I agree that this is a legitimate intelligence target. All of the allies spy one one another all of the time, that's how we keep trust.
I think the biggest scandal that isn't discussed often enough (in the US) is not spying on foreign government officials for legitimate security-related reasons (e.g. this), it is spying on foreign government officials to give the US an advantage in trade negotiations or worse passing on "tips" to US-based private companies so they can gain an advantage during negotiations/bidding.
The US constantly beats the capitalism drum, and that's fine. But it seem hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages.
Even people in the US should be asking why large US corporations are given these tips/advantages/etc while small-medium US businesses are not. Let alone the immorality of helping a US company win against a foreign one due to state supplied corporate espionage.
The justification "well China does it!!1!" while true, is just kind of pathetic. China does a lot of things, doesn't make it right for a country that claims it is the beacon is capitalism and democracy to do the same.
> The US constantly beats the capitalism drum, and that's fine. But it seem hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages.
For many of us, "capitalism" involves precisely this -- the wealthy using their wealth and power to cement their position.
If pure capitalism isn't robust enough that it won't devolve into cronyism then it's just as worthless an ideology as "communism", and for much the same reason. It's not enough that something sounds good and works in theory - humans have to be able to implement it too.
The lines between national interests, immigration restrictions, inherited wealth and cronyism are very blurry though, and not just empirically or historically.
But let me ask you this: Why is the government helping large corporations to cheat more than small or medium companies? Even if we decide cheating is acceptable, shouldn't everyone be on an even footing in terms of this type of help?
Seems like the ultimate result is the big get bigger while the small get smaller.
The large corporations give more campaign donations (bribes) to the individuals who make up the political class, which gives the large corporations massive preference when their interests are addressed. Large donations equals political preferences made into reality. Our reality is a result of this going on for almost a century. It is this simple.
This is true. They removed the exception of insider trading for Congress a few years ago, but put it right back in a year or two later. It's disgusting.
>or worse passing on "tips" to US-based private companies so they can gain an advantage during negotiations/bidding.
>But it seem hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages.
Do you have any sources for this? I am genuinely curious.
If there was anything in any of the leaked Snowden slides detailing any US companies they give info to that would be greatly appreciated.
"Snowden's documents, many of which were published by Brazil-based U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald, revealed that Washington had spied on Rousseff's personal communications, those of state-run oil company Petrobras - which Rousseff once chaired - and countless Brazilian citizens".
And what information was provided to US companies? That's an article about a US company losing business, not an article about a US company benefiting from NSA provided secrets.
"According to an economic espionage order, the NSA intercepted all French corporate contracts and negotiations valued at more than $200 million in many different industries, such as telecommunications, electrical generation, gas, oil, nuclear and renewable energy, and environmental and healthcare technologies.
A second economic espionage order called “France: Economic Developments” shows that information was then shared with other U.S. agencies and secretaries, including the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Commerce, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasury. Eventually, this data could have been used to help sign export deals."
> shared with other U.S. agencies and secretaries, including the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Commerce, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasury.
None of those are US companies. This is like every Snowden thread ever. A specific claim was made: the NSA provides private companies with tips. A citation was requested. Instead of evidence for the claim that was made, we get this, that, and the other thing, but never the requested citation.
Look, if there's no evidence that the NSA provided a company with tips, then just say "Sorry, I misspoke. I conflated spying activity A with spying activity B."
True, you have a point, there is no evidence that I am aware of - of this information dissipating to _private_ companies.
Just like phone call records were improperly used to spy on unfaithful spouses (which was not disclosed by Snowden docs), it is highly likely it was the case with business intelligence.
Your point stands, though - we'll need another Snowden to leak more docs to know for sure :-)
There is nothing about the NSA giving information to Boeing.
You mean to say a spy agency spied on a foreign president, color me shocked. The article is about blowback from the Snowden leaks. Nothing about the government supplying private companies with information.
Look further down the article. It talks about spying on Petrobras. There is other evidence of spying on French and German companies (see my other post in this thread).
I did misspeak on who the information was shared with. It was dissipated among several government agencies. I am not aware of any evidence about sharing it with private companies in the US.
The irony here is that the European Union states are famously among the worst industrial espionage offenders, particularly between Germany and France. This isn't a "US and China" thing.
> it seems hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages
Capitalism is a regulatory and economic framework that allows for the private ownership of capital and assets and is driven by selfish profit motives.
In a purely capitalistic system, we wouldn't even have a government to redistribute wealth and provide oversight, or in this case - to spy on other countries and provide information to a few select corporations. The socialistic thing for the government to do would be to distribute these secrets evenly among all US businesses.
So government favoring big business is actually another triumph of capitalism.
You sound exactly like people who insist that communism has never "really" been tried.
Look, if a framework for running a society and an economy is so fragile that it immediately devolves into something else, then it's worthless. It doesn't matter if you can point to all the mistakes that were made along the way - if humans can't implement it and make it work, and if there are countless examples of them trying and failing to do this, then it's broken.
Given that there is no perfectly capitalist society, and in practice, all capitalist structures degenerate into crony-capitalist structures without strong government regulations, I would say there is no difference.
Its really all just a show. Our economy runs purely on the perceived confidence built through illusion and leveraging the immense natural resources we have.
No. We don't trust each other. But if we all know we're all spying on each other we're a lot less likely to act up fearing that someone else will find out.
It's not a super friendly close relationship like you might have with a sibling or your lifelong best friend. But it's "I know you're not doing anything bad. You know I'm not doing anything bad. So until one of us does something bad, we can 'trust' each other and continue business like usual."
Trust means something different in every context. I don't trust my wife the same way I trust Digicert, but I "trust" both. This is what it means for nations to trust each other.
You trust your understanding of the math underlying Digicert. I don't see how we trust germany at all if we are spying on them.
It's one thing to collect signal intelligence within bounds, and it's quite another to continually exploit an ally's vulnerabilities to your own advantage. What about the trust we have for our government? I don't recall anyone justifying the NSA's existence with anything other than the threat of soviets (and then... terrorists, which has frustratingly increased dramatically domestically since the beginning of this practice.)
I trust the math behind RSA in general, but I also trust Digicert specifically in the sense that DigiCert Global Root CA is in my Trusted Root Certification Authorities store whereas, say, Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions RootCA is not.
The NSA has overreached their authority in many ways, but this isn't one of them. Not spying on Germany, especially their intelligence service, would be negligent.
I'm sure the nightmare scenario is beyond the imagining of decent people like you or I. But considering Germany has been the aggressor of the two largest conflicts of the previous century, do you honestly believe it's prudent to say "just let them do whatever. I'm sure they've learned their lesson this time"?
Agree that American citizens are not legitimate targets in and of themselves, but they will routinely communicate with people other than American citizens and those communications mean that citizens will be spied on. That's globalization for ya.
I don't understand what you mean when you say "spy on American citizens" do you mean court order/warrant approved surveillance? Even your local police can do that, its generally how criminal investigations are conducted.
Spying on other spying agencies seems like 100% fair game even if they are our allies. I don't think the NSA should be collecting massive amounts of data on ordinary citizens in a way which violates our constitutional rights, or that they should collaborate with other intelligence agencies to effectively do the same thing, but I think they should still exist and they have a real reason to exist.
So is Snowden still a whistleblower? Honest question, not trying to be snide.
If you abscond with 1,000 legitimate mission-oriented documents for every 1 document you leak that pertains to something you think an agency shouldn't be doing, are you still blowing the whistle? At what point are you no longer able to use that title as a defense? 10,000 documents for every 1? 100,000? Can he be both a whistleblower and a criminal or are the two mutually exclusive?
I don't have answers to these questions so I hope someone else does.
Try not to downvote for simply disagreeing with the question, as though it were even possible to disagree with a question.
Snowden didn't decide which document's to publish - journalists did. He handed over a trove of information, among which was damning evidence that our government was/is doing something they shouldn't, and gave journalists the responsibility to publish relevant documents appropriately. I for one believe that the releases have been done with impeccable professionalism, and in fact if it were up to me I would have been even more liberal with the releases (Greenwald, Poitras, et al. have actually worked with the government during this process).
Nevertheless, journalists work for media companies which run on ad revenue. Their motivation and Edward Snowden's don't necessarily align, now that he has become (perhaps inadvertently) a cult of personality figure and a marketable brand, and attaching his name to anything guarantees readership.
With respect to The Intercept, I submit that you're technically correct (their motivations and Snowden's aren't identical), but that Snowden's motivations are probably closer to The Intercept's staff than they would be to any other news outlet, even NPR.
Before the downvote button is spammed: He simply did not have time go go over every single one of the 100,000+ documents he claimed to leak, and give them to journalists in an intelligent manner. There simply was not enough time between him leaving the country and the documents being revealed for him to have done that.
So yes, he did very much indiscriminately leak them.
The journalists working closely with him did have time. There is nothing about this situation that the word "indiscriminately" applies to, unless you're talking about the military spy organization that was allowed to indiscriminately target its own citizens.
Giving classified documents to _anyone_ who isn't cleared to see them is the "general public." Journalists are no exception. Not sure why you think that.
Are you serious? The only "cleared" (using your term) people were NSA higher-ups - the very same people who spied on their own citizens.
Snowden sent the docs not to any/all journalists, but to a carefully selected group of the most reputable ones: NYT, WP, Guardian. He had followed Poitras/Greenwald for a long time before to make sure the docs end up in responsible hands.
Also, the journalists asked the US government to cooperate/redact out some national-security sensitive details, they refused. So they had to use their own judgement.
Are you arguing that Snowden giving all of the documents to me would have produced the same outcome as giving them to journalists to review and redact and write articles about?
I would only add that in the end, the specifics of what should be released are usually going to a subjective judgment call. Everybody is going to draw a slightly different cutoff line. In US tradition we have used journalists as a representative of the people to make that decision, and Greenwald et al have been incredibly careful in how they released pieces of the Snowden archive. Too careful, perhaps, but I can certainly understand the desire to take it slowly and carefully.
I realize Snowden personally didn't leak the documents (unless you qualify handing the trove to journalists as "leaking" which some might). This is why I used the word "abscond" as well as "leak". Fact is he left with thousands of legitimate documents that had no business being a part of his collection.
But I've never received a straight answer to that question and I guess this is no exception.
I'm confused about what kind of straight answer you're expecting. Why isn't this considered a straight answer?
> Snowden didn't decide which document's to publish - journalists did. He handed over a trove of information, among which was damning evidence that our government was/is doing something they shouldn't, and gave journalists the responsibility to publish relevant documents appropriately.
Had he pre-selected which documents to hand over to the journalists, how would this be any different than if he just published them by his own? Snowden knew that he was not supposed to handle this task alone by passing his judgement on these documents by himself, and that he needed someone to help him judge what to disclose and what not to disclose, so he delegated this responsibility to journalists with a reputation he could trust. IMO he was as responsible as one could be: he didn't handle this trouble all by himself, he didn't let any biases he might've had affect the decisions, and he delegated the task at hand properly to american citizens (this is important, he was dealing with national security after all) he judged to be trustworthy. It just boils down to teamwork.
Selecting only the documents he thought described wrongdoings would put too much of his perspective and his biases on the end result. Too much for a single man to decide.
He didn't have the right not to make a decision. As a responsible citizen he had the obligation take action and decide how to approach the issue, and he did the best he could as a single individual. Deciding who to trust is doable; filtering all the information on those docs by himself is not.
Yes, he could have disclosed the obvious things, but how would that work out on the long term? Would he be able to address by himself all the questions that would follow up? How much information would he be able to disclose? Too much information and he'd risk disclosing legitimate operations, too little information and he'd soon get discredited.
In the long term, it would have meant that people like me who think there is a legitimate reason for nation states to have intelligence agencies could support him with clear consciences.
He did not disclose all the documents. He made a pass through first to protect people primarily. The vast majority of what he passed on were power points and lists of devices.
>Fact is he left with thousands of legitimate documents that had no business being a part of his collection.
Going through all the files by himself would be a daunting task that would take years. There are literally 1,000's of documents. Raising the alarm now rather than 8 years from now is important.
Given the circumstances, grabbing everything and handing it over to a team of respectable journalists (who have a team of lawyers) to find out what is against the Constitution/not in favor of the people (seeing as journalists represent the people to an extent) to allow them to only leak the relevant ones that were crossing boundaries seems like a best decision act.
The journalists can leak documents over the course of years and slowly investigate each one to determine if it crosses boundaries and the alarms should be rung for the public.
Snowden would have had a single release of a handful of documents and gone on a very long vacation in a place nobody has ever heard of had he released a few documents himself. It's expensive to pay for a vacation for an entire group of journalists and lawyers.
Grabbing everything because you don't have time to sift through the data and passing them to so-called "respectable journalists" doesn't make it right. In the same way that people claim dragnet surveillance is wrong to catch terrorists if it's violating the privacy of everyone else.
How would you have done it? Gone through 16,000 documents that are all 100's of pages long as an individual? You'd be lucky to finish in your lifetime. Not to mention he's not a lawyer. Should he consult a lawyer to know what is going against the Constitution or just use his best guess? Is consulting a single lawyer better than a team of lawyers? Should have had consulted a team of lawyers? What makes Snowden more trustworthy than journalists?
Would he be able to find lawyers to consult while remaining in a country that wouldn't put his life at risk? Should the lawyers relocate to Snowden's location of asylum? Or should they be consult over the constantly monitored internet? Is releasing the information 10 years from now more beneficial than releasing it now?
It opens a big can of worms when you question the logistics of doing it differently. Not that I disagree with your statement - it's a lot like dragnet (catch it all to watch a few) but the logistics in this scenario, unlike a dragnet, the resources simply aren't there to do it any other way. Snowden is not a multi-billion dollar government with near unlimited resources.
Are you claiming that he could handle all of this by himself? Because unless you're claiming it, you'll have to agree with me that he would have to trust someone at some point. And calling Greenwald a so-called respectable journalist doesn't make justice to the reputation he built. I'm curious to know how would you select a better fitted person to this job.
I also don't think that comparing this to privacy violation is a valid comparison. The government is not a person, you're not violating any civil rights by getting these documents.
The point of whistleblowing is to blow the whistle and tell people. Not blowing it at all is the exact opposite of whistleblowing - it's being complicit with the crimes committed by the government. Your suggestion is because he does not have the resources, alone, to deal with a corrupt part of government he shouldn't even try? That's a great way to maintain the status quo and have nothing change.
As far as I'm concerned - he could not have handled his scenario in a more responsible manner given his resources and scenario.
What makes Snowden more trustworthy than Greenwald, et al? Some no-name contractor nobody had ever heard of is not more trustworthy than a team of internationally respected journalists with a team of lawyers capable of citing the laws where the government is overstepping their bounds.
I wouldn't trust Snowden to determine what should and shouldn't be leaked to the general public. I don't think many people would. I do, however, trust Greenwald, et al. They have a reputation that they've spent years building up trust with the public. Snowden lacks that trust.
We're not talking about asking him to sift through data on hundreds of programs. He had the resources to leak information about the one or two programs that actually went so far over the line that it made him worried rather than everything he could get his hands on. Talk to the same journalists and everything. That would have been easier, not harder. Sure, maybe less gets fixed in the one go-round, but if the NSA doesn't take that as a hint to clean up their act, more whistleblowers would follow, especially if Snowden had actually earned trust for the idea by acting responsibly.
Thinking that people wouldn't believe the data he provided because there wasn't enough of it makes no sense.
>He had the resources to leak information about the one or two programs that actually went so far over the line that it made him worried rather than everything he could get his hands on.
I can agree with you to a majority extent on this. The only reason I disagree is only because of circumchance. How things happened to play out - which is more and more incriminating documents being read/discovered within the files.
>Sure, maybe less gets fixed in the one go-round, but if the NSA doesn't take that as a hint to clean up their act, more whistleblowers would follow, especially if Snowden had actually earned trust for the idea by acting responsibly.
I disagree entirely that more whistleblowers would follow - especially with how government shills and a good chunk (although seemingly a minority chunk) of people condemn Snowden as a traitor full-through rather than a whistleblower. They don't even partially agree that anything should have been leaked. Full-stop they have no understanding of what a whistleblower is or how it benefits them, nor do they care. He did something the government thinks is bad, therefore he is bad.
Those sorts of people actively discourage future whistleblowers. Receiving death threats from "hardcore patriots" chugging from the jingoism juice is the last thing potential whistleblowers would willingly opt into.
A small group of people (can I safely include you in this group?) might consider him in a better light had he only leaked the programs/files that personally bothered him. That's a really, really, really small group, from what I've read/seen online. And yes, without the circumchance I mentioned above (how things "happened to turn out") I would agree that would have been a more responsible take on it. I also personally think it would have had less of an impact, received 2 weeks of media coverage and then completely died out. More responsible? Yes. Change anything? No.
Eventually he would have to sift through more documents to renew public interest (why the articles were published every-so-often rather than all-at-once). Eventually, he would need to find help to sift through more documents. Relying on the small possibility of more whistleblowers coming forward is naïve at best or unrealistically optimistic at worst. I do not agree with the reality you imagine had he only taken what he had problems with that other whistleblowers would have stepped forward. Nothing is stopping from additional whistleblowers from stepping forward now with programs they are uncomfortable with in a "more responsible manner" than Snowden. I do not agree that had he done anything differently that more people would be more willing to step forward.
Remember that this has been going on for at least a decade. Nobody, until Snowden, had stepped forward and gotten public discourse about it through constant media exposure. There may have been whistleblowers about the NSA in the times before him. I've never heard of them. And I'm pretty sure there have been others that have now stepped forward after him, not withstanding his irresponsibility.
>Thinking that people wouldn't believe the data he provided because there wasn't enough of it makes no sense.
It happens with media on a near daily basis. Why would this be any different?
And now I think you've come a lot closer to the problem most privacy advocates don't seem willing to accept. That maybe, if nobody cares and nothing happens, that's because most people believe that what the NSA is doing is really not that bad. That maybe people are tired of seeing the same few articles with a few countries and codenames slightly tweaked because they stopped giving a shit 2 weeks after XKEYSCORE, just like they would have if the leaks had ended there.
We've pretty much been through this before with Binney. He did things the right way. Nobody cared. Nothing changed. Snowden probably saw that and didn't want to end up the same way. He wanted to start a fire because he thought he knew better than everyone else. Fuck General Alexander, fuck the DHS, fuck the public - privacy matters because I say so. And so he did something (a lot of things) dumb. So fuck him. That's my group. That intersect "no such thing as privacy in our digital-everything future".
I'm willing to accept that that is your viewpoint, and the viewpoints of others. We'll also have to disagree with each other due to different viewpoints, obviously.
I think that people being complacent or uncaring about what is going on without them is usually (but not always, its also possible I can be wrong too :) ) due to either being ignorant, misinformed, or not understanding the implications of an act.
If you do a highly dangerous activity in a town that hasn't killed anyone yet but didn't warn or tell the town that if something goes wrong - the entire town would be blown to smithereens. Of course, nobody would care. They either don't know about the dangers (ignorance) - and the people doing the dangerous activity are actively giving misinformation about the actual dangers (misinformed), so anyone telling others about the dangers is just a "paranoid tinfoil hat" (not understanding the implications of the act).
Even if the town hasn't blown up in 5 years - should they keep testing their luck until they blow up? Ignoring that it might be a calculated risk, people will only ever care when it all comes tumbling down and blows up in their faces. History has shown this time and time again. That's an unfortunate aspect about society-at-large, but a lot of educated decisions and fail-safes can be put in place ahead of time. It merely relies on the public being educated. An ignorant public is an easily manipulated public.
As is oft-mentioned/quoted. Few people care about their online privacy... until you tell them their nudes can be seen by people other than their intended recipient. Then they suddenly care a lot [0]. Of course, that's a little bit of a stretch in most cases. But as they educate themselves more and more about how important their privacy is (and how much they actually value it, by using examples) the more agreeable they become. It's not an overnight process - it's one that has to be won through many battles. Few wars have ever ended in a single battle.
There's been larger and larger amounts of the public looking for and asking for more secure forms of communication. Or how to keep their communications private. That tells me that as more people are becoming educated, more people are giving a damn. That's a sign to keep trying - not to give up because people don't care.
People didn't care that black people were slaves or that women couldn't vote. There were even women who argued against women's suffrage. It took many years - but eventually the general public was informed enough to change their minds about the importance of these things. Should they have given up when people told them they were wrong or weren't making any public influence? I personally think it's a good thing they argued for years on end instead of stopping 5 years in because of little to no progress. If it takes 10 more years to convince people their privacy matters, so be it.
I'm sorry for the length of my replies. I like to tread carefully with my viewpoints and make sure I mention exceptions as well as my willingness to entertain other viewpoints or at least show I understanding where they are arguing from, even if it comes down to "I disagree with your reasoning".
TL;DR
I don't think that the public-at-large not caring for their privacy now means they don't care for their privacy. It means they're ignorant or don't understand the importance of their privacy. Education has shown that the public is changing and becoming more aware of the importance of their privacy. Adoption is slow, but even if it takes 10 more years to convince people privacy matters - that isn't a reason to give up now.
Obviously people can be manipulated into believing anything. Especially by charismatic media figures. It's incredibly condescending of you to believe that people only disagree with you because they don't know any better. Especially when you try to pull that shit on me.
I care about whether the food I eat contains beef, but I don't think that you or anyone else is ignorant for not caring. As if I only had to educate you about the proper Hindu way and then you'd recognize that it mattered after all. I accept that different people have different beliefs. Why can't you and all the other religious whackos have the decency to do the same? Obvious answer: you don't even see it as a religion. To you it's just truth. Well, you're not the first.
>It's incredibly condescending of you to believe that people only disagree with you because they don't know any better.
Please don't skim read. I see we're done here.
>(but not always, its also possible I can be wrong too :) )
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>I care about whether the food I eat contains beef, but I don't think that you or anyone else is ignorant for not caring. As if I only had to educate you about the proper Hindu way and then you'd recognize that it mattered after all.
I disagree. I'd be ignorant as to why I should care. What if I tried to feed you beef and didn't understand why you became angry with me? Obviously this is a problem of my ignorance - fixed by education. Ignorance is not a bad thing. People cannot be expected to know everything.
If I wanted to repeat each word and include all the nuance the TL;DR would fail to be a TL;DR. It would be a repetition. If I thought I could fit eight paragraphs of my thoughts into a single paragraph without losing nuance, I wouldn't take eight paragraphs to express my points.
The point of a summary is to get rid of formalities for the sake of brevity. I feel I summarized my points well and accurately, and the purpose was to save time for those who do not wish to read 8 paragraphs. The trade off is that any formality and nuance is lost in the summary - and you took that lack of formality and ran with it by putting words that weren't there in the summary.
As a thought experiment, are we certain these documents came from Snowden? He has not digitally signed these releases. He himself may not know entirely what was in the archive, so he may not be certain if all the released documents originated from his dump. Even if he was aware of documents being incorrectly attributed to him, it may do his cause more harm than good to highlight this fact.
It would be a legitimate option for the NSA to intentionally "leak" documents that simply describe their mission, causing a false spectacle. It will not hurt them much, given it's well within their mission parameters, but CAN hurt Snowden through public backlash. It would raise such questions as, "is Snowden still a whistleblower?" Such releases could hurt his credibility, or even flood the news with insignificant stories such that the truly important ones are lost in the shuffle.
I am not certain this is what we're seeing, but neither would I be surprised if it were true.
Using your same logic here, you could claim that those documents are forgeries to begin with, leaked to "assassinate" the "character" of the NSA. You can't have it both ways. Either you're skeptical of the documents origin/source or you aren't.
I used quotes because I don't know if it's actually possible to assassinate the character of a government organization, in the sense that I'm not sure if a government organization has a character to be assassinated per se. Generally I'd save that term for individuals. I wasn't being flippant.
Sorry, I was speaking of character assassination of Edward Snowden, not of the NSA. I did not intend to insinuate you were being flippant, it was very possible you had not known this turn of phrase (not everyone is a native English speaker).
As a citizen of EU country I'm grateful. If Snowden is committing crime, it's political crime.
There are more important concerns and loyalties than those we have for individual countries. If he is revealing how US spies friendly nations, he is serving greater good. His document leak to journalists seem to avoid information of NSA spying Russia or China.
Snowden stopped being a whistleblower to me when the docs about the CIA's sigint spying gear was published.
There's a lot of docs that are useful for laypeople to improve their privacy, and then there's the ones that are going to do nothing but damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies against nation-state adversaries.
If his sole goal was to damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies, then he was a mole, not a whistle blower.
> There's a lot of docs that are useful for laypeople to improve their privacy, and then there's the ones that are going to do nothing but damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies against nation-state adversaries.
That's a false dichotomy. Snowden didn't risk his life just to help people improve their privacy - he did it to expose wrongdoing and start a process to reform our government.
This is an unrelated issue, but I think you're working from the premise that the CIA's spying and SIGINT capabilities actually make the US safer or more strategically secure in the world.
That the CIA actually improves the US's position isn't remotely proven even on the 50 year timescale, and there's a cornucopia of evidence that supports the opposite hypothesis which states the CIA's endless philandering has engendered a deep hatred of the US in many corners of the world, not to mention seeding anarchic instability.
And the idea that engendering a deep hatred of the US in many corners of the world or seeding anarchic instability does not improve the US's position is likewise not remotely proven. The whole point of representative democracy is that decisions, especially ones like these that require privileged information to really be sure about, are delegated to elected representatives.
The US spying capability does nothing but damage to the rest of the world. Just because I live in a different country you must respect my rights, nonetheless. No, secret court orders won't fly around here.
Isn't every whistleblower within the intelligence community a criminal by definition due to the laws surrounding the material? (Assuming they are blowing the whistle about non human-resources issues)
That's not a question with a binary answer. Some of what he's published clearly is "whistleblowing", and a lot of it clearly isn't.
The notion of whether Snowden as a person is a whistleblower is a partisan rhetorical trick --- employed by both "sides" of the debate --- used to distract people from his actual actions.
How do we determine his actual intentions? I mean, Snowden is alive and well and giving quotes: "People who think I made a mistake in picking [Hong Kong] as a location misunderstand my intentions,” Snowden clarified. “I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”"
Sounds like Snowden considers himself to be something of a whistle blower, in the common sense, if not the technical. So, that's settled, I guess.
>Try not to downvote for simply disagreeing with the question
You are asking the question same way Fox News asks if we should just nuke middle east. It not a question, its your opinion, as valid and proper as rape jokes(another Fox News special).
If you are concerned about the release of some of these documents, why aren't you focusing your attention on the crimes in government and the failure of oversight that made public disclosure necessary. Would you prefer Snowden had stayed silent and the crimes he revealed remained unknown?
Everybody makes mistakes, and it is reasonable to assume that someone trying to bring documents out of a state agency so the people can see them isn't going to have the luxury of time. This attitude that a whistleblower is somehow supposed to be perfect is suspicious; attempting to seed the meme that Snowden was anything other than a whistleblower, while diverting attention yet again from the crimes of a rogue intelligence agency.
Of course he is. His documents have already provided huge benefit to the public. Are we really going to nitpick over every single document from the hundreds of thousands and go "Aha! this document probably shouldn't have been leaked - he's totally a traitor now"?
I'm sure there were documents in the Pentagon Papers which probably shouldn't have been made public, too. Looking back, was that relevant to the larger cause of informing the public about the Vietnam war's lies?
If someone lives an otherwise law-abiding life, and commits ONE crime, would you not call him a criminal as long as his total contribution was net positive?
My bigger takeaway here is that they are supposed to be working with them. I'm quite sure that German intelligence would have offered up this information if some NSA official just asked.
Instead of coordinating with the people that they share so much other more sensitive info with they stole it. That is where I see a problem.
>My bigger takeaway here is that they are supposed to be working with them. I'm quite sure that German intelligence would have offered up this information if some NSA official just asked.
How would the NSA know the Germans didn't lie? I don't think this is a big issue. If you're a spy, expect to be spied upon.
Seems like a non-story. The NSA was in possession of a couple of documents created by German intelligence. There's no evidence how they got them. Perhaps there was a leaker inside of the German intelligence service who posted a copy of these memos to a pastebin? They have no idea how the Americans got it.
> Spying on other spying agencies seems like 100% fair game
> This is legitimate activity for the NSA
> I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on foreign intelligence agencies.
Correct. This is what spy agencies do. Edward Snowden is an American Hero, and it is a shame what has happened beyond the obvious. His name is invoked for shock headlines, and at this point there is almost no reaction to these disclosures and that is worrying. If there was a way to lower the power distance between "Government Actors" and citizens, we could expend resources cooperatively instead of competitively.
Until then, there will be numerous government agencies AND companies, on many continents and countries, building systems to collect and analyze your data creating a single point of failure. That sounds counter intuitive, but if we assume all of your data is essentially uniform and the Chinese/NSA/BND etc. all have essentially the same data. If even one of those places has a breach event, your data will be in the hands of bad individual actors. This leaves aside, that the data is already in the hands of questionable players.
To conclude, the Snowden docs were illuminating but no longer hold the shock they once did. Not much has changed. The initial disclosure confirmed for a lot of us what we already knew, and publicized it to those who didn't. The ongoing disclosures are marginal now and really a function of leveraging Snowden's name for ad-traffic. Hopefully, going forward there will be a framework for protecting privacy that regular, everyday people can easily use. Until then, these disclosures are just a disheartening reminder of the inability to seperate gov. tyranny from legitimate activity.
[0]Snowden is living in an undisclosed location in Russia, a country hostile to the US, and barred from entering America without being tried for treason. Disappointing.
Currently the more get's leaked, the more I'm afraid.
I live in Germany and I hope that there won't be any global war. But currently the policits between countries getting stranger and stranger.
Mostly due to the governements. Shouldn't they suppose to work for freedom and not war?
I mean I think even germany will send weapons to bad behaved countries (americans aswell), just for the money, who cares about weapon embargos?! Money is all and the fact that so many people care so much about Money and some kind of 'status' inside their culture makes things really really worse.
I hope that I can live in peace until I die. Hopefully.
Shouldn't they suppose to work for freedom and not war?
Here's an interesting take on that[1][2][3].
Father: You're gonna make the world safe for democracy!
Joe Age 10: What is democracy?
Father: Well it's never bright clear on myself.
Like any other kind government it's got something
to do with young men killing each other I believe.
There's some weird activity in this thread which I think bears mentioning.
Lots of people saying either "good, this is their job" and "old news"-- shill trademark phrases. I'm not making any accusations exactly, but I am concerned at the mass of simple, positive, and vapid comments in this thread.
I never dismiss the possibility of JTRIG-style disinformation or the far more common problem of people that have to argue a certain way because their salary depends on that point of view.
That said, I suggest considering Jacob Appelbaum's interpretation[1] of the "not surprised" dismissal: it' s a coping mechanism. It's an expression of frustration about not being able to do anything about the problem. The bigger question is if the phrase is being used to shut down discussion? Or can we acknowledge that frustration and try to find some way past it. It's difficult to care about a cause if you don't see even a theoretical way for the cause to succeed.
A particularly effective weapon is convincing your opponents that they cannot win. I suggest that the "cannot win" scenario only happens if we let it happen( by adopting a nihilistic, defeatist attitude.
What do you think the purpose of the NSA is? I'm trying to understand if you're arguing that the NSA should not exist or if in this case it is acting outside its jurisdiction?
How can we know what the purpose of the NSA is? After all, the Presidential Order creating it (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa02b.pdf) in 1952 was classified (I think) until 2008. We can be pretty certain that the NSA is operating under a legal basis, but we can also be pretty certain that the legal basis is either not what we think it is, or is interpreted in such a fashion as to make the wording of that basis irrelevant.
How do we know if the NSA should exist, or if it's acting outside its jurisdiction? All that info is classified, or crapagandized.
I believe that is the wrong question. Apologies, my ulnar nerve says I need to stop typing, so I refer to Appelbaum's response to a similar question, which I agree with completely.
Let's face it, there are almost certainly NSA / CIA / FBI / $ASSORTED_GOVT_TLA plants here. Or, if not actual human plants, at least an automated system that posts astroturf "pro military-industrial-espionage complex" comments on their behalf. That they use this kind of technology is well established. And considering that HN is a pretty prominent social-media site, frequented by a lot of potential influencers in the technology community, I think the odds are approximately 100% that this site is one of their targets.
Agreed. Which leads to two questions:
1) Why is this post so far down the page?
and
2) If anyone is qualified to combat automated (or perhaps even human) astroturfing by technical means, it's YC. Dang/other mods, are there efforts underway to detect and mitigate this?
I ask both on principle and because the quality of discussion is noticeably damaged by having to wade through many questionably real comments before finding actual discussion.
And of course it's not just the Americans doing this, undoubtedly the Russians/Chinese etc do something similar.
Looks like there has at least been some academic research on detecting astro-turfing on social media, although not sure if anybody has looked for the JTRIG stuff specifically.
I agree, imagine people saying the same thing about China or Russia.
Not only that, they are completely missing Snowdens point. Which is that US intelligence are out of control and has become self-serving to the point of hurting US interests and principles.
What the thinker thinks the prover proves. Instead of starting some metaconversation, it might be more productive to address how this information is new news or why the NSA should not be spying on foreign intelligence?
Instead of starting a distracting discussion about the minutia of spying and whistleblowing, it might be more productive to address the actual problems at the NSA that need immediate attention.
Glad to see I'm not the only one seeing this. I have seen such behavior on other NSA-threads, as well as a few political threads in recent memory. I think, for the most part, HN is now "on the radar".
To be absolutely clear re: my other reply - while I think there are a lot of frustrated people, there has absolutely been JTRIG-style astroturfing on HN, and it's not recent.
It's dangerous to make specific accusations (many people are just ignorant, confused, or frustrated), but that doesn't account for the reliability, low latency, and consistency of the NSA apologizing in any of these "big" NSA stories.
Yeah, the low latency is a critical part. I laid eyes on this thread very soon after it was submitted, and there were already a number of identical dismissal style comments-- before anyone else had even arrived.
You really don't see how some people might legitimately think spying on foreign intelligence agencies is a key part of the NSA's job? Or that disclosing details of that process is actually leaking classified information that should have stayed secret?
Dismissing people as shills just because they disagree with you is incredibly arrogant.
It's not about the disagreement that makes me call them shills, it's about the speed at which they replied to the comment thread (before anyone else did), and that their comments are all negative/dismissive without content, de-railing, or minimizing the issue, rather than addressing it directly while discussing facts as is the HN comment standard.
I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on foreign intelligence agencies. FFS, that, and spying on heads of government/military, is their ultimate purpose.
Counterterrorism and such, which has the slippery slope to spying on private citizens, is completely secondary at best.
This is legitimate activity for the NSA, but it plays badly in Europe. My guess is that Snowden and his friends are pandering to folks in Europe who naturally dislike this kind of thing, and particularly to folks in Germany.
Imagine the reaction on the far right here in America to a news report that Russia, Germany or France spies on American intelligence agencies. It's natural that such things should happen, but its also certain to create discord among certain factions here in America.
All information might as well be completely free and open to the public for the security the practice of counter spying provides us. Additionally, the reason this level of infringement of privacy is so damning is that it completely absolves any notion of trust the German authority might have had towards the US. Attempts to form a more cohesive alliance in international politics will not be fruitful with this strategy.
Probably not but I don't see any reason why this kind of information needs to be sourced through spying rather than through a formal declaration between intelligence services. Not that that process need be transparent, just that the act of willing participation by the German administration would likely produce a more amicable friendship.
The "I'm shocked, shocked" meme from Casablanca is most appropriate when the speaker is themselves hypocritically complicit in the wrongdoing being described.
So... I think it's up to the German Minister of Security to say they are shocked, shocked that the USA is spying on the people Germany uses to spy on the US.
But I should be more clear. I'm not saying what you said isn't funny, it made me smile! I'm just trying to share that under certain circumstances, it's even truer to the original scene and thus funnier.
I guarantee that the only reason the NSA did this was so that some few fatsos could continue to live in Germany, drink great beer with their friends, live in a swank apartment in the old town, and collect their foreign earned income exclusion.
looking at recent busts of Russian "spies" (quotes because they were so inept in their activities) in US, it is pretty much the same picture - young lazy morons from well-connected families get a good job in a good country (i.e. like a trade representative in US of a Russian state owned corporation) with only downside is a possibility of being deported/non-grata-ed if busted (again they have been so inept that US seems to happy to just get rid of them instead of keeping them in prison)
I think the biggest scandal that isn't discussed often enough (in the US) is not spying on foreign government officials for legitimate security-related reasons (e.g. this), it is spying on foreign government officials to give the US an advantage in trade negotiations or worse passing on "tips" to US-based private companies so they can gain an advantage during negotiations/bidding.
The US constantly beats the capitalism drum, and that's fine. But it seem hypocritical to beat the capitalism drum with one hand, while with the other quietly subverting capitalism by giving certain favored entities tips and advantages.
Even people in the US should be asking why large US corporations are given these tips/advantages/etc while small-medium US businesses are not. Let alone the immorality of helping a US company win against a foreign one due to state supplied corporate espionage.
The justification "well China does it!!1!" while true, is just kind of pathetic. China does a lot of things, doesn't make it right for a country that claims it is the beacon is capitalism and democracy to do the same.