The weirdest thing is that Drake had already whistleblown about the program in 2005. It was front page on the NYT and WP. But 8 years later everybody seemed to have completely forgotten that and acted like Snowden was revealing something new.
> "Wow, you didn't already know that every phone is tapped?..."
Not sure I'd call it psy-op.
When it became feasible for the NSA to essentially tap every phone in the U.S. I think most of us just presume that they will do just that.
Historically, it's what those with power will do — exercise it.
And for all number of examples in history we are not naive enough to think that their saying they're not doing it (are no longer doing it) means nothing.
One bit of trivia that came out of it is that since WWI, the FBI has received from USPS a photograph of the destination and return address of every letter mailed in the US (the analogy with telephony metadata is pretty obvious).
And if it's in a 'I can't believe they would be doing it, really?' territory (black ops, black sites, torture, drone killings, ...), they make a movie about it, effectively normalizing the action for the audience.
How a Hollywood star lobbies the EU for more surveillance
The European Union debates a new law that could force platforms to scan all private messages for signs of child abuse. Its most prominent advocate is the actor Ashton Kutcher.
To put more context in this: movies made with military equipment need special approval by the us military, and they will not generally approve “unpatriotic” movies and blacklist studios who do make movies they disapprove of… from Defense dot gov:
“ The Defense Department has a long-standing relationship with Hollywood. In fact, it’s been working with filmmakers for nearly 100 years with a goal that’s two-fold: to accurately depict military stories and make sure sensitive information isn’t disclosed.”
If this is information anyone can get by flying a drone around military equipment or buying old equipment offered for sale, this seems like a startling suppression of first amendment rights
How so? Hollywood wants to make money. And most Hollywood decision makers want to brag about having Important Friends in High Places (like the DoD). Producing anti-war movies (or otherwise making the DoD look bad) would get them ~nothing that they really want.
That goes down the same conspiracy theory rabbit hole like claiming that all state employee bureaucrats just try to bloat their dept. to have more power which ultimately wastes tax money.
Some people have standards and want to do good. Some of them work in Hollywood. And some of them in your city's administration. Not everybody is as selfish and unethical as portrayed here.
Maybe it reflects on the person expressing such theories though.
The theory is actually that some people have standards, some people just want to advance, and in the long run the latter will inevitably dominate the organization.
Yep. About as "conspiracy" as "managers in the XYZ Corp. Sales Dept. are all eager to make XYZ Corp's products look good".
Meanwhile...the US Army's Public Affair Dept. is headed by a 2-star general (same rank as the top general in command of an entire Army Division), and its mission is:
"Public affairs fulfills the Army's obligation to keep the American people and the Army informed, and helps to establish the conditions that lead to confidence in America's Army and its readiness to conduct operations in peacetime, conflict and war."
When they brought back the X-Files for one season a few years ago they did an episode on this premise: the shadowy conspiracy master actually releases youtube videos describing what he does, on the grounds that nobody knows the difference between truth and untruth anymore, so it only helps him to further muddy the waters.
I think the simplest explanation is that people have it good enough to not rock the boat, and those among the literally unwashed, and untreated, masses who don't have bread and circuses would quickly be shutdown if they tried to move on any part of the government.
Seems to me this state of surveillance has just been accepted as a norm. People in the business have taken precautions like using more encryption and auditable open source, while the people outside the tech business just shrug their shoulders and shake their fists at dirty politicians.
Snowden also brought the goods (actual docs) so that the existing cases and inquiries could proceed without getting the Glomar response - “cannot answer the question of whether you have standing, as we can neither confirm nor deny the program either exists.”
And this was deliberate. Those in the know knew _of_ the program, but could do little actionable with that knowledge without Snowden’s public proof.
The president's order expired in 2007. Some people thought it meant the illegal parts stopped. And some reports before 2013 said Trailblazer never operated fully.
Right, a friend told me about this many years before. She worked on the networking infrastructure and knew what it was being used for. I didn't think much of it at the time and I thought it was common knowledge. When the Snowden "revelations" came out it, I was surprised that this was considered news. I understand that perhaps there wasn't an official website laying the whole thing out, but at a minimum it took a lot of people to set up and run and I really don't think it was ever terribly secret to begin with.
This really feels like CIA NSA propaganda. As if nothing wrong happened. What the hell.
The character assassination of Snowden&co in the anglophone sphere is absurd, and probably manufactured. But this didn't quite happen in other languages.
Assange trials are just mind-blowing and worrisome, and yet the simple truth is here: who told the truth is in jail, and who committed war crimes is outside.
Why does Snowden's character even matter? He's not the story and his personal qualities aren't relevant to the discussion. He could be a neo-Nazi and a child murderer and it still wouldn't change anything about the facts of mass surveillance.
Every second that we spend debating whether or not Edward Snowden is a good person is a second that we're not asking hard questions about the nature of our relationship with the state. Almost as if that's the whole point.
In late 2021 and early 2022 almost everybody, including most European heads of state, believed Russia was just bluffing and wasn't going to invade (because they correctly thought it would be incredibly irrational).
I think most of that happened well before 2021. And he may well have believed they were not going to invade — I totally believed that, because the alternative was just too depressing. Most of my friends, relatives and acquaintances (Russian-speaking, but not in Russia) were of a similar opinion.
He doesn't claim anything, he just didn't believe it at that point. He literally says "If there's an invasion tomorrow, dunk on me because I have been spectacularly wrong."
He hasn't even acknowledged his part in spreading the obvious propaganda. Nor does he seem to care about US democracy considering he's been silent on Jan 6 Trump insurrection
I agree he repeats Russian propaganda and it's sad. It diminishes his previously clear and rational portrayal of what he knew of the NSA.
It was clear that Russia lining their tanks up on the border and stress testing the Ukrainian response to an invasion was not going to be a bluff. Why give your enemy the chance at trial run? This was the message from US and UK intelligence and they were right.
I understand why he does it though, he is in Russia and if someone takes a dislike to him he will be dead. He would also feel justifiably "wronged" by the US, and i understand why he would not want to repeat US messaging, but maybe don't keep quite about the Russian "messaging" as well.
At least he is not as crazy as Kim Dotcom, another Twitter "celebrity" with a taste for Russian propaganda who has been wronged by the US.
What are you talking about? Can you provide one example of the US doing a buildup on the Russian or Chinese border that was even a quarter the size of the Russian buildup ahead of their full-scale invasion?
At literally any given time, including right now, the US has a wide combination of aircraft carriers and submarines and other vessels in striking distance and with enough nuclear arms to flatten the entirety of China. It terms of destructive power it’s significantly higher than what Russia has built up
I think this situation is different from hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of pieces of armor and artillery being moved to the border over the course of a couple months.
Ah, yes, the technical correct, best kind of correct.
Remind me, why the country an ocean away has it's troops in these countries?
And while we are it, can you explain why the country with only two countries on it's borders (one is allied, the other one is clearly not hostile) has a standing Army (not navy, not air force) of 460k+ active personnel?
OP claimed it was reasonable to say "Russia won't invade" because he claimed the US does things similar to Russia's buildup, but it doesn't invade.
I was saying that, whatever your thoughts about US military policy, its deployment patterns are not, in fact, anything like what Russia did in late 2021/early 2022.
Pointing out that the US has troops in other countries, and a massive military in general, does not address the point.
> Pointing out that the US has troops in other countries, and a massive military in general, does not address the point.
US doesn't have an army on the Russian border because it's at least an ocean away, so asking 'how many US forces at the Russian border' is naive at bedt and comparing apples to oranges at worst.
You are clearly are separating US from NATO, which is technically correct but absolutely ignores how US sees the world.
From that post:
As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
> “The Committee further found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.” (p. 16)
> “As a legal matter, during his time with NSA, Edward Snowden did not use whistleblower procedures under either law or regulation to raise his objections to U.S. intelligence activities, and thus, is not considered a whistleblower under current law.” (p. 18)
> “Since Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.” (p. 20)
Since you have examples at your fingertips, kindly post some examples of massive surveillance wrongdoing that was ended, once it was reported thru official channels.
> The Committee further found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.
By design, this sentiment omits what happened to previous individuals who worked within the given channels. Specifically it omits how official channels failed at every level and omits the consequences for the individual who continued their push to end the wrongdoing.
Whistleblowers were ignored, resisted and eventually revenged. Every administration. Every time.
I will tell you that three letter agencies in the US have a proven and undeniable track record of lying incessantly and basically nothing that comes from them can be trusted.
So you are claiming that the NSA (at all levels) lied to the House Intel committee? That's a big claim, you should back it up with some evidence. Which part of the report is not accurate?
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in March 2013 that the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans, just three months(!) before Snowden and Greenwald revealed the classified NSA documents proving otherwise. [0] The heads of the intelligence agencies will say whatever they need to say to get what they want. Lying to Congress and the American people is business as usual for them.
You’re missing the point. The NSA has an undeniable track record of illegal and dishonest activity that is easily googled. Nothing has systemically changed since those actions and until it does there’s no reason to place confidence in anything they say
Being charged with a crime would require the people who could charge him actually wanting to charge him. If congress wanted him to lie in the way that he did, clearly they wouldn't charge him after the fact.
Did you try at all to discover falsehoods yourself?[1]
Snowden showed the intelligence committee were ineffective or complicit. And the chairman called him a traitor before the investigation. Truth was not the committee's goal. And their sources were established liars.
Did you assume had contact meant initiated contact?
Why would he have any faith that internal "whistleblowing" would do anything but paint a target on himself? I certainly wouldn't. As for "he didn't whistleblow properly!" I don't really give a damn how the government says we're "supposed" to inform the public of their misdeeds
If a police officer leaked evidence of widespread misconduct to the press (as has happened several times), would he also be implied to be an enemy agent for not going through the totally trustworthy and effective internal complaints process instead?
> Ledgett's answer is confirmed by a comprehensive listing of the tasks of the NSA in the Strategic Mission List from January 2007. It was published by The New York Times in November 2013, but got hardly any attention, despite the fact that it clearly contradicts the claims by Snowden and Greenwald that the NSA has just one single goal: collect all digital communications from all over the world.
If you look at the document, it indeed lists more than half a dozen goals, not just one. For example, supporting industrial espionage is mentioned (expressed as preventing "surprises" in the area of technology - wonderful euphemism!), which is not terrorism-related at all.
But the part that worried Snowden is actually reflected in the strategy document, even using the same wording as Snowden: MASTERING the Internet/cyberspace. That _does_ have a ring of total control and exhaustive gathering.
I still haven't gotten my head around the valorization of Bill Binney, who does not appear to have been an opponent of dragnet surveillance, as he's so often portrayed, but rather of inefficient and poorly managed dragnet surveillance. ThinThread, the system he designed and left NSA over when they didn't pursue it, still left it up to NSA to determine which data to make available, and still presumed NSA would collect the same raw data.
Maybe someone more familiar with ThinThread can make a case for how that system would be acceptable to us where Trailblazer (its competing design, in the narrative one tends to read here) wasn't.
See [1] (from 1:14:43). The difference was Binney's system (ThinThread) being designed to quickly filter out most data and retain only a relatively small amount of targeted data. The result being the target had to be specified before the data could be collected. The other system (Trailblazer) was designed to capture and retain as much data as possible, and allow targeting to occur against this enormous buffer after the data had been captured.
Whatever system there is in place doesn't seem to do much to address:
+ lone wolfs such as Uvalde, Las Vegas, Nashville, Waukesha...
+ Cross border drug operations
+ Transnational incidents like Nord Stream, spy balloons, COVID.
+ Military operations in Ukraine, Russia, Afghanistan
We are asked to relinquish so many freedoms and spend so much money on what, exactly?
The 'we can't tell you because it'll jeopardize all those important things we can't tell you about' argument simply doesn't hold water. There are too many intelligence fumbles to assume that there is intelligence.
Now if there was a mechanism in place to ensure that no one would rock the military political industrial complex... well that lines up with a lot of observable outcomes.
It's clear to me the system is in place to maintain: diplomatic, military, energy, and technological dominance so that the US can pick the winners and losers. Makes sense. Any of us would make the same decision, and the American people are not outraged because they directly benefit from these surveillance activities...and they don't even have to get their hands dirty.
That's the problem with "secret" agencies: you don't know they're effective because they don't publish what they know or what they prevented.
You hear about successful lone wolves, they become national news. You don't hear about the people that were taken in for questioning after posting a threatening message on the internets, which flags up in the FBI's systems right away.
There's plenty of news of intercepted drug shipments. This is actually an example of the inverse, because you'll never hear about the ones that do get across. I'm sure there's a lot more that comes through compared to what is intercepted though, else they wouldn't try it.
Well it is regular business for any sufficiently big drug operation to put some lure's in the form of smaller shipments to distract the police from the real action or just give them something to play with.
All fine unless you happen to be on the wrong delivery I guess
Government agencies have developed incredible powers but they aren’t heroes. It’s like they have developed incredibly abilities to turn water into wine and raise the dead and yet what do they do with these powers? All they use them for is banal things like saving money on the company picnic wine bill and skipping brake checks on the company vans knowing that if anything bad happens they just resurrect the victims.
On the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations - the NSA celebrates the hard lesson they learnt about compartmenting their internal networks. No other lessons were learnt. Infect it seems like the real pivot was just to get Internet companies to pick up the ball on dragnet suverliance so they could feed of those instead of doing it themselves.
10 years on, Snowden remains arguably the most important whistleblower in the US after Daniel Ellsberg. The fact that the government pursued Snowden and effectively drove him into exile in an unfriendly country shows how serious the revelations were, and exposes the dangers of an unchecked government.
I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Snowden single-handedly changed public perception against the NSA and the domestic branch of the war on terror. And yet, what shocks me to this day is how feckless the Congressional and Administrative responses were to public outcry. The government bet on the scandal blowing over, and for the most part it was right. Snowden's whistleblowing should have led to widespread changes in the law and in agency policies - and in a healthy democratic society that would have been the result. Instead, he'll never be able to return to the US because DOJ has made him tantamount to Public Enemy No. 1.
I recently noticed how the public perception of Snowden changed on reddit. Years ago it was I think very positive. But with the war going on now when I see him come up, usually there are many users saying that he is a naive Russian asset and so on.
Most of comments you read on reddit are written and/or upvoted by bots. No wonder they are trying to shift the narrative to be more pro-US. Eglin Military base was some time ago biggest source of traffic on Reddit. It’s up to you what you make of that
It's one of those rhetorical tricks being used to manipulate public opinion, where any criticism of the status quo is branded as "un-American" and "un-patriotic". But in fact it's the other way around, we criticize and are angry because we care about the country and the values it stands for.
The sleight of hand, the sneakiness of how everything gets turned upside-down is impressive though, how quickly a hero becomes a villain, and the villains openly continue with their villainy as if it were heroic.
There’s an important distinction here. Most of the comments you read. You being the general you. Most people will read a few dozen comments at most. These comments are overwhelmingly written by bots or inauthentic participants in subreddits like r politics. And they’re the most visible because these same groups also upvote them inauthentically
I just don't think that's the case yet, but we probably have no evidence one way or the other.
I don't know about /r/politics since I don't read it, but say in /r/worldnews, /r/europe, /r/ukrainewarvideoreport, /r/noncredibledefence, when I open a thread and pick ten comments at random and then take a look at their user histories I believe most are human.
The guy was regurgitating Russian propaganda talking points on twitter just days before the invasion and then accepted Russian citizenship after the fact. At this point considering him a Russian asset seems reasonable IMO.
Isn't the big threat the US government's illegal and omnipresent spying on its own and other countries citizens, rather than what Snowden been up to lately?
As the article you're commenting on makes clear, there is no illegal and omnipresent spying on its own from Snowden's documents. The phone metadata collection program was the only possibly illegal US program in the leaks, and that was shut down years ago.
I'm Ukrainian, so possible Russian assets like Snowden and Greenwald, or (senile) useful idiots like Chomsky and Waters are obviously much bigger threat to me than some dude in Maryland reading my emails.
Sure. Ukraine at the moment is completely dependent on its allies to support the war effort. Without their help Ukraine wouldn't hold on for long.
Recent Russian disinformation campaigns seem to be concentrated on eroding public support for Ukraine in western countries through various means and they had some success among the whole Greenwald-Taibbi-Snowden-Peterson crowd specifically and MAGA-people in general. Losing US support would put Ukraine in dire straits since I'm not sure EU/UK can provide all necessary equipment and ammunition by themselves.
So let me get this straight. Since you are Ukrainian, Chomsky, Snowden, Greenwald, and others are threatening you by expressing views on the Ukraine war that diverge from the mainstream? Doesn't that sound awfully similar to George W Bush who claimed that everyone who isn't with us (the US) in the "war on terror" is against us?
You asked how I'm _threatened_ by those people trying to shape the narrative and I explained. Not sure what does whataboutims about George Bush have to do with it.
Does reading taibbi or thinking the snowden revelations were a good thing make someone a MAGA person? Is Taibbi running Russian disinformation campaigns?
I don't fault you for your position one bit, but this stuff seems a little conspiratorial to me. And what Peterson are you talking about?
You think Russian intelligence just let him have asylum (and be granted citizenship) without finding everything he knows about how the NSA operates? That'd be extremely naive to believe. Witting, willing, or not, Snowden has been extremely useful to Russia.
According to what I am reading on Wikipedia about the specific timeline, the US revoked his passport before he left Hong Kong. He claims he was planning to fly to Ecuador and was just going to pass through Moscow. And yet there are direct flights from Hong Kong to Ecuador.
The US government is responsible for its track record of completely failing to provide constitutional rights as part of its justice system to people in snowdens position, and Snowden has every right to not subject himself to a broken and corrupt system
Snowden was behaving like a Russian propagandist in late 2021 and early 2022. He was repeating Russian lies that they were totally not going to invade etc.
For what it's worth almost everyone but US government predicted the Russians won't invade. Zelensky himself predicted there is no imminent invasion and complained that the west creates panic which is harmful to UA economy.
I mean, I can understand Zelensky talking it down; as the public face of Ukraine's government, I assume everything he says is propaganda of some kind (whether or not it's true).
But back in December, the satellite photos were showing the huge build-up of troops and armour on Ukraine's border. I didn't believe it was just an "exercise", nor did I believe it was sabre-rattling. I was convinced that an invasion was imminent.
I paid no attention to Snowden's opinion; he was a guest of the Russian government, and couldn't easily flee Russia.
It's actually not that complicated. The US intelligence services relied on high-level sources, essentially the military's plans for invasion, to come to its conclusions. European intelligence services tended to rely on low-level sources (the status of the units in question) instead. It turns out that the units were, even on the eve of the invasion, simply not ready for an invasion, and the European intelligence had sussed that out. In effect, when the US reported to the Europeans that Russia was preparing for war, the Europeans went "With what army? This one clearly ain't ready for war."
Combine those contradictory signals with the preconceptions that people had. The US intelligence had badly misfired during the Iraq War. There is a (not entirely undeserved) tendency to view the US as excessively warmongering. Putin had a (mostly undeserved) reputation of being a skillful and crafty manipulator. And Russia engaging in naked territorial aggression would require painful reassessments of 30 years of Russia policy (not least of which is the degree to which Europe depended on Russian gas). With all of that weighing against believing the US intelligence, it should be no surprise that Europeans did so.
I am no expert, but I too thought that they wouldn't do a full scale invasion. It seemed like a dumb move and I didn't think they would do dumb moves.
I have since learned to listen to what Pentagon has to say in this conflict, because their intelligence (and what they decide to share with the public) has proved to be on point.
Russia actually invading Ukraine full-on was the most irrational and self-destructive thing Putin could've done. By all measures it was and still is a terrible idea. Only if you thought Putin was a madman you could've predicted it but before the invasion that wasn't his reputation at all IMO. I think he was seen as relatively pragmatic and rational (for a thug).
I agree that it looked like a crazy thing to do. But I'm not one of those who reaches for the word "madman" when someone does something that seems to me to be irrational.
With the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't seem so irrational to me now.
* Russia was under sanctions for the invasion of Crimea; the central bank had built up a huge stock of foreign currency, but it was only going to diminish with time.
* The Russian economy was at best stagnant, and largely powered by resource extraction.
* Ukraine was an impediment to land-traffic to Crimea (hence the need to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait), and also controlled the water supply.
* Ukraine was tooling-up.
For those reasons, delaying the invasion would have resulted in worse outcomes, the longer the delay.
As far as the justification for invading at all, you can take your pick from Russian fear of having a full NATO member on his Western border, or dreams of a restored Russian empire. I think both justifications are crazy, but dreams of a restored imperial glory are common among Russian nationalists. They can't all be madmen.
I think it is astute to look at things in these terms, and avoid the lazy but quite common exercise of labeling motivations and actions you don't understand as "not understandable."
George Kennan, who came up in a recent HN post [0], has a fair bit to say on the subject. Namely, that throughout its history, Russia has been obsessed with expanding and securing its border for perfectly understandable strategic reasons. Especially regarding Ukraine and Crimea. Something along the lines of their western borders being completely open and strategically terrible to defend, thus the desire to push them out to more defensible locations. Of course you also have key routes for shipping, military bases, and oil flow in Ukraine that make it an incredibly appealing strategic objective. Kennan actually defined this mentality of western territorial expansion as an essential part of the Russian character, that it should be used as a backdrop to inform analysis of Russia 's motivations and contextualize strategic decisions (this was a key part of his analysis that ultimately lead to the whole "containment" strategy in the cold war).
It seems as though Western expansion has become completely ingrained basically to the point of a cultural imperative for any aspiring politician or political operator in Russia. Kind of like the requirement that any US politician must publicly proclaim their love of freedom and God in more or less equal measure (from what I can gather we've had exactly two openly atheist congress members, out of >11,000 members throughout history). In this way, it doesn't necessarily have to be rational in any absolute sense, it is rational in terms of national politics, beyond the point of expediency and into the territory of a binary whether or not you fit the hard requirements.
In 1992, Kennan wrote that NATO expansion towards former Soviet states in Western Europe including Ukraine, “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era...
Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
He seems to have been largely ignored, not for the first in his career, up until Putin lead Russia to the annexation of Crimea. An act which seems to have taken heads of state and the international relations people by surprise, and perhaps undermined their optimistic beliefs about Putin having been coaxed into political/military partnership with the Western world (through economic incentives, international relations norms, etc). There was a lot of stock put on this idea that through economic incentives, trade agreements, and such, both Russia and China could be "brought into the fold" of neoliberalism and Western democratic principles. People were quite shocked to find out it didn't play out like a Disney movie with regards to Putin, and it's looking more and more like China isn't going to continue playing along with the tune set by the West when it is no longer in their strategic interest to do so.
Everyone from Obama to John Kerry to Angela Merkel were so perplexed over Russia's move in 2014 that their only explanations (including to each other in private, apparently) revolved around Putin being divorced from reality. However, as Henry Kissinger noted, the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis when there is nothing better at hand to guide us. So perhaps it is our lack of understanding of his real situation and objectives rather than his (of what is in both his and Russia's strategic interest) that is driving this urge to paint him as a irrational lunatic.
It seems likely that, as Kennan predicted, NATO expansion and general American/European policy caused a return of cold-war thinking and relations.. but only in the mind of Putin and Russian politicians. The rest of the world was out of step, and apparently wouldn't realize their error and catch up to reality until after that key moment in 2022, when just about everyone except US intelligence agencies didn't really believe the invasion was going to happen.
> the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis
We tend to personalize nations, to the extent that we refer to the nation using the name of its leader. So, for example, "Putin invaded Ukraine". In fact the first time Putin even visited Ukraine was more than a year after the invasion.
What we generally mean by "Putin" is what during the Cold War was referred to as "The Kremlin", roughly Soviet/Russian central government. "Kremlinologist" was a term that referred to people whose job was figuring out what was going on in the Kremlin; civilians like me were encouraged to regard Kremlinology as impossible in principle, like Astrology, or reading tea-leaves.
I don't pretend to know what's going on in the Kremlin. But generals get pushed aside, and then re-hired somewhere else; officials get publicly humiliated on TV. I think it's faily clear that Putin is not in any sense an absolute dictator. He's the leader of a very authoritarian, militaristic government, in a country that is traditionally very authoritarian and militaristic.
I mean, I do think Putin's bonkers. But not based on his actions; I suppose his government's actions are the actions of the leadership clique, the "siloviki", i.e. the former KGB/GRU colonel-generals, turned oligarchs and government officials. I don't think Putin could have ordered this invasion without consensus of some kind in his clique. If his power were that concentrated, he would by now have ordered full mobilization, but it isn't, and he can't. [Edit] The reason I think he's bonkers is the things he says, especially in "On the Historic Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian People". But even that wasn't invented by him; those ideas come from "philosophers" like Alexander Dugin.
The handling of the Prigozhin Mutiny is evidence of that (Prigozhin is not siloviki, and was never KGB/GRU). If Putin were an absolute dictator, Prigozhin would have died the day after the mutiny, either shot somewhere very public, or poisoned using chemicals only made by the Russian government.
Situations change, I can see how in the 70s and 80s this may have been an argument to keep the cold war "cold". But as the Russians have shown, there is no longer any need to handle them with care. Their armed forces are diminished to the point they can't successfully roll tanks over their own border and get a strategic win.
All they have left is the nuclear threat, which only protects existing borders (even for Putin holding Ukrainian territory is not worth having Moscow turned to glass by the return strike).
There is nothing to be gained by acknowledging the Russian expansionist "cultural imperative" in policy making now. Ensure the ex-Soviet states that want to join NATO and the world will be a safer place.
It is funny how all comments (including mine) pointing out that fact are heavily down-voted without any counterarguments. I know the rules, so I won't insinuate any kind of "shilling", but that really makes you think...
I downvote it because it’s been repeated a dozen times and there’s a lack of intellectual honesty to say that a prediction that Russia wouldn’t invade is the same as spreading Russian propaganda for deliberate and malicious reasons. I can’t be bothered to explain it more than this because any ability to not see this means I’m wasting my time explaining it further
> I downvote it because it’s been repeated a dozen times and there’s a lack of intellectual honesty to say that a prediction that Russia wouldn’t invade is the same as spreading Russian propaganda for deliberate and malicious reasons.
It wasn't just a good-faith prediction, he was quite cocky and arrogant about that[0], including, ironically, accusing others of amplifying disinformation campaign:
"So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3AM, I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility."
At the same time he didn't appear too fazed by the invasion after it had begun, just casually accused others of concern-trolling[1] and "happily and thankfully" accepted Russian citizenship[2].
> I can’t be bothered to explain it more than this because any ability to not see this means I’m wasting my time explaining it further
I'm engaging in this discussion constructively and provide links to support my position. You preemptively accuse me of willful ignorance, but after re-reading his tweets I still stand by my words.
I'll be charitable by assuming that people here are getting defensive by their hero not living up to expectations. Snowden is (justifiably) angry about the US treatment of him and happily amplifies Russian propaganda as some sort of badly considered revenge.
It's a shame that he uses his platform for this, especially as the current propaganda is in support of Russia rolling their tanks across the border and killing thousands of people in Ukraine.
Also worth noting that it is strongly in his interest to craft and filter his public dialogue with the interests of the Russian state in mind. It is a basic fact of his existence, whether it is something he thinks about explicitly and often or not. Of course Russia isn't going to execute him or throw in in a gulag, since he is more valuable to them as a political set-piece that somewhat undermines America's moral high ground. However, that doesn't mean they can't lean on him considerably and make his life severely unpleasant in myriad subtle ways. There is no way he isn't acutely aware of Russia's reputation for brutal coercive tactics regarding their political enemies and targets, especially domestic ones.
He is completely at their mercy and he knows it. What is he going to do, cry out to the world that Russia is hounding and harassing him, or otherwise making his already beleaguered situation even less tenable? First of all, who is going to care that can do anything about it, second, it will delight people he almost certainly views as his enemy for him to make any such pleas and thirdly, it starts down a path of no return to start calling out Russia for abuses while you are stuck there with no allies and no way out.
Being on reasonably amicable terms with the power-elite in Russia is pretty much the last, best hope he has in this world. Whether consciously or not, the severe ramifications of burning that bridge are going to weigh on every decision and proclamation he makes. Of course he may always consider this effect and choose actions that upset Russia/Putin without regard for personal consequences. But it becomes increasingly easy to justify the path that doesn't lead to the complete crushing of your spirit the longer you have lived your life staring down the barrel of 5 or 10 different shotguns trained right between your eyes.
And of course it gets easier still when you feel wronged and martyred by the enemy of your friend, even if that friend is born purely out of necessity and circumstance. Anyway, all that is to say, thought I am grateful for his attempt to protect American citizens' constitutional rights and hold the government that professes to fight always for freedom to a higher standard... I have to take anything he has said in recent years as extremely biased and a product of "soft" but very serious coercion (from multiple fronts).
Arrogance does not disprove earnest belief. Snowden's comments before the invasion disappointed me. But many others said similar things. And I don't believe he owes Ukraine effective statelessness. Did he say anything about the war in 18 months?
I'm not saying I'm absolutely positively 100% sure that he intentionally shills for Russia, but consider that he has been in Russia for quite some time now but only got the passport after he started tweeting from pro-Russian angle.
> But many others said similar things.
Yeah, but I kinda expected more from him than "US bad, then Russia must be good".
> Did he say anything about the war in 18 months?
I'm not aware of anything after his initial "okay, I won't talk about it anymore since you ghouls are concern-trolling me after I got this one wrong", but I'm not really tracking his hot takes on social media anymore. I think he recently switched to well-articulated and insightful commentaries on US preparing to attack China or something...
Snowden claimed in 2014 that the 2012 Internet shutdown in Syria was actually done by the NSA and not Assad. The totalitarian dictator apparently cared too much about the free flow of information to do such a thing.
If you choose the path of martyr you ought to follow it. "I did it for your freedom and that's why am now with your sworn enemy" can only work for so long.
The article makes the case that Snowden was NOT a whistleblower:
“ "I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I'd first had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later I was determined to find out if an American system of mass surveillance existed and, if it did, how it functioned."
With this, Snowden basically admits that he isn't a whistleblower: he wasn't confronted with illegal activities or significant abuses and subsequently secured evidence of that, but acted the other way around, by first gathering as much information he could get and then look whether there was something incriminating in it.
In his memoir, Snowden doesn't come up with concrete misconducts or other things that could have triggered his decision to hand the files over to journalists. He even omits almost all the disclosures made by the press, which makes that Permanent Record contains hardly anything that justifies his unprecedented data theft.”
I think the parent is claiming that whistleblower protections don't apply to Snowden. A vigilante's actions can be both morally right and blatantly illegal. There are people that are glad he did what he did, but also believe in the rule of law, and feel his actions might have carried more weight if he turned himself in and accepted the legal repercussions.
Personally, if I were the judge I'd give him a light slap on the wrist because of how hard he worked to bring the information to light in a responsible manner so nobody got hurt. It's hard for me to imagine him not getting absolutely fucked in a real court of law however, and I'm certainly not going to judge him and say, "You should have been willing to throw your whole life away over this, or not done it at all."
Do any of the relevant laws specify needing to be at war? Both the treason clause of the Constitution and the Espionage Act specify helping "enemies," but I'm not sure they specify needing to be at war.
The Rosenberg's were executed despite the US never officially declaring war on the USSR or even North Korea.
Right. I just didn't see the significance of his fitting a specific definition of whistleblower.
Most of the article was discussing the illegal secret data collection he exposed and the worldwide response to those revelations in the ten years since.
I wasn't sure what difference it made that the official government whistleblower processes didn't work for him. Someone else mentioned he therefore lost legal whistleblower protections. I don't think that the public worried about big brother, the tech companies like Google who promptly encrypted all their traffic, or allies like Angela Merkel that were spied on, cared that Snowden stepped outside the government's whistleblower process when it didn't work.
I didn't know if this is what you meant, or if you thought that what he did (double cross the government) was worse than what the NSA did (double cross the public), or if he should have kept his mouth shut when the official process wasn't working, or something else.
Did you think to ask what suspicions Snowden had in 2009 in Tokyo? Or why he had them? He stated he read an unclassified report with evidence of illegal activities and significant abuses. The classified version confirmed his suspicions.
Indeed, this struck me as weird, and so I went and re-read the Japan chapter. In which he also explains why metadata is more important than data, which this article later also completely ignores.
Since this website otherwise seems to be well-done, has been repeatedly popping up on HN, and related HN discussions seem to have an influx of pro-NSA new accounts :
I'm afraid that I must entertain the possibility that the website itself is owned by the NSA, and the best thing to do is to ignore information on it, however well it might be presented. (I do not think that I'm smart enough to prevent a NSA team from tricking me.)
That seems to be the only way to subvert the very compartmentalization that normally keeps people from seeing such patterns or systemic abuses that he exposed - no?
In all these years I'd never seen this. Ironic, but not surprising, that according to this account Snowden did exactly what he accused the US government of doing: mass collecting data with no authorization or purpose and then using it to accuse someone he disagreed with of crimes.
And we do. The difference is that Snowden did the crimes he is accused of. The US government, on the other hand, did not commit the crimes Snowden accused it of.
They had to. He broke the law. He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status. Given the politically charged nature and public opinion at the time, he might have had a pretty fair shake and could have been living comfortably in the US working for the ACLU or something.
Instead he plotted an escape to an openly hostile country (not even a quasi-neutral country or a non-extradition country) and allowed all of his stolen material to fall into the hands of a foreign intelligence service.
He didn't go to a hostile country. He went to Ecuador, not a hostile country. The US government cancelled his passport while he was connecting in Russia, and then the Russian airport refused to let him leave.
The fact that he's now in Russia is 100% on the US.
Also, he didn't bring any stolen information to Russia. He says he was contacted by Russian intelligence but that they pretty quickly figured out he had nothing more to give them than what he gave to the journalists.
He went to China and leaked documents of what Chinese systems the NSA had compromised in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. China kicked him out.
The fact that he's in Russia is 100% on Russia. If you think the Russians care about Snowden's travel documents, you don't know anything about Russia.
If you think that russia is not a beuerocratic hellhole that cares to an extreme amount about travel documents you have never had the pleasure of dealing with russian border security in a moscow airport.
Or you have more money and backing than an average person. I hear langely is quite hot this time of year?
To pretend that they weren't in control of the situation when he was there from a national security standpoint is a bit naive. Ultimately the decision to allow him to depart Hong Kong was made in Beijing.
"The Chinese government made the final decision to allow Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, a move that Beijing believed resolved a tough diplomatic problem even as it reaped a publicity windfall from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, according to people familiar with the situation."
You're claiming this with no evidence and calling me naive. What's more, there is a good explanation for choosing Hong Kong - it's the only non-US aligned country in the area with a history of free speech (well it was, back then). New Zealand or Australia has free speech too, but if he had gone there he would have been black bagged and sent on a plane to USA, Guantanamo style.
Hong Kong is China and in 2013 the process to take over administrative control by the CCP was already well under way. But looking at it from a national security standpoint China was in control. Why would I look at it from a national security standpoint? Given who he was and what he was carrying it has to be viewed that way. Let's not forget that he was carrying information on NSA espionage on China when he landed in Hong Kong.
We now know Glenn Greenwald was likely a Russian asset at the time he was given access to the Snowden files. For a member of the intelligence community, he sure did a piss poor job of vetting who he chose to whistleblow with.
The conclusion of the article you referenced is the opposite:
"Greenwald is not, as many of his critics lazily allege, a Russian agent; that would imply that his motivation is pecuniary rather than heartfelt. Greenwald remains what he has always been: a sincere enemy of liberal democracy and a genuine lickspittle for tyrants."
Glenn Greenwald is a real liberal democrat and fights for free speech. He even left "The Intercept" when they suppressed inconvenient facts.
I've noticed that most criticisms of Greenwald seem to be "he sticks to his principles and calls things out consistently, even when it's Our Team doing them. He must be an enemy agent!". At both a domestic and geo politics level
Absolutely. When you make the choice to become a whistleblower, you are making the decision that the information you have is more important than your personal freedoms.
Any major US news publication or the EFF would have put their legal team to work protecting him. He could have fled to a friendly country like France that has strong civil liberty protections. He could have gone to a neutral country like Switzerland. Instead of trying any of these things, he went right to Russia and horse traded information for protection - which plays a lot more like an asset coming home than a legitimate whistleblower.
Poking a rights-violating government in the eye by exposing their rights violations, and then asking that government to protect your rights, isn't such a genius move.
Running away and getting protection from a different rights-violating government that you haven't poked in the eye sounds quite a bit less masochist.
It's also common knowledge he didn't go directly to Russia but had his passport canceled by the US, leading to the Russian airport he was transferring through not letting him leave.
> When you make the choice to become a whistleblower, you are making the decision that the information you have is more important than your personal freedoms.
So it's wrong to expose a corrupt government without becoming a martyr? It's better to let the public to be fooled?
Not everyone thinks this way. Sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn't.
> he went right to Russia and horse traded information for protection
Do you have a source for the above statement?
It's my understanding that the U.S. revoked his passport while he was en-route to Ecuador, trapping him in Russia. I haven't heard that he gave the Russians any intelligence.
> He could have fled to a friendly country like France that has strong civil liberty protections. He could have gone to a neutral country like Switzerland
he could not [1]
> Instead of trying any of these things
he did try [1]
> horse traded information for protection
when he was in russia, he had nothing more to give them [1]
You have no idea how whisleblowers are treated in even the most democratic and rich countries. There are numerous examples of people becoming the enemy of the state and a fair trial never ever happened. The legal system does not apply for those.
>He would have had the chance to go to trial and defend himself and seek whistleblower protection status
No, he wouldn't. Google "snowden fair trial". He has always said that he is perfectly willing to come to the US and do exactly as you describe, if the government is willing to guarantee a fair trial. It isn't.
Go on, Google "snowden fair trial". Go do it. It's a key part of the story you're apparently unaware of. It'll take 5 seconds.
Trump makes the same claims every time he is caught doing something.
Implying there is some sort of kangaroo court cabal out to get you is a deflection tactic that you seem to have fallen for.
If the American system is so corrupt that we ignore our own rules, why didn't the CIA just black bag him and bring him back? Or kill him outright? Both would be easier and more effective than a show trial.
Now I'm not going to say the sentence Chelsea Manning received was fair or that I'd be down for going through what she did, or pretend that her life will ever go back to normal, but can we not act like we don't have multiple, recent whistleblower/leakers who have served their time and been released from jail?
For all conspiracy theorists like to talk about it, there is remarkably little disappearing going on in the US, even when intelligence agencies are involved.
The espionage act famously does not allow for whistleblowing as a defense. Tulsi Gabbard [1], Rashida Tlaib [2], Ron Wyden and Ro Khanna [3] (and perhaps others) have tried to introduce legislation to change this. For example, Reality Winner was unable to make any public interest arguments in her defense [4]. Ed Snowden has repeatedly said he would happily return to the US to face trial if he were allowed to make a public interest defense. For example, in a 2019 NPR interview [5]:
> My ultimate goal will always be to return to the United States. And I've actually had conversations with the government, last in the Obama administration, about what that would look like, and they said, "You should come and face trial." I said, "Sure. Sign me up. Under one condition: I have to be able to tell the jury why I did what I did, and the jury has to decide: Was this justified or unjustified." This is called a public interest defense and is allowed under pretty much every crime someone can be charged for. Even murder, for example, has defenses. It can be self-defense and so on so forth, it could be manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. But in the case of telling a journalist the truth about how the government was breaking the law, the government says there can be no defense. There can be no justification for why you did it. The only thing the jury gets to consider is did you tell the journalists something you were not allowed to tell them. If yes, it doesn't matter why you did it. You go to jail. And I have said, as soon as you guys say for whistleblowers it is the jury who decides if it was right or wrong to expose the government's own lawbreaking, I'll be in court the next day.
What does whistleblowers going to prison have to do with the Snowden case? The article we're commenting on makes it clear that whistleblowing and Snowden have nothing to do with each other.
This is a rather strange take. In 2013, Hong Kong was a very different place than today, with none of the China stigma.
Additionally, you neglect to mention that is was the US actions in cancelling his passport that stranded Snowden in the Moscow airport that he was transiting through on the way to Ecuador.
If you believe Russia cares about Snowden's travel documents, I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Snowden should consider himself lucky that he got detained in Russia because Moreno would have given him up before Assange.
" The Chinese government made the final decision to allow Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, a move that Beijing believed resolved a tough diplomatic problem even as it reaped a publicity windfall from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, according to people familiar with the situation."
He didn't. He went to Ecuador, but the US cancelled his passport while he was connecting in Russia. And he didn't bring any classified materials with him.
So it's 100% on the US government that he ended up in Russia and not Ecuador
The scandal was watched globally as it unfolded. By the time of his arrival to Sheremetyevo his future FSB minders were getting tired of twiddling their thumbs at the gate.
> A whistleblower doesn't abscond to a hostile country with troves of top secret data.
Why not?
The fact of being a whistleblower is orthogonal to whether you abscond and where to. And Russia wasn't a "hostile country" - many of the biggest companies in the US had operations in Russia.
Its the behavior of someone that doesn't want to go to prison in the US.
There are literally only a handful of countries that are viable to avoiding that. Them being geopolitical opponents is exactly what they are countries that are viable to avoiding that. You are choosing to put the cart before the horse, that he went to geopolitical opponents to give secrets, and not that he was going to a handful of countries that would avoid prison in the US. and yes, I'm choosing to see it the other way, because his actions are more congruent with the other way. He was trying to go to a different country but could not reach it. The US intercepted flights they merely thought had him on it.
You mean the most sensitive government secrets that are about warrantless total surveillance of everyone on earth? The proof that the US government has lost all control over their spying apparatus? Where would be a sensitive place to take them instead in your opinion?
He gave that data to american citizens in Hong Kong and retained no copy. Obama's people trapped him in transit in russia on his way to south america so that they could claim "russia! russia!" They openly bragged about this. It worked on both levels. He's stuck and people amazingly still claim he's in with the russians.
It always surprises me how many people still come out with this totally discredited line that he gave secrets to china and russia. Are we done with the equally dishonest claim that he put lives in danger or is everyone across that being a total lie now.
When I think of courage I think of Snowden speaking out against Putin while stuck in russia. When I think of cowardice I think of the lack of prosecution for all those spooks who are now paid by CNN to lie to the public. Who decided not to prosecute clapper? How? He's above the law. Why?
How is this whistleblowing? He also participated in Putin's call in propaganda show, I don't believe for a second that he's said anything that upsets Putin or the FSB particularly if mild criticism is useful for them in maintaining the fiction that he is not under the control of the Russian security services.
That leak about NSA breaching Chinese servers was in the same time period that Chinese security services executed accused CIA informants with a gunshot to the head in front of their coworkers.
First one was not published by the journalists Snowden chose, whom he directed as to the kinds of things he wanted published and not. The NYT got the archive from the guardian against Snowden's wishes and knew better. Your criticism is of the NYT.
How are your criticisms of the CIA, NSA and Dept of homeland security coming along? Or you are unable to criticise clapper, the cnn paid expert at this time.
> The NYT got the archive from the guardian against Snowden's wishes and knew better.
No, the NYT was reporting on documents that Der Spiegel obtained from Poitras, according to Snowden's wishes. The Der Spiegel journalists had decided to publish a book about those documents and made them public in Germany at the same time.
Let's forget about publishing. He took a top secret document on NSA spying on China to Chinese territory and then on to Russia. The fact that the Times published them and not his preferred journalist is besides the point. The damage was already done when he took them to Chinese territory and then on to Russia.
The only people who saw the documents that Snowden had were the journalists chosen by Snowden. In any country, including the USA. Some were less responsible than others hence the nyt got a copy. Hong Kong is wholly and totally irrelevant.
The fact the times decided to publish is 100% their responsibility.
Again, what criticisms do you have of the NSA, CIA and dept of homeland security? List them all briefly here, please.
Your objections here are like criticizing a homeowner for shooting a burglar with an unregistered gun. Yes, it's illegal, but nobody cares because there is a much more severe crime going on, and it's strange that you would focus on that.
Maybe it's because of Snowden's moral grandstanding over leaking only a single extant US program that could possibly have been illegal (telephone metadata collection) and hundreds of others that very clearly weren't. People have every right to be disgusted with him.
My knowledge of him comes primarily from news articles and the Citizen Four documentary (which I highly recommend) but my perception is that whatever his intentions were I'm amazed at how smartly he did everything. He literally fought the US government and got the best case scenario anyone can practically hope for which is that he's alive and not in Guantanamo.
What's the etymology of the term "Snowden revelations"?
People seem to really like that term, and it makes sense. But someone has to have said it first. I don't recall hearing "revelations" used much before then, other than for the book of the Christian New Testament. (Is some of the appeal of the term to allude to an almost biblical impact, or saintly/savior aura around Snowden?)
They know that men of science throughout the world subject each other’s results to the most searching examination; and that error is mercilessly exposed and rejected as soon as discovered.
And, finally, they know that still more conclusive testimony is to be found in the daily verification of scientific predictions, and in the never-ceasing triumphs of those arts which Science guides.
To regard with alienation that which has such high credentials is a folly.
Though in the tone which many of the scientific adopt towards them, the defenders of Religion may find some excuse for this alienation; yet the excuse is a very insufficient one.
On the side of Science, as on their own side, they must admit that short-comings in the advocates do not tell essentially against that which is advocated.
Science must be judged by itself: and so judged, only the most perverted intellect can fail to see that it is worthy of all reverence.
________________________________________________
Be there or be there not any other revelation, we have a veritable revelation in Science—a continuous disclosure, through the intelligence with which we are endowed, of the established order of the Universe.
________________________________________________
This disclosure it is the duty of every one to verify as far as in him lies; and having verified, to receive with all humility.
