6th example, and more, of failings like those 5? It seems obvious to me that they gave 5 because they're writing a HN comment not an entire book and they had to stop somewhere, not because they spent an hour searching to find as many examples as possible and couldn't get past 5; so it seems like a poor rebuttal to make the count your argument.
The successes generally don't register. The "didn't have a disaster" scenario doesn't tend too get much attention... let alone statistical victories like, "decreased rate of cervical cancer". Hell, unemployment going down decreases mortality rates...
My point was that it's not a persuasive argument. Even if you made a laundry list of failures, you have no baseline to compare against.
I would compare the Twin towers falling to them not falling, for example.
Can we not point to some kind of success this country's made, in unambiguous terms? Have we eradicated any diseases? Some sort of government action that has a clear cause and effect? Statistics are too prone to manipulation and classification mismatching. For example, you don't count as unemployed in the US stats unless you're actively looking for work. Someone who's given up the search is not counted. Methodology counts immensely for statistics, and those choices will change the numbers.
We could counter the shooting angle with the number of mass shootings stopped. That's something we can work with. I've only seen one in recent memory and I'm not sure if it was this year or last year.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a country that has the world's best military and technology to actually make productive use of it and protect the people who pay ~30% of their income to under threat of violence. The least that could be offered is actual protection from enemies; foreign and domestic.
Is it inconceivable that despite the government providing protection from enemies, foreign and domestic, that we still don't live in a risk free society?
You mean some arbitrary assumption about competency and the threats the populace faces.
Yes, government invariably could do a better job of protecting people, and the US government in particular could do a better job of protecting people. However, even with the US government, if you were to systematically dismantle it, there'd be FAR more deaths.
Take your example of mass shootings, do you really think there'd be fewer if there were no regulations, no police, no public emergency response systems, no import restrictions, no safety restrictions, no military, etc.?
Have peons ever had control over the world’s affair? I now have hard time believing, between 1950 and 1990, that voting, demonstrating or participating in parliament meant choosing the future for your country. It must have been a marvelous time if it was true.
Sometimes when I speak to old French people who held activist reunions in Paris in March-May 1968, I get that feeling that it was true, that they were building the rules for how they should be treated, how they should intervene abroad, and most of them also donated 2 years of their life for humanitarian development in Africa, building wells, etc. They seem to believe it so strong. The explosion of the Rainbow Warrior taints the picture a little, but shows how little the spies could do, with amateur leverage. Did pitchforks ever influenced the course of affairs? Maybe yes, during a short period of time.
As a generation Y, having lived through the social media times, having seen printed media say blatant falsehoods about feminism and manufacture uproar that doesn’t exist in real people’s feeling, I do feel that we’re living in a sock puppet show.
Two things can be true. Snowden likely committed acts of treason for which the govt will pursue him. Snowden did pose a threat to US national security interests. If you look at the Schneier essay, he shared privileged info with journalists with poor operational security experience, one of whom crossed borders with a USB thumb drive full of docs. As a whistleblower, he might have enjoyed some legal protections if he had stayed within the lines, which would've at last implied staying in the US and dealing with the possibility of being tried. By fleeing abroad (to the PRC no less, then Russia), he made it easy to write him off as a traitor.
At the same time, he exposed behaviors that were clearly wrong in both government and industry, and spurred a number of people into actions that would not have been undertaken otherwise. For this he should be thanked. That doesn't erase everything.
It does erase it. If you (Snowden in this case) take an unlawful action out of reasonable necessity to defend yourself and others from the criminal acts of another (the US gov in this case), the latter is responsible for it, not the former (subject to certain limits like murder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens).
It's pretty debatable whether the entirety of Snowden's actions can be attributed to "reasonable necessity to defend from criminal acts". He could, and did, encrypt his own comms, by which point it looks like he was pretty shielded. Dropping a lode of secret docs with journalists that seemed to have barely a grasp of security, that doesn't seem to have been the only reasonable action strictly to protect himself or even others against govt action.
He was under great personal pressure as a result of the actions of the original criminal (US gov pursuing him and canceling passport etc), and had very limited time and resources of his own.
He could have dumped it all on the net, but instead handed it to big name highly resourced journalists, who were definitely aware of the seriousness of what they'd received.
There's two ways people try to discredit Snowden. The first is the government absolutist way, that no-one can wrong the government even to remedy its own far superior wrongs. The second is the backdoor version of the same: to say yes we get why he did it, but to impose a burden of performance that only a superman could attain in the reality of that situation, falling short of which: "he caused more harm than he prevented".
He wasn't under strong direct pressure from govt until after fleeing with secret docs. The actions he took after that can't justify his theft and flight abroad. The theft and flight abroad, however, were disproportionate relative to the harm that he was suffering from personally (metadata collection, eavesdropping, both of which he had the technical knowledge to protect himself from).
I'm not trying to balance actions against one another in some form of equation to see what the net good is. That doesn't make sense. It reminds me of Dave Chappelle's skit about trying to process rape allegations against Bill Crosby. He was a great comedian. And probably a rapist. Well, Snowden is similarly complicated.
Comparing Snowden's actions with Cosby is disingenuous at best, sorry. Cosby drugged and raped dozens of women. All of Snowden's actions in their entirety were done with positive intent, regardless of any supposed missteps. Completely incomparable.
Not sure those documents had any legal right to be secret in the first place. Criminals (and that's what the people that broke wiretap laws became) should not enjoy the benefits of secrecy.
Snowden saw what happened to previous whistleblowers like Binney who did stay within the lines, and who achieved little or nothing beyond making themselves pariahs in the intelligence community.
He saw that he had to take a different path, even though it was one that was illegal. And I respect and honor him for being willing to make that choice.
It's a miracle (owed largely to the incompetence of "The Plumbers") that Daniel Ellsberg (RIP) both avoided prosecution and being murdered.
Heck, Assange never stole anything, his crimes were journalism and publication.
Also, 10 years on, there hasn't been any direct evidence of any "damage" from the revelations and it's doubtful the document archive is of any present-day risk to anyone.
There’s a playbook - it always focussed on the character. It’s probably the only way to deflect from the reality of the content of a leak… it’s amazing how influential narratives can be, I suppose is why media has such power.
Exactly, there's a reason character assassination is a term at all. The more someone is damned for their character over the more meaningful topics in the context, the more your should consider someone is trying to deflect your attention.
Same thing happened after Ted Kaczynski got arrested. Media deliberately avoided talking about his ideas, literally all they said about them was a brief mention that they are "unoriginal", like it concerns Kaczynski or anyone. They OTOH talked incessantly about his upbringing and childhood and personal problems and whatnot.
He leaked top secret information and fled to america's worst enemy Russia, where he enjoys a peaceful life now. His revelations are not as shocking to the public as they are to tech people. And the journalists he went to were not american. If he indeed exhausted legal options to report his findings he should have made his case in a US court.
There several implications to his actions. One is that he has no faith in the US legal system and has rejected it, another is that he believed his revelations were unlawful and without precedent, both things are untrue, the intel oversight committee was aware of what the NSA was doing and it was not their first time spying on americans. Even before electronics, intel agencies opening the letters of americans and spying on them was a thing. Many regular people I talked to about this are actually glad because they hear about ISIS and terrorist bombings all the time (back then at least). When bombings like the boston marathon bombing happened, what did the public/media say? They all blamed the fbi for not stopping it beforehand, and after 9/11 the NSA and CIA were expected to work hand-in-hand with the FBI and domestic LE by lending/extending their capability to help them.
You will all remember how this was not even a 2016 election issue.
Personally, I am very glad snowden revealed what he did, and a lot of people in the USGOV should have been imprisoned for it.
But the people voted and continued to vote in favor of the government, vindicating them and condemning snowden. Other leakers followed his way and they were appropriately jailed and then released as he would have. This is thr unfortunate reality of democracy and the state of mind of the majority of americans.
Self included, the USGOV is not my enemy but Russia is. As much as I appreciste snowden's efforts, expecting americans to side with a person who defected to Russia is silly. He is someone who did what he thought was right but defecting to Russia makes him an enemy, not a hero, despite what he said.
Let me put it in a very simple way: American's (self included, as much as I care about privacy -- I have been a victim of this more than you know!), compared to defecting to Russia or humiliating the US by fleeing to our enemy don't give a shit about the government spying on us unlawfully.
The people are aware,every major media outlet and even major movies told them exactly what snowden did and revealed. Snowden is a pariah because that is the will of the plurality of americans.
You've made a few false statements, so lets go through them to keep the record clean.
> He leaked top secret information
True, however it was detailing criminal behaviour and projects that were designed with criminal intent. The Government was not allowed to be running those programs as dragnet surveillance is against the constitution.
> fled to america's worst enemy Russia
False, there is ample evidence to support the fact that he was travelling somewhere else and was unable to continue passed Russia. Where he has decided to settle.
> His revelations are not as shocking to the public as they are to tech people.
True, Which is unfortunate, the tech industry taking notice has had positive impacts, like the taps that were placed on google datacenters being less effective due to TLS being deployed between all services inside google. A very serious undertaking. It also pushed us to create new TLS suites (TLS 1.3) with this in mind and was at least partially responsible for LetsEncrypts existence. So, despite the public taking less care than they should have; it has been for their benefit.
> The journalists he went to were not american.
Laura Poitras is not American? Glenn Greenwald is not American?
> If he indeed exhausted legal options to report his findings he should have made his case in a US court.
How did that go for William Binney? I'm fairly certain you never heard of him or his revelations.
I think the point you've missed is that NSA is above oversight. It's "Enemy of the State" but.. actually, it's exactly like that.
> but defecting to Russia makes him an enemy, not a hero
This is so extremely childish that I am at a loss at how to argue this.
He is in Russia, by the US's own doing, there is a lot of evidence to support that he preferred to be elsewhere. If the only thing you have to smear him on is the fact that he's in an enemy country then sir: you've missed the point. He was always going to end up in an enemy country if he was going to be safe from the US's agents.
Assange was in an embassy in London and there was still discussion in the intelligence community (up to the president) on whether they should assassinate him. In an allied country, in a fucking embassy.
Indefensible.
----
You're also making a cardinal sin, (as am I by responding to you).
If a crackhead gives you a video tape of your child being raped by the local priest, you don't say that the crackhead is a crackhead and thus ignore the video tape.
You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
This is not about how much integrity Snowden has, that's completely irrelevant. He shows that the NSA broke the law and knowingly lied to congress. This is absolutely not open for debate, it's a plain and simple fact, and yet we sit and bicker about how Snowden just "isn't american enough" and how "it's nice for our enemies". -- No. It's nice for our enemies because our governments are doing things they shouldn't be. Not holding them to account is not going to make our governments any better.
> True, however it was detailing criminal behaviour and projects that were designed with criminal intent. The Government was not allowed to be running those programs as dragnet surveillance is against the constitution
The patriot act is also unconstitutional yet it nearly unanimously gets reauthorized. One could argue the NSA spying was merely a tool in support if that. The government gets authority from the people, the people authorized this. And if it is criminal behavior, what crime was violated? The DoJ signed off on NSA spying telling them it is not a crime. Proper legal authorization was obtained from both legislative and executive branches of the government and there was popular support for it.
> False, there is ample evidence to support the fact that he was travelling somewhere else and was unable to continue passed Russia. Where he has decided to settle.
I did not speak about his initial intention but his eventual decision. He knew the implications of settling for moscow. Working in intel, he knew better than most people exactly why Russia welcomed him, it was to cause harm to the US and he became complicit.
> Laura Poitras is not American? Glenn Greenwald is not American?
Fair enough. But I meant theguardian and der spiegel FWIW.
> How did that go for William Binney? I'm fairly certain you never heard of him or his revelations.
> I think the point you've missed is that NSA is above oversight. It's "Enemy of the State" but.. actually, it's exactly like that.
I think you missed the fact that the US is a democracy. The NSA has plenty of oversight. DoJ authorization is oversight, the whitehouse being aware is oversight, the intel oversight committee being aware is literally oversight. They are not above oversight, oversight just meant sacrificing liberty for little security. That is where oversight led to. Did Snowden not know about binney? The thing both you and him wrongly presume is that the NSA or congress were contradicting the american people, that is not the case.
> This is so extremely childish that I am at a loss at how to argue this.
> He is in Russia, by the US's own doing, there is a lot of evidence to support that he preferred to be elsewhere. If the only thing you have to smear him on is the fact that he's in an enemy country then sir: you've missed the point. He was always going to end up in an enemy country if he was going to be safe from the US's agents.
> Assange was in an embassy in London and there was still discussion in the intelligence community (up to the president) on whether they should assassinate him. In an allied country, in a fucking embassy.
> Indefensible.
It doesn't matter what he preferred, he went to the enemy in the end willingly. The US did not force him to settle in Russia, nor was he forced to leak any information. Fleeing a country to avoid criminal penalty is called being a fugitive. Working for a spy agency and settling in the enemy's capital being used as a propaganda piece by them is called defecting! "If he was going to be safe from the US agents" give me a break, his name was globally infamous, do you think he will be assasinated? Do you think the CIA cannot assasinate him in Moscow? He was fearing being arrested and facing legal consequence in the US, the laws of the people of the US!he fled because he knew what he did was illegal not because spies will kill him anywhere else. He saw it fir that benefiting a US enemy is worth letting the american people know something they already authorized when they tolerated the patriot act and have been doing so for two different administrations at that point!
I would like citations on the government discussing assasinating assange, but even then assange is not American. If snowden flies back to DC today, do you actually believe he will get assainated? To what end? Wouldn't it be better to just lock him up?
Had he stayed, his fate would have been similar to reality winner: 5-10years in prison. He fled to avoid that, if he really did everything lawfully he had nothing to fear.
> If a crackhead gives you a video tape of your child being raped by the local priest, you don't say that the crackhead is a crackhead and thus ignore the video tape.
> You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
I agree with your analogy. What you keep missing is that the government is the crackhead in this situation and snowden is the other thing (i won't use something horrible like that even in an analogy). His betrayal, and decision to avoid legal consequence made him a fugitive defector. For the american people, he betrayed them and the government did what was authorized by them to stop terrorists or whatever boogeyman.
In a democracy, nothing trumps the will of the people. If reality was such that the american people did not expect their government to do whatever it took, including sacrificing civil liberties and privacy of americans to stop the next 9/11(despite success/failure of their attempt), and/or if Snowden's revelations were things congress oversight, the DoJ or the whitehouse were not aware if then it would indeed have risen to a very serious level of "rogue agency breaking laws" scandal, but that wasn't the case. Even from snowden's perspective, he raised his concerns to the NSA ombudsman and every other internal means of raising the alarm. He presumed the NSA was acting on its own volition or that congress was not aware (he could have notified the whitehouse or members of congress instead of the press).
> You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
Yeah, not the press and if the police were compicit you make your case in court and tell the press
> This is not about how much integrity Snowden has, that's completely irrelevant.
I agree. But he did know how moscow will benefit from his presence there. He chose to aid a foreign enemy to expose a domestic one (turns out the domestic enemy was just the gov doing what people wanted).
If a law was broken, it was the entire executive branch, not just the NSA, spanning 3 (now 5) administrations that have been arguably breaking the law. EO12333 and the patriot act were known to the people. The DoJ authorized that mere collection is fine, so long as when a human looks at the information a foreign entiry was associated with the communication.
> This is absolutely not open for debate
Who was prosecuted for breaking the law then?
> it's a plain and simple fact
Absolutley nothing argued as a matter of breaking the law is a plain and simple fact. Just about any law, including murder can be violated in the name of self-defense or national security. Everything leaked by snowden was approved by everyone in the executive branch that should have had to approve it. So bush and obama broke the law in your opinion but whether not their national security defense was lawful, that is what FISA court is for as is the supreme court who are ok with FISA court.
> It's nice for our enemies because our governments are doing things they shouldn't be. Not holding them to account is not going to make our governments any better
If you get anything from this, get this one thing: it doesn't matter how shitty our government gets, the american people will never be ok with aiding a foreign enemy to acheive that goal. Even if the US were to turn into a totalitarian fascist regime, I would rather have that than aid terrorists or Russians in their efforts against us. We live in a time where a major political party is cozying up to Russians who we are fighting a proxy war against, so this is even more true today than ever before. You overestimate how serious if a thing it is in the minds of americans when the government spies on them compared to a foreign enemy that is working hard to destroy their country and way of life.
A foreign enemy is an entity against whom we send our sons and daughters to die just to make small gains at defeating that enemy. Use that perspective when evaluating snowden's presence there as a voice of propaganda against the US. Also consider that lawful or not, the NSA's surveillance was intended on catching foreign enemies and their actions were largley in accordance with the expectation of most americans.
Had he gone to any other country like ecuador as he originally supposedly intended or had the american public not already made a collective decision to sacrifice privacy and liberties for security then I would be agreeing with you on most things. But that just isn't reality.
> The government gets authority from the people, the people authorized this.
But it doesn't actually work that way. People don't specifically vote for the politicians that are currently in the office over this particular issue - they vote on their entire platform, and if we we're being honest, they mostly vote on the few "wedge issues" that are particularly prominent in mass media at the time the election happens. In the past two decades, it's also increasingly "voting against" the other guys as opposed to voting for someone.
The end result is that, while those elected certainly claim to have a popular mandate on the basis that they won the election, it's very misleading in practice in most cases.
I think the major difference is that I believe that allowing a branch of government to break laws and lie to our democratically elected leaders is anti-democratic and totalitarian, thus anti-American.
I agree that I don't like it but can anything with the support of the plurality if americans by definition be anti-american? Maybe anti-democratic since the proper way is a constitutional amendment, but even that is a stretch since by 2012 three election cycles tolerated compromising liberty for security and justified violating the constitution because of national security, and snowden's leak on an election year wasn't used by republicans in their effort to retake congress or by trump when he ran against hillary. It can be argued that as unfortunate as it is, the apathy if the american people and their disproportional fear of terrorism that resulted in the NSA's surveillance was very much democratic and american.
Keep in mind that this same democracy and sentiment had led to japanese internment camps in WW2 and even worse in other situations.
I have a feeling history will rule in favor of snowden but I just wish he moved to a country not hostile to the US. Especially these days when Russians themselves are fleeing Russia, it's hard to defend Snowden. His Moscow relationship undermined whatever intention he had to bring change to the NSA.
The bigger problem is that he was trying to change a symptom, while ignoring the disease, that is the sentiment of the american people. I fear it would take the abuse of the NSA's powers against the american people at scale by some tyrant to fix the root cause.
I've watched the Twitter InfoSec crowd slowly turn from:
supportive -> ambivalent -> hostile.
Guess exposing XKeyScore, PRISM, TEMPORA really pissed off the hypocrites in the US.
The intersection in the Venn diagram between Intel and Infosec community is substantial. And quite a number of accounts directly linked to US IC influence decisions of who is allowed to have a voice at DefCon and BlackHat.
The same happened with public support for Assange.
Nobody talks about the retaliation by proxy against Ola Bini. They should.
If you stand up for them better prep yourself to either get labeled a tankie or get character assassinated¹ by some nutjob with pink hair and overly strong feelings about pronouns. Which is an odd hostile spectrum to find oneself in. Jacob Applebaum was especially torn down hard using manufactured content of blog posts of "rape victimes" coming forward. And until today he remains so:
¹ > In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy.[10] In mid-May, Snowden gave an electronic interview to Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum which was published weeks later by Der Spiegel.[119] -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
The same governments who told you that Snowden is a traitor, Assange is a hostile intelligence agency, the Iraq war was because Hussein was behind 9/11, and that he had WMD, are now very concerned about protecting you from disinformation from social media.
They also want backdoors in your crypto on all your communication devices, so they can better protect you.
It's quite scary how well government smear and disinformation campaigns work.
And then we had The Twitter files, where once again the focus became attacking the journalists rather than the outrage that should have flowed from the content exposed.
> I find it terrifyingly fascinating how the US has managed to turn Snowden into a pariah
Just normal Stalinist propaganda (made by the CIA) at work.
The idea, just like in the case of Assange, was to turn the people away from their revelations and in turn, to turn people against Snowden by painting him as a vilain.
* Landed in Moscow, went to the transit zone which is used to change flights
* Applied for asylum to Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela.
* Left HK due to agreements and good connections to the US (not that HK is China, but it would have been easier to go to China from HK than to Russia if thats the goal).
Additionally: In an October 2014 interview with The Nation magazine, Snowden reiterated that he had originally intended to travel to Latin America: "A lot of people are still unaware that I never intended to end up in Russia."
Leaking information to journalists is not at all the same as gathering information for foreign intelligence. Snowden is the 21st-Century Daniel Ellsberg.
I'm not sure how to get this through to you; but let's try.
Imagine that every time you go through airport security, a full body scan is made of your kids and wife and they are sent around to a thousand or so unknown people (most of whom aren't even directly employed by the government) for salacious reasons or to be mocked. Now, there's a law that protects your kids scans from being sent anywhere (like HIPPA for doctors!), but incidentally it's a government institution and thus, according to themselves they do not need to follow the law. - despite that law existing for the only purpose of protecting your kids from the government.
When the information gets out that this is happening (this part happened before Snowden btw), everyone involved, including the head of the organisation, knowingly lies to the "Oversight committee" which is democratically elected, is transparent and wants to protect your kids. The "Oversight Committee" have no choice than to just trust airport security at their word, for "security" reasons. (this was one of the things proven to have happened in the Snowden leaks: IE; General Alexander knowingly lied to the US Senate).
Lying to the "Oversight committe" in this case is also a crime, but such flagrant disregard for the law has become pretty standard.
This is what we're discussing here, not just that there was laws being broken, not that there was surveillance after all: their job is surveillance.
The fact is here: that you, dear citizen have a right to privacy enshrined in the constitution. The reason that protection exists at all is to protect the very democracy that you uphold: freedom of expression.
A rogue government agency that lies to your democratically elected leaders, that breaks laws indiscriminately and does so under a thick blanket of secrecy -- while wielding a very powerful hammer to discredit and chase people to the ends of the earth -- that's what was exposed.
Not "the good guys". If they were "good" they wouldn't be lying to the US Senate. They wouldn't be assassinating the character of the people that expose them- these things would have clear answers and when exposed people would shrug.
You can't defend it by saying "it's national secrecy". Tell me how spying on your ex is in the national interest? Tell me why there can't be oversight?
"does the US spy on its citizens?"
"Not wittingly"
your write explains it well, but I guess privacy has been eroded so much. people have trouble with the mindset.
And yet HN loves Snowden but hates Bitcoin and crypto. Let the cognitive dissonance seep in and realize maybe it does have a purpose other than scams. Maybe software devs making 400k a year working for tech giants don’t need it, but lots of other people do.
HN loves crypto, just not cryptocurrency. Cryptography can be the most venerable tech on the planet when implemented right. Good cryptosystems protect us everyday, and their continued development and research is necessary to truly ensure that personal security is attainable.
Cryptocurrency is a more dubious system. It's trustless and has some cryptographic elements, which is cool and very nerd porn, but it's also intrinsically social and complicated beyond understanding for the layman. That's where custodial scams and interpersonal exploits crop up, along with the other problems of sharing a universal ledger. Wildly variable gas fees, fraudulent transactions, systemic abuse and non-canonical forks are all just a part of the Blockchain model. Combine that with a lack of implementation spec, an incentive to fleece your user and zero regulatory bodies, and you might see how people dislike cryptocurrency. I don't even like the startup culture this website worships, but trusting the Blockchain to be a solution is fatal overcompensation.
I can recommend something like PGP or OpenSSL full stop. I cannot recommend cryptocurrency unless you know what you're doing, have a specific use for it, and treat your crypto-assets as disposable if you intend to keep them in the long-term. Those aren't just unacceptable terms for a successful currency; that's unacceptable for any online networked platform.
Because Bitcoin never lived up to the hype. It’s nothing more than a scam. Nothing crypto or blockchain has done has advanced us forward in any meaningful way. But it has stolen 1000s of dollars from people and made a small number of people rich.
>Nothing crypto or blockchain has done has advanced us forward in any meaningful way.
Snowden is literally saying how helpful and useful to him Bitcoin was. How can you make such a cognitive dissonant statement? Like I said in my original post, crypto hasn't been helpful to you, that doesn't mean it hasn't been helpful to everyone. Newspaper owners hated the internet, that doesn't mean the internet isn't useful.
Snowden made himself a pariah. Two wrongs don't make a right, fleeing to Russia was a bad choice. Your suggestion that we are falling for some grand scheme or propaganda unless we subscribe to your opinion is dishonest.
In hindsight, fleeing to Russia was a good choice, even if it wasn't Snowden's intention.
Snowden said he was trying to get to Ecuador, but the Ecuadorian government would have handed him over to the US for the right price, just like they did with Assange. EU countries are too cozy with the US, and would never have given him asylum. In fact, when the US thought Snowden might be on the President of Bolivia's plane, it got a bunch of EU countries to deny overflight, forcing the Bolivian President to land and submit to a search of his plane. Snowden's only realistic option was to seek shelter in a large, powerful country with a poor relationship with the US.
The USA have initiated one of the biggest denouncement campaigns in its very history against this man. Nobody sane would have not fled in that situation.
The goal was always to get into either China or Russia. They are the only geopolitical heavyweights that wouldn't have folded like Ecuador did with Assange.
It's amazing how the "American whistleblower randomly ended up in Russia during transit" revisionism is being pushed.
Ecuador folded because Assange was inside the embassy, in what ultimately is UK soil. There was no way, when push came to shove, to prevent him from being captured. If Assange was in Ecuador proper, they might not have folded, or he might have been able to leave Ecuador for, say, Cuba before the hammer dropped. I imagine this was Snowden's plan since he wanted to go to Cuba, Ecuador, or Venezuela. If he wanted to stay in Russia he wouldn't even have noticed his passport being deactivated, and if he wanted to go to China, he would have went to Shenzhen from Hong Kong instead of going to Russia first.
In theory, it does. In practice, pretty nobody actually does this, because it's largely unenforced, and on the other hand, nobody wants to lose their internal passport and have to go through the headache of replacing it. Losing your international passport as a non-citizen would be even worse.
A cop on the street isn't going to check whether your passport was or wasn't revoked (and in fact simply can't). You would only notice that at the airport. And he did in fact claim that he noticed this in the airport, when trying to leave Russia.
This is a misconception, it isn't. It's extraterritorial-ish, meaning that the host country temporarily and revocably confers the privilege for that area to be under different laws. It's revocable at any time with sufficient notice, and it stays sovereign soil of the original country.
Just flooding the fields doesnt produce fruit. Producing fruit takes time, knowledge and skill. There are no shortcuts.
Snowden should have spent time scanning the data to find allies high and low. Building networks of like minded folk. Regularly meeting to come up with better solutions. Testing them out till the good ones are shown to work. And then launch attacks on those most corrupted. That is what a character like Gandhi did. And the outcomes were very different.
Also compare with what Propublica has been doing with the Clarence Thomas corruption story. Every few days there is another story about a different time he took a $100+k bribe. They're going to beat the drum until Justice Thomas resigns or stops being openly corrupt, which may be a very long time.
> They're going to beat the drum until Justice Thomas resigns or stops being openly corrupt, which may be a very long time.
I don’t expect either of those things to happen, sadly. If everything stays as it is, he will remain in office and continue his behavior. He’ll stay there until he dies.
I guess I’m one of those easily misled sheep who has been cowed (sheeped?) by government propaganda.
Or maybe it’s possible to disapprove of Snowden not as “a plant or a terrorist” but as an unwitting accomplice or a useful idiot who chose to make classified information public in a way that was extraordinarily favorable to what were obviously (even in 2013) two of the most repressive regimes in the world.
Like, don’t flee to China after you supposedly blew the whistle to highlight abuses of government surveillance. And never ever transit through Russia! If Snowden had given 1% as much thought to factors like that as he had to stealing and disseminating classified information, maybe it would be easier for me to believe that his motives were completely pure and/or he hadn’t fallen under the sway of foreign intelligence services.
Instead, the most charitable assessment I can give him is that he’s a guy who’s not nearly as bright as he thinks he is who got in way, way over his head. I have a hell of a lot more respect for Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner than I do Snowden.
Firstly; I want to mention how extremely difficult it is to admit that you've been misled. It requires basically removing all stigma from being conceivably wrong then coldly looking at the facts. Most people simply cannot not do this as it triggers the same sections in the brain as a pain response; they will instead simply pick a side (usually the first one they hear) and not alter their opinion much. So if you are able to coldly assess the facts and you come up to the same conclusion - then I applaud you, that's more than most can do.
However, some minor facts:
1) He was in Hong Kong when he blew the whistle, which as much China as Puerto Rico is the USA - its a special administrative region, there is a strict border when travelling to Szhenzen.
2) Whats your transit strategy if the US is trying to get you?
Finally; that something is nice for an enemy doesn't mean that it shouldn't see the light of day, for example if your favourite fast food owner rapes a bunch of women but the company he represents is basically the only thing standing up to a big chain, well, unfortunately, you have to own up to it; not doing so is worse for everyone, including you as you are now complicit.
Frankly: Laws were broken and the governments of the allied countries (colloquially: 5Eyes) should petition the law to be changed if that's what they require and it should go through our democratic system.
You cant claim to be a democracy and then not permit your democratically elected leaders oversight or intentionally mislead them under oath, as General Alexander has knowingly proven to have done in the leaks.
Edward Snowden is the single most influential person in the entire history of information security and it's not even close. The data he revealed changed the direction of the evolution of the internet rapidly and completely. HTTPS websites, E2E encrypted communications, VPN providers, metadata reduction, etc. All of these things gained traction because of Snowden and are integral to the modern internet.
Aside from the very real gains in privacy and security, I would also like to make the argument that we would currently be living in a fragmented hellscape of an internet if the net had not turned (mostly) opaque after 2013. Imagine the same AI spam filters currently operating on your email but for all network traffic. We would be suffocating under the weight of (sometimes) well-meaning, but ill-conceived security solutions. Fortunately, we took a different path.
Saying he's either a pariah or a hero is a very political stance either way, and I don't want to spout politics here on HN (That's not what HN is for, although political rants still slip through the cracks on HN).
That said, the leaks did leave some aftermath[0]. All the tinfoilers, pre-Snowden had their suspicions confirmed in real, tangible ways. Yeah we knew abut ECHELON[1] but the Snowden leaks were far more substantial IMHO, and leaked at a time when The Internet was really starting to ramp up (in terms of all the services/tooling now available, and social media making leaps and bounds).
"Work to develop a new version of TLS was started in 2014, mainly due to concerns that TLS 1.2 and earlier version implementations had been shown to be vulnerable to a range of attacks over the years. The work to develop TLS 1.3 [RFC8446] also aimed to encrypt more of the handshake so as to expose less information to network observers -- a fairly direct result of the Snowden revelations. Work to further improve TLS in this respect continues today using the so-called Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) mechanism [TLS-ECH] to remove one of the last privacy leaks present in current TLS.P:
Work on ECH was enabled by significant developments to encrypt DNS traffic, using DNS over TLS (DoT) [RFC7858] or DNS Queries over HTTPS (DoH) [RFC8484], which also started as a result of the Snowden revelations. Prior to that, privacy hadn't really been considered when it came to DNS data or (more importantly) the act of accessing DNS data. The trend towards encrypting DNS traffic represents a significant change for the Internet, both in terms of reducing cleartext, but also in terms of moving points-of-control. The latter aspect was, and remains, controversial, but the IETF did its job of defining new protocols that can enable better DNS privacy. Work on HTTP version 2 [RFC9113] and QUIC [RFC9000] further demonstrates the trend in the IETF towards always encrypting protocols as the new norm, at least at and above the transport layer.P:
Of course, not all such initiatives bore fruit;"
Indeed. People are still sending cleartext domain names in SNI. Are the alleged privacy gains of encrypting DNS traffic meaningful when anyone can see the domain names in SNI, when the user makes a TLS connection. Arguably cleartext SNI is even worse for privacy than cleartext DNS because with SNI anyone can see when the person is connecting to a website whereas DNS only tells them when the person looked up a name. Concluding that a person accessed a website from a DNS lookup alone requires some assumptions. Cleartext SNI requires no such assumptions.
My favourite section is the history, and the one most relevant to RFC authors and editors. It is easy for me to forget that most people in tech never heard of the Clipper chip. This is a simple summary that history, and the implications for the RFC process.
If you want a technical document, try BCP #188 aka RFC 7258 "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack". That's a Best Common Practice document (ie it describes what the Internet Community should do) about the wide use of surveillance technologies such as "middle boxes" and it makes it clear that these are necessarily an attack in practical terms and therefore new Internet technologies should be designed to mitigate this attack.
BCP #188 made it easy to say why EDCO's arguments for RSA KEX in TLS 1.3 were unactionable. ECDO (the Enterprise Data Centre Operators, mostly big banks and similar outfits) wanted to use the obsolete RSA key exchange method in TLS 1.3, and sent somebody to argue for this right at the end of the process, years after it was removed - because otherwise they'd have to do a bunch of work, and who wants to do work? Well, too bad, RSA KEX makes surveillance really easy, so we got rid of it.
They got rid of RSA KEX but it was explained that using static DH you can still implement TLS monitoring. So they came out with ETS [1]. I'm sure there's vendors out there implementing this.
Having worked for a large telco that ran an oppressive network that performed TLS inspection on all corporate traffic, I imagine there'd be demand to inspect TLS 1.3 traffic. Banks, Boring Enterprise, Governments, Intelligence Community, etc. are the types of customers that are interested in this.
Here is a vendor implementing TLS 1.3 inspection [1] - they probably don't call it ETS (since there's a CVE attached to it) but it probably implements that exact spec (since ETS only deviates from TLS 1.3 by using a static DH key instead of ephemeral).
The second link even explains what they actually do, which is what we told them to do (but they didn't listen) many years ago in at least TLS 1.2 and probably TLS 1.0
It's a full proxy. Your client (say, Firefox) connects to their product, which has the real end entity certificate and keys for say, big-bank.example, which will have been provided by the customer who bought this product - and so it can prove satisfactorily that it is big-bank.example. Then the proxy forwards this to the "real" system which does the actual banking or whatever.
This is completely orthogonal to the TLS security design. We have successfully connected to you to a system which can prove it is big-bank.example. No need for static DH.
Should your bank trust third party suppliers with the ability to seamlessly impersonate them? I guess that's up to regulators.
RFC, in its earlier days, was not as rigid as it is now. You get standards written like essays (good for figuring out why, not quite good for figuring out how to do something) and regular essays. Check out more from the Informational category:
The ISO has informational documents that aren't really standards. I wrote one that is in the process of becoming one of those documents that you pay 133 Swiss Franc for.
If any western goverment had the balls do offer Edward Snowden asylum and a competent security detail he wouldn't be stuck in Russia. He tried to do the right thing and our oh so principled governments just wanted to shoot the messenger and hide the body along with the other evidence of their crimes.
> "Looking back on all the above from a 2023 vantage point, I think that, as a community of Internet engineers, we got a lot right, but that today there's way more that needs to be done to better protect the security and privacy of people who use the Internet. In particular, we (the technical community) haven't done nearly as good a job at countering surveillance capitalism, which has exploded in the last decade. In part, that's because many of the problems are outside of the scope of bodies such as the IETF. For example, intrusive backend sharing of people's data for advertising purposes can't really be mitigated via Internet protocols.
However, I also think that the real annoyance felt with respect to the Snowden revelations is (in general) not felt nearly as much when it comes to the legal but hugely privacy-invasive activities of major employers of Internet engineers.
It's noteworthy that RFC 7258 doesn't consider that bad actors are limited to governments, and personally, I think many advertising industry schemes for collecting data are egregious examples of pervasive monitoring and hence ought also be considered an attack on the Internet that ought be mitigated where possible. However, the Internet technical community clearly hasn't acted in that way over the last decade."
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We are all very aware of Snowden's revelations and call him a hero, but we also routinely ignore, if not get paid by, major tech corporations that make tracking and advertising, a form of surveillance, their main source of income.
I guess it's easy not to care when you're paid $250,000/yr and have a nice cafeteria to get unlimited free snacks.
Imagine being served ads so good that you would install a contentblocker to not be distracted from the ads. That in principle requires knowing who you are. Still its only a means, the goal is selling the ads, and the major tech is honestly uninterested in the content of the surveilance itself.
Interestingly the IETF collaborates with the Chinese surveillance sector (China Mobile, ZTE, Huawei etc.) but comes out against the US surveillance sector.
The former half of your comment is misleading: All large standards organizations work with anyone willing to contribute, as far as I’m aware.
The latter half of your comment is factually incorrect: I’ve been a member of both IETF and ISO cryptography-related working groups and seeing people who work for NIST or NSA is not uncommon.
NSA and the 5 eyes were the baddies and they got caught. They got caught because they had been demoralized from within, and there were dozens of other Snowdens waiting in line because the agency had obviously and demonstrably lost its way. If NSA thought they were keeping the world safe from totalitarian communism, they had one job, and the leadership of each of those countries and in europe today suggests that America actually lost the cold war and is collectively too stupid to know it.
I suspect the IC has been seduced by the conceit that they are essential to the movement whose activists have infiltrated it and is using the agencies to ratchet its people into government. The IC people just don't get that this movement won't need the NSA when it has Google and Apple. It doesn't need the FBI when it has digital currencies. It doesn't need any of them when it has snitch networks and legions of the mentally ill denouncing people for counter revolutionary thoughts. The last thing on earth it needs is professional bureaucrats with networks of relationships, let alone sentimental beliefs about nationhood and freedom, and who know where its blind spots are. The simple reason behind 20th century atrocities is they were all committed by people who thought they would be the exceptions, and it was accepting the exceptions that enforced the rule.
Snowden showed us that we were all the suckers at the table with NSA, but I would observe a decade later that now the IC as a whole doesn't know who the sucker at the table is anymore. If you don't believe me, then tell me, the flag on your boss' desk or hanging in classified areas, its stripes, what colours are they?
In other words, I'm perfectly happy taking the risks to society that would exist if the government didn't read literally everyone's private communications. The right to freedom from unwarranted search and seizure is written into our basic government document, if you don't like a society like that, go move to a totalitarian state to feel comfortable in your safety.
I see the argument that people need to be accountable for leaking secrets.
I also see that if a organization holding too many secrets gets too big, something is going to leak. If you drive from BMI airport to Washington DC at the wrong time of the day you might encounter one of America's worst traffic jams when everybody gets off work at the NSA headquarters.
I remember reading a non-fiction account of certain intrigues from the early 1970s where a private eye says: "If I know something there is 1 chance it leaks out, if two people know it is more like 11, if it is three people, like 111, etc" and given that increasing difficulty of keeping secrets, if you really want to keep something a secret you really have to keep it a secret.
was faulted for revealing specific names, dates, etc. of CIA personnel that directly put them in danger. I wasn't surprised at all that the NSA was doing the stuff that Snowden "revealed", in fact it would have been a scandal if they weren't doing that because the whole reason the NSA exists to do exactly that. Snowden can be faulted not so much for revealing the big picture, but revealing lots of details that affected specific activities and programs.
Of course, without all those details people wouldn't realize what a house of cards a non-encrypted internet is. Back around 2005 I turned on a Wi-Fi packet sniffer on an academic network and immediately saw email passwords for about 15 people (I deleted them right away) It is not just the NSA hoovering up data but governments like France, Israel, Iran, Russia, China not to mention high school hackers, organized crime organizations, etc. People never seem to take security seriously enough and unfortunately it took Snowden to wake up to the possibility that the NSA can do that but so can everybody else.
I sort of agree with op.
Whatever NSA did (doing?) certainly very disturbing and should be scrutinized. And I think the fact that Snowdlen revealed that definitely made things better.
However, Snowden fleeing to russia (a 100% dictatorship country) that is doing things way worse than NSA, and then being silent about that makes him a hypocrite.
They don't read literally everyone's private communications. The vast, vast majority of collected data is discarded without having ever been read. Only where it's relevant to national security are analysts permitted to actually read it.
It's very naive to think that targeted surveillance, and the means to achieve it via bulk collection and other methods, isn't necessary in the incredibly hostile world in which we live.
Please put away your dogmatic, child-like slogans and open your eyes to see the real world.
you are in their databases as of 10+ year old information and their capabilities have grown massively since then.
Every contact you have with another person is logged and catalogued- exceedingly likely recorded and at the very least automatically transcribed and easily searchable by thousands of people with no oversight.
People were even using it to stalk women they liked.
Your stance is not rooted in the facts as we know them.
1. The government is not spying on you - that's a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
2. OK, the government is actually spying on you and here's why that's a good thing.
>The vast, vast majority of collected data is discarded without having ever been read.
[Citation needed]
Notably, you're omitting anything about the role that intelligence collection and Parallel Construction play in prosecuting Americans for crimes which have nothing at all to do with national security, and which they have no possible way to defend themselves against the use of that information.
It's unsurprising given the way it was phrased — very US-centric, and essentially that "if you disagree with me, you're as bad as Putin's soldiers in Ukraine"? Hardly the best way to encourage friendly debate.
I'll fess up to having originally flagged it despite generally not liking doing that. I did so because of the "flamewar style" of the argument - single-purpose fresh account, personal attacks on anyone who disagrees, phrased in the most inflammatory way possible. A comment like that isn't looking for earnest discussion, and it would have been very easy to write something less likely to set off a shit subthread.
Besides, a later comment flatly asserting the impossibility of abuse, like three weeks after https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/fbi-intellig... did rounds in the news, smells like good old-fashioned trolling. Anyone seeking to seriously discuss this topic is aware of that development.
After Snowden, I realized there are two types of security: the one that protect your from high-profile black hats, and the one that protects you from governments.
I just want to be protected from criminals and other black hats that only do harm. It's pointless to be protected from the government, because I want real criminals to get caught. The chilling effect is real, but I still don't want criminals to hack me, and so far it seems things are okay, and online ads are more worrying than the NSA.
What's worrying with this NSA story, is how politics can influence with justice, when agencies use their powers for political gain but it doesn't seem the NSA is really using it on the US political scene.
However, the US abuse its power on the international scene, so it spies on its allies or even work with large US corporation to loot other countries. That's a real problem.
At the end of the day, lay people will just argue that what the NSA does is to preserve American dominance, so it must be good.
So in the end, the NSA and digital surveillance is never the problem, the problem has not changed, the problem is how the US behaves on the planet.
But ask yourself this question: do you trust your government? I'm not american, the US scares me, and I trust the US government. Even Trump could not do all the damage he wanted.
So in the end, the Snowden story only resonates with libertarians who fears that the US government will turn into a fascist soviet empire. It's not cyber surveillance that will do it. They should learn more about politics and history. Technology isn't everything.
It might interest you to keep in mind that you should care about a branch of government breaking its countries own laws and acting intentionally against the will of the senate, even openly and directly misleading them.
Such a thing is akin to a rogue government entity, it’s the stuff of Mission Impossible movies; though much more mundane and sleazy as people were shown to be stalking ex-lovers using the tech.
I won’t jibe with comments about how totalitarian regimes come about, though that’s certainly an issue- I would invite you to read the thought experiment of Roko’s Basilisk though, you should be warned that some people consider the awareness of this thought experiment to be akin to a virus[0].
Essentially, you don’t just trust this government and all it’s employees implicitly, you are basically trusting all future governments and government employees, and you are trusting them to only break the laws that suit you. I’m not sure what laws you think they should be beholden to in that case.
Law is not optional, it works or it should be changed, via the democratic process.
I'd like to point out two things that are relevant:
1. There is a Presidential candidate who has absolutely, positively stated that if elected President, he will use government power to go after his political enemies. Like 100%. No ambiguity on this, he is campaigning on it.
2. This candidate has been estimated at having at 45-49% chance of being elected the next President (since that is his chance of winning the electoral college) according to a recently quoted US political expert.
As the expression goes, life comes at you fast. It really wouldn't take that much for being protected from government to be even more important than it currently is. So if today you'd say 'I'm not worried about the government scanning my data', please note that the negative power of government interest, and prosecution of perceived enemies, could escalate exponentially very quickly.
This isn't a hypothetical: we have a candidate that has said he's going to pursue his political enemies, and there's good reason to think that nothing will be off limits.
The problem is that they store all this data. Can you trust all future Governments of the US and their allies, for the whole rest of your life?
This is not a hypothetical - it’s actually been a serious problem for groups of people. For example, census data voluntarily filed by citizens to probably then trustworthy Governments was used by a later regime that invaded to identify which people to exterminate in the holocaust.
Then there is the problem of leaks. Sure you might trust the Government with that data, but what it it’s hacked by a criminal organisation, or other governments etc.?
Anybody who saw him speak knows he was doing everything possible to make it about the content, and not him as a person- only putting his name to the light to prove it wasn't false or the result of some disgruntled employee trying to stick it to his manager.
Yet the narrative very quickly focused on him; the content of his character, his upbringing, his connection to the government, the fact that he is in Russia and decidedly not on the content of the leaks which quickly got glossed over and to date I am unaware of single arrest due to it- despite clear evidence of lawbreaking (including but not limited to: deliberately lying to the Senate).
Lets not forget that diplomatic plane that was downed across international territories because they suspected Snowden was inside.
Despite posing no continued threat to the US, they sure spent a lot of effort making him as uncredible as possible yet anyone who has eyes sees it as completely transparent.
The scariest part of it all is that people actually are falling for that narrative, do not look at the leaks for what they are (proof of unconstitutional behaviour by a branch of government) and call Snowden a plant or a terrorist- ironically the kinds of people who would otherwise argue against government interference. Boggles my mind, and scares me to death how clearly susceptible the population is to disinformation.