And yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
> People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."
Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.
> What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
this is the kind of thing one has to be american to actually come up with and write down
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
Corporate Dems lose because they have become indistinguishable from their donor class and have failed to institute significant changes that would actually improve people’s lives. They are a captive opposition.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)
It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.
The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.
The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".
> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.
The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.
> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.
Based on everything I thus far know about WWII, I do not have the impression that Hitler wanted war [1], nor do I have the impression that their ideology demanded it.
If you also read what they published about themselves, instead of only what others wrote about them, the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced.
There is nothing like "the most powerful", though.
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
The Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians").
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Be afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence
For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.
We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".
The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.
This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".
Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency
According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB.
Nor was it put to any other minister.
"This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Not just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
See that's the thing: bad faith requests for presence in the marketplace of ideas almost always more the discourse towards authoritarian views, reactionary and racist views. Smashing it metaphorically means that monarchists and authoritarians flood the marketplace with garbage.
We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.
Socialist, communist, and reactionary views should all be equally allowed, along with bizarre views like Posadism and whatever Alex Jones believes.
I want to see a debate stage with Haz Al-Din, AOC, Ezra Klein, Thomas Massie, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Fuentes. Let the best one win.
> We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views
And this is why only reactionaries gain a foothold. Powerful people benefit from it, so reactionary views are let in while the rest of the “window” remains intact. Smash the window.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
The original comic didn't really resonate with me for a couple of reasons. The first is that the obvious metaphors it seems to have (which I assume you're alluding to here) are in quite poor taste. The second is because I think public debate is critical for a healthy society, and so am quite averse to anything that justifies making statements and then being unwilling to engage with challenges to them. Obviously outright harassment would be not only wrong but also illegal, so I think that's largely a nonexistent extreme.
In general I think if people were more regularly challenged on their claims, it might help reign in some of the self radicalization, intolerance, and so forth that's growing in society. When somebody only acknowledges 'friendly' voices, you end up in a scenario where they're effectively surrounding themselves with a baseline that's heavily biased, but that baseline will (from their perspective) be normal. That's just not healthy.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
First, the conversation was about the DNC, so what centrist Dems think is more important than "Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left". But beyond that, what specific policies are you talking about? Because without naming specific parts of the DNC platform, what you're saying sounds completely indistinguishable from "my niece corrected my pronoun usage and that made me angry".
Your point about the DNC is taken, although these groups do have sway there, as Yglesias often complains about.
Support for hate speech laws is common among leftists who primarily focus on social causes, as is support for “deplatforming” political opponents. Some also support German-style laws regarding politically extreme speech, which is funny, because those laws would almost certainly be used against them if they weren’t plainly unconstitutional.
I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.
> Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
But to answer your question about conservative opposition to free speech, some conservatives are now showing support for hate speech laws, specifically laws against antisemitic speech, which is new. So this is actually a current “both sides” issue. Time will tell if the poles fully reverse on this; I think it depends on what form post-Trump politics takes.
Edit: wow, TIL. Apparently there were local laws against “race hatred” on the books in the early 1900s, and some conservative segregationists found that they could use those laws against “anti-white” speech (like supporting integration) in the 40s and 50s. So believe it or not, they became supportive of these laws until the Warren court overturned them, thanks to the work of the ACLU.
Fair enough if you consider your comment a start of a new thread, but that is ignoring the context in which the comment you replied was made.
>specifically laws against antisemitic speech
As a Jewish person, I have a bridge that fights antisemitism to sell you if you genuinely believe this. Just the simple fact that they are only against antisemitism and not all hate speech should tell you there is no genuine conservative desire for hate speech laws. And your second example is just more evidence of that. Conservatives cynically abusing existing laws does not show a conservative value eventually becoming liberal or vice versa. You can argue it shows how these laws create problems, but it isn't evidence of any sort of switch in values.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
Glenn, along with many others in the left-libertarian camp, correctly identified that “wokeness” was being used to fracture the left between the old guard, focused on economic justice and ending imperialism, and the “groups” who focused solely on racial and cultural agendas and were actively hostile towards traditional left agendas. These groups were also often hostile towards traditional liberal concepts of rights, such as freedom of speech and equal treatment under the law.
I agree that his reporting on this was sub-par. It’s not his beat and he should probably leave it to others.
The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.
Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.
If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
One of the accusers refused to sign their written statement, then disappeared. The other kept making contradictory statements and changed her story, and recently said she was “happy” that he was free, although she did not recant her accusation. Prosecutors also allegedly changed one of the statements to make it sound more serious, per the later UN investigation.
They put out an Interpol notice and had him on the “most wanted” list for this, which is ridiculous. There is documented communication between the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service and Swedish authorities where the CPS is goading the Swedes into continuing the case, warning them not to get “cold feet.”
The prosecution eventually dropped the case because they believed that the evidence was too weak, blaming the long gap in time. I’m not clear on how they thought the passage of time had weakened their evidence, which was limited to victim statements from the very beginning, AFAIK.
A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
>A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.
As I recall he became fixated on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, to the extent that he got himself fired from The Intercept over it. Maybe he saw the pictures of naked Biden and became absolutely obsessed with the photo gallery of coke and dong.
Hard to say whether he resigned, or "resigned". And I'm not sure there's a huge difference, practically speaking. By Greenwald's account, it was the former, I think. Either way, he took his marbles and went home. In fairness, I can imagine why, after having spent 7 years of his life mining through the Snowden archive, spending another few years mining the Biden hard disk might have been attractive.
It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
Defending your client is not vile, and making statements that contribute towards that defense is part of the game, even if they are harsh.
Funny to see someone who seems to be on the left engaging in “kink-shaming.” Glenn has the right to a personal sexual life, including whatever exotic sexual proclivities he may have. Frankly, the film you mentioned sounds pretty tame for gay porn.
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
In that it was perfectly legal. Snowden, with his high school dropout reading skills thought it allowed the NSA to pull any account's data directly off the companies' servers, and Greenwald, with his technical illiteracy, believed him. The Guardian didn't have a competent news editor and allowed the story to be printed without verification from an expert, while pretty much every other news agency got the story right.
This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
Makes sense. OP is leaning I to conspiracional adhoc reasoning. I’m sure Pierre would rather keep his Hawaiian island than to field questions from the agencies
I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The latter applied to many US (and historically British empire wars, from where the US learned).
Greenwald had a Rumble contract for daily videos during the Biden years, so I think it would be fair to say he was a Trump influencer.
He also has many enemies in Brazil (e.g.. Supreme Judge Moraes), so that video could have come from anywhere.
But yes, he could also have been threatened over the Snowden files earlier.
Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.
It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.
That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
> That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
That is a fine example of propaganda: All people, including historians who evaluate different possibilities, surely want to paint Russia as the victim!
> I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.
Valdai financing in 2023 does look bad. But his 2015 talk "Why Ukraine is the West's fault" does not appear to have any financing and says the same already.
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
negligence and incompetence can act as very good cover for malice. The same reporter that leaked Reality Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, has also been suspected by multiple other whistleblowers of exposing them as well.
On a tangential note, watching the documentary on her was the first time I viscerally understood that people with very different ideas about how to live can agree on some fundamental political principles, and don't have to stuff themselves into right/left boxes for easy manipulation. They went after her hard because a culturally-conservative, intelligent, hard-nosed soldier type who sticks to virtues that are not completely in-line with our warhawk doctrine is their worst nightmare.
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
That doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example.
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
Just as some Chinese people want Ai Weiwei to rot in prison, some Russians wanted Navalny to rot in prison and some Americans wanted or still want Snowden and Assange to rot in prison.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
Her default option was to return to her abuser and face more abuse so she went to the only shelter she could access, having no means to access any other shelter.
It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
> if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
It’s really not, because knowing when you edited it is already enough, given that there’s a timestamped edit history. And the size and shape of your request payloads will show that you edited it, not merely performed GET requests.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.
Thank you for pointing this out. So often that point gets lost in the weeds of the discussion of trivialities. The absolute irony is that Snowden is more 'ideal American' than 99% of the rest of the population, and the people that cast him in any kind of bad light should be ashamed to call themselves Americans.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other
>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.
I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.
"Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation."
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
He likely did do what he was accused of, with two well-meaning (and now presumably former) fans of his (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...), though it's his right to argue against that. It does not seem like a "honeypot" trap, these were genuine supporters.
The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.
I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.
Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.
Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
> Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out.
The article addresses this argument, and quite thoroughly dismisses it as BS. Read the report about how rapidly the reporting stopped and how much material was left untouched.
I was also thinking about this. Did Snowden share his files with Wikileaks? Do the insurance files partly contain the Snowden files. Actually does Snowden himself have access to the files?
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow [0]
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.
This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.
Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
It certainly would have kept the leaks in the news cycle for much longer and not delegitimized his motives. It’s anyone’s guess whether that would have had any real effect on policy.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
I doubt he could have been disappeared after all of the attention. Chelsea Manning wasn’t disappeared despite causing a similar black eye for the US government.
I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone.
That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
I don't get why they all try to protect it so much. Snowden's identity is already public so sharing the files can't hurt him. Just redact personal info and put it all out there.
A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.
They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.
I deeply hate Noam Chomsky for his hypocrisy, but his 80's analysis that the press as a business can't do its job is profoundly right. It got much worse since then.
In the UK we have the laws around how government documents of historical value go into the national archives after 20 years, documents with personal information are held longer (up to 100 years). I could see a good argument for the Snowden archive to be automatically decrypted and published after 100 years on a similar basis for it's historcial value.
I think the answer to what happened is really straight forward though - they published as much of it as they could, what they published is probably pretty representative of other stuff in the archives and there's no news value to publishing 100 variations of the same story. If they published 1% of the archive, but the other 99% is just a million details about the same basic decisions then I don't think it matters much. It's also a really slow and painful process to make sure you're protecting the identities of people.
Having said that, I could see some value in a team taking a privately hosted open source AI model, feeding into it the archive and any related news articles into it and asking it if there's anything newsworthy that we missed.
They're just hiding misconduct because the government does an enormous number of things that would be national scandals if they weren't allowed to bury them.
Apart from his news: if Snowden want to get out of exile and return to the US; the current administration can be bought. The next president will probably still wants to jail him (or worse)
The "Snowden Docs" were just a wget --mirror of the internal wiki. So there was a lot of cruft in there.
Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.
This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.
Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since.
I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.
He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
While I respect Snowden and find many of the claims plausible much of the evidence and story didn’t add up. Here are a few doubts I have, and I’d like to see the rebuttal.
First, he seemed to embellish his role and authority at NSA. Based on his vernacular, and the artifacts that he presented, I believe he was an IT admin, who happened upon these files. His archive was predominantly design / spec docs with screenshots, rather than code artifacts (compiled code, 1st hand screenshots, configs). In his interviews he didn’t seem to have a deep technical grasp of the systems, and he was cagey about his areas of responsibility.
Second, XKeyScore and other system implementations seemed too primitive for the claimed capability. It was claimed they could google everyone’s email (or some large share of the population, let’s say 100-500m individuals, in real time), but the designs were primitive collegiate level , single-instance mySQL databases and CRUD UIs. I didn’t see any indications the system capability met the claims .
I’m not an expert, I’ve read No Place to Hide, watched some interviews, and used to follow him on Twitter.
I’d like to see how this community assessed him personally and the artifacts he shared.
* and I don’t remember Snowden presenting evidence that NSA (et al) had the datacenter / compute capacity to surveil these targets. Even a fraction of the target traffic (3+ wireless carriers, dozens of messaging email software firms) would require a fraction of their datacenter capacity to sniff, trace, index, analyze . Was that capacity presented in the archive?
He was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.
SQL alone is just a query language. the MySQL design docs Snowden shared were primitive installations that did not meet the claimed capability of their surveillance system.
There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.
Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.
can you elaborate on this ? what were his responsibilities and what role did he have in setting up the system?
He seemed to imply that he helped deploy these systems (though he never authored them), but from his interviews & the evidence provided, I don't even think that was the case. I got the impression he was sort of a backup & storage manager.
Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.
Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.
He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.
What's your overall take? do you think evidence was presented to confirm these systems were active around his tenure e.g. 2012? I'm maybe 20% confident they were active.
The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.
Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.
I mean about the historiography, and your personal verdict on whether those systems were active, based on the evidence Snowden provided.
A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.
Snowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.
cocodill | 22 hours ago
Barbing | 20 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 18 hours ago
(although of late my surprise is decreasing).
anotherhue | 22 hours ago
motionlessveloc | 20 hours ago
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
fantasizr | 19 hours ago
rightnutwingjob | 17 hours ago
Empathy is, after all, free.
Action has a price.
rexpop | 17 hours ago
nostrademons | 17 hours ago
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
djhn | 17 hours ago
Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
nostrademons | 16 hours ago
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
ai_critic | 16 hours ago
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
nostrademons | 16 hours ago
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
ai_critic | 15 hours ago
Interesting times indeed.
SamInTheShell | 15 hours ago
tosapple | 14 hours ago
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
avazhi | 12 hours ago
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
avazhi | 10 hours ago
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
Zigurd | 7 hours ago
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
avazhi | 6 hours ago
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
nostrademons | 5 hours ago
Zigurd | 4 hours ago
wsng | 2 hours ago
greedo | 6 hours ago
avazhi | 6 hours ago
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
greedo | 3 hours ago
marsmaps | 10 hours ago
this is the kind of thing one has to be american to actually come up with and write down
avazhi | 10 hours ago
But congrats on managing to pull out the ad hominem and being wrong to boot, that takes special skill.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
watwut | 14 hours ago
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
jesseendahl | 12 hours ago
Der_Einzige | 10 hours ago
samudrijan | 7 hours ago
watwut | 14 hours ago
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
falserum | 13 hours ago
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
watwut | 7 hours ago
It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.
The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.
The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".
> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.
The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.
> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.
BoxwoodSeed | 4 hours ago
If you also read what they published about themselves, instead of only what others wrote about them, the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced.
[1] https://yle.fi/a/20-270673
psychoslave | 7 hours ago
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
ricksunny | 15 hours ago
In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?
Zigurd | 7 hours ago
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
seer | 14 hours ago
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
flir | 13 hours ago
(TL;DR: It's just a metaphor).
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
neffy | 7 hours ago
ericyd | 22 hours ago
jdiff | 22 hours ago
all2 | 22 hours ago
DubiousPusher | 21 hours ago
esseph | 21 hours ago
c0nducktr | 21 hours ago
DubiousPusher | 19 hours ago
riddley | 21 hours ago
joe_the_user | 21 hours ago
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids
jojobas | 21 hours ago
N_Lens | 21 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 21 hours ago
bflesch | 22 hours ago
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
iamnothere | 22 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 22 hours ago
fn-mote | 21 hours ago
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
godwinson__4-8 | 20 hours ago
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
iamnothere | 20 hours ago
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
godwinson__4-8 | 19 hours ago
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
defmacr0 | 13 hours ago
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
godwinson__4-8 | 4 hours ago
For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.
We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".
The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.
This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".
Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.
markdown | 21 hours ago
Surely you mean oligarch-supervised institutions.
Our institutions are supervised by representatives elected on the dime of corporate and billionaire benefactors. They pull the strings.
It became a banana republic when money became speech.
totetsu | 19 hours ago
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/512315/updates-foreign-a...
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB. Nor was it put to any other minister. "This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
pluc | 22 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 22 hours ago
tasty_freeze | 20 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 20 hours ago
The first part because the second part.
joe_the_user | 21 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 22 hours ago
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
iamnothere | 22 hours ago
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
Arainach | 21 hours ago
Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
starkd | 21 hours ago
iamnothere | 21 hours ago
bdangubic | 20 hours ago
Arainach | 20 hours ago
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
iamnothere | 20 hours ago
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
Arainach | 20 hours ago
iamnothere | 20 hours ago
bediger4000 | 17 hours ago
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
bediger4000 | 6 hours ago
We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.
iamnothere | 6 hours ago
I want to see a debate stage with Haz Al-Din, AOC, Ezra Klein, Thomas Massie, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Fuentes. Let the best one win.
> We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views
And this is why only reactionaries gain a foothold. Powerful people benefit from it, so reactionary views are let in while the rest of the “window” remains intact. Smash the window.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
somenameforme | 19 hours ago
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
[1] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
[2] - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
mitxela | 14 hours ago
somenameforme | 13 hours ago
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
mitxela | 13 hours ago
somenameforme | 6 hours ago
In general I think if people were more regularly challenged on their claims, it might help reign in some of the self radicalization, intolerance, and so forth that's growing in society. When somebody only acknowledges 'friendly' voices, you end up in a scenario where they're effectively surrounding themselves with a baseline that's heavily biased, but that baseline will (from their perspective) be normal. That's just not healthy.
somenameforme | 20 hours ago
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
bluegatty | 19 hours ago
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
somenameforme | 17 hours ago
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
bluegatty | 15 hours ago
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
somenameforme | 15 hours ago
bluegatty | 14 hours ago
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
slg | 15 hours ago
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
somenameforme | 14 hours ago
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
Centrist Dems are more supportive, as are the (sizable) segment of socialists who understand history
Left libertarians are broadly supportive of free speech
slg | 5 hours ago
iamnothere | 4 hours ago
Support for hate speech laws is common among leftists who primarily focus on social causes, as is support for “deplatforming” political opponents. Some also support German-style laws regarding politically extreme speech, which is funny, because those laws would almost certainly be used against them if they weren’t plainly unconstitutional.
slg | 3 hours ago
iamnothere | 2 hours ago
> Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
But to answer your question about conservative opposition to free speech, some conservatives are now showing support for hate speech laws, specifically laws against antisemitic speech, which is new. So this is actually a current “both sides” issue. Time will tell if the poles fully reverse on this; I think it depends on what form post-Trump politics takes.
Edit: wow, TIL. Apparently there were local laws against “race hatred” on the books in the early 1900s, and some conservative segregationists found that they could use those laws against “anti-white” speech (like supporting integration) in the 40s and 50s. So believe it or not, they became supportive of these laws until the Warren court overturned them, thanks to the work of the ACLU.
slg | 22 minutes ago
Fair enough if you consider your comment a start of a new thread, but that is ignoring the context in which the comment you replied was made.
>specifically laws against antisemitic speech
As a Jewish person, I have a bridge that fights antisemitism to sell you if you genuinely believe this. Just the simple fact that they are only against antisemitism and not all hate speech should tell you there is no genuine conservative desire for hate speech laws. And your second example is just more evidence of that. Conservatives cynically abusing existing laws does not show a conservative value eventually becoming liberal or vice versa. You can argue it shows how these laws create problems, but it isn't evidence of any sort of switch in values.
viccis | 19 hours ago
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
StanislavPetrov | 19 hours ago
viccis | 16 hours ago
mitxela | 14 hours ago
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
I agree that his reporting on this was sub-par. It’s not his beat and he should probably leave it to others.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
Conservative enough for you?
viccis | 3 hours ago
The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.
Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.
If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.
bluegatty | 19 hours ago
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
aaron_m04 | 21 hours ago
iamnothere | 20 hours ago
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
crimsoneer | 16 hours ago
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
They put out an Interpol notice and had him on the “most wanted” list for this, which is ridiculous. There is documented communication between the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service and Swedish authorities where the CPS is goading the Swedes into continuing the case, warning them not to get “cold feet.”
The prosecution eventually dropped the case because they believed that the evidence was too weak, blaming the long gap in time. I’m not clear on how they thought the passage of time had weakened their evidence, which was limited to victim statements from the very beginning, AFAIK.
stickfigure | 16 hours ago
WarOnPrivacy | 20 hours ago
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
StanislavPetrov | 19 hours ago
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
WarOnPrivacy | 17 hours ago
It wasn't one. It was eight women who put themselves in the firing line of (mostly) men, who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
I believe them.
StanislavPetrov | 15 hours ago
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
walrus01 | 18 hours ago
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
rerdavies | 17 hours ago
Very generous indeed.
walrus01 | 16 hours ago
rerdavies | 12 hours ago
microtherion | 14 hours ago
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
https://masternotions.com
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
Funny to see someone who seems to be on the left engaging in “kink-shaming.” Glenn has the right to a personal sexual life, including whatever exotic sexual proclivities he may have. Frankly, the film you mentioned sounds pretty tame for gay porn.
nextstep | 12 hours ago
I read his substack, he seems to be critical of the US security state and not inline with alt-right principles at all
iamnothere | 8 hours ago
LastTrain | 20 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 17 hours ago
wvbdmp | 13 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 12 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
rtpg | 21 hours ago
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
[0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/
ktallett | 14 hours ago
ekjhgkejhgk | 14 hours ago
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
hnhg | 12 hours ago
jasonvorhe | 12 hours ago
jules-jules | 9 hours ago
Arodex | 9 hours ago
Proving again that the billionaire class is more lucky than smart, and has now more money than sense.
linkregister | 4 hours ago
throwaway85825 | 10 hours ago
TiredOfLife | 10 hours ago
2301976 | 9 hours ago
The latter applied to many US (and historically British empire wars, from where the US learned).
Greenwald had a Rumble contract for daily videos during the Biden years, so I think it would be fair to say he was a Trump influencer.
He also has many enemies in Brazil (e.g.. Supreme Judge Moraes), so that video could have come from anywhere.
But yes, he could also have been threatened over the Snowden files earlier.
ekjhgkejhgk | 6 hours ago
It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.
That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
123886 | 5 hours ago
That is a fine example of propaganda: All people, including historians who evaluate different possibilities, surely want to paint Russia as the victim!
You are literally forbidding people to think.
bigyabai | 4 hours ago
pphysch | 3 hours ago
bigyabai | 2 hours ago
throwaway85825 | an hour ago
mopsi | 5 hours ago
3hG1 | 4 hours ago
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...
All is in line with his realist great powers philosophy (the 1993 analysis differs of course because there was no significant NATO expansion yet).
I'm sure he would take CNN money, too, but they don't invite him. That is the problem if you isolate people.
root_axis | 2 hours ago
2301976 | 9 hours ago
linkregister | 4 hours ago
signalblur | 4 hours ago
The intercept is a joke and so are those that work there.
autoexec | 47 minutes ago
frmersdog | 3 hours ago
EDIT: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reality_winner
Coeur | 21 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 21 hours ago
NamTaf | 19 hours ago
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
BLKNSLVR | 18 hours ago
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
firesteelrain | 20 hours ago
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry
anonym29 | 20 hours ago
firesteelrain | 20 hours ago
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
BLKNSLVR | 20 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
firesteelrain | 20 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 20 hours ago
If a person has a 'state', but that state would immediately jail the person for treason upon their return, is that materially different to stateless?
That feels like the reason that many countries allow 'political asylum'.
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.
BLKNSLVR | 19 hours ago
You seem to continue to minimise the seriousness of the situation.
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
pydry | 15 hours ago
It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.
firesteelrain | 12 hours ago
kelnos | 12 hours ago
pydry | 10 hours ago
iamnothere | 19 hours ago
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
BLKNSLVR | 18 hours ago
ShinyLeftPad | 17 hours ago
The only problem with getting asylum anywhere while being stateless is proving who you are. And it wasn't a problem for him.
viccis | 19 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 18 hours ago
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
(inb4: No, you're wrong, he wasn't stateless.)
pepperoni_pizza | 14 hours ago
If you decide your words mean something else to the common usage, people will react to that.
brightball | 20 hours ago
I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
sentientlaserbe | 10 hours ago
"Her" is Snowden.
Let's not be so sneaky in how we word things ;)
crossroadsguy | 17 hours ago
"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"
Hence established! ^
BLKNSLVR | 18 hours ago
anonym29 | 9 hours ago
walrus01 | 18 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 15 hours ago
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
walrus01 | 15 hours ago
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
commandersaki | 19 hours ago
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
Lammy | 19 hours ago
judge2020 | 18 hours ago
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
Lammy | 17 hours ago
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
nl | 17 hours ago
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
> We kill people based on metadata.
Sure, but they also kill people based on content.
Lammy | 17 hours ago
I wholeheartedly disagree :)
If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...
One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lolnl | 17 hours ago
> I am here → Don't be seen
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
Lammy | 16 hours ago
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
nl | 16 hours ago
It seem you concede the point about survivability though?
Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.
ShinyLeftPad | 17 hours ago
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
nl | 15 hours ago
Just visiting, sure but if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
Say you are on your school network and leak something damaging about the school on Wikipedia.
Prior to Wikpedia switching to HTTPS, both the school and any intermediate network could see
After HTTPS, your school could see That's strictly better in every way.layer8 | 12 hours ago
It’s really not, because knowing when you edited it is already enough, given that there’s a timestamped edit history. And the size and shape of your request payloads will show that you edited it, not merely performed GET requests.
Melatonic | 16 hours ago
And of course the additional options available
jeltz | 14 hours ago
commandersaki | 7 hours ago
mitxela | 14 hours ago
jeroenhd | 12 hours ago
In practice, those caches were all done for malicious purposes, usually for injecting ads and selling tracking information through injected headers.
Those shared caches were monitored just as strongly, if not stronger, by the people doing internet surveillance.
commandersaki | 7 hours ago
octoberfranklin | 18 hours ago
VCFundedGenYer | 19 hours ago
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
BLKNSLVR | 19 hours ago
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
unsungNovelty | 19 hours ago
usumgallu | 12 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 9 hours ago
No good deed goes unpunished.
nl | 19 hours ago
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
unsungNovelty | 19 hours ago
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
unsungNovelty | 19 hours ago
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
nl | 19 hours ago
The word "flee" is not a pejorative in any way. For example flee North Korea all the time.
unsungNovelty | 18 hours ago
firesteelrain | 19 hours ago
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
unsungNovelty | 18 hours ago
Can't be serious.
firesteelrain | 18 hours ago
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
unsungNovelty | 18 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 17 hours ago
anon7000 | 18 hours ago
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
ShinyLeftPad | 17 hours ago
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
mitxela | 14 hours ago
ShinyLeftPad | 13 hours ago
marsmaps | 10 hours ago
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th... 'What the United States Did in Indonesia', The Atlantic
modo_mario | 14 hours ago
It was not the original intent from what i understand.
But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
ShinyLeftPad | 13 hours ago
As i wrote he probably took the easiest way out for himself. We are in agreement.
I just say what's better for himself is not necessarily better for the debate/cause. I don't know how that is controversial.
sensanaty | 13 hours ago
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
ShinyLeftPad | 12 hours ago
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
fsflover | 12 hours ago
He didn't, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782465
slg | 19 hours ago
unsungNovelty | 18 hours ago
marcus_holmes | 18 hours ago
slg | 17 hours ago
marcus_holmes | 16 hours ago
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
slg | 15 hours ago
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
marsmaps | 10 hours ago
slg | 5 hours ago
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Arodex | 8 hours ago
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
linkregister | 3 hours ago
CalRobert | 17 hours ago
Arodex | 14 hours ago
dhx | 13 hours ago
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...
impossiblefork | 17 hours ago
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
slg | 17 hours ago
Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.
impossiblefork | 17 hours ago
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
slg | 16 hours ago
impossiblefork | 15 hours ago
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
slg | 5 hours ago
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
impossiblefork | 3 hours ago
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
slg | 28 minutes ago
kelnos | 12 hours ago
Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.
slg | 5 hours ago
ninalanyon | 12 hours ago
That's exactly what they are.
youngtaff | 14 hours ago
He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy
sensanaty | 13 hours ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50473792
kotaKat | 12 hours ago
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
amiga386 | 9 hours ago
The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.
I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.
Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.
Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.
blitzar | 14 hours ago
Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is
masfuerte | 14 hours ago
blitzar | 13 hours ago
one is true and one is false
judge2020 | 18 hours ago
defmacr0 | 13 hours ago
Arodex | 8 hours ago
Arodex | 14 hours ago
firesteelrain | 10 hours ago
sandblast | 6 hours ago
maxbond | 17 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 17 hours ago
maxbond | 17 hours ago
mannanj | 17 hours ago
tosapple | 14 hours ago
MSFT_Edging | 9 hours ago
linkregister | 3 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 8 hours ago
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
The lesson in all this? Stay in school.
NoMoreNicksLeft | 7 hours ago
Haha. Tell us another one. I don't have enough comedy in my life.
lern_too_spel | 6 hours ago
NoMoreNicksLeft | 3 hours ago
To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
lern_too_spel | 3 hours ago
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
achierius | 17 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 8 hours ago
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
pydry | 15 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 12 hours ago
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...
linkregister | 3 hours ago
It was probably unwise of him to insult the T group director publicly, which led to the entire subsequent chain of events.
mitxela | 14 hours ago
Arodex | 14 hours ago
pidgeon_lover | 13 hours ago
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
Arodex | 9 hours ago
Russia may execute him anytime though. And his family. Easy to pretend he was killed by an Ukrainian bombing.
scrollaway | 4 hours ago
You have zero moral ground or credibility to stand on.
firesteelrain | 10 hours ago
MSFT_Edging | 9 hours ago
He exposed massive unconstitutional dragnets that made the unaccountable agencies look bad.
If the damage is "makes the US look bad from their illegal surveillance of citizens", then the NSA did that to themselves.
nilamo | 3 hours ago
INTPenis | 12 hours ago
atemerev | 11 hours ago
INTPenis | 10 hours ago
And maybe that's why the Snowden documents are not being fully released, because they've gone from responsible disclosure to irresponsible disclosure.
I'm 100% convinced the US is evil imperialists, but in this particular case the "Snowden being a Russian agent"-angle isn't finding much resistance.
atemerev | 10 hours ago
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
INTPenis | 9 hours ago
dijit | 10 hours ago
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
firesteelrain | 10 hours ago
fsflover | 9 hours ago
dijit | 9 hours ago
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
firesteelrain | 8 hours ago
dijit | 7 hours ago
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
hylaride | 4 hours ago
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
IAmBroom | 8 hours ago
Decisions made at gunpoint are not usually preplanned choices.
firesteelrain | 8 hours ago
Really have to question his motives
palata | an hour ago
Against... the NSA. Do you genuinely believe that anyone could leak that amount of NSA data anonymously?
firesteelrain | 51 minutes ago
TiredOfLife | 17 hours ago
crossroadsguy | 17 hours ago
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
margalabargala | 5 hours ago
viktorcode | 14 hours ago
atemerev | 10 hours ago
fn-mote | 3 hours ago
The article addresses this argument, and quite thoroughly dismisses it as BS. Read the report about how rapidly the reporting stopped and how much material was left untouched.
WarOnPrivacy | 20 hours ago
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance+torrent
kiproping | 10 hours ago
TiredOfLife | 10 hours ago
motionlessveloc | 20 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 20 hours ago
Also, please refer to a reply to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong
0110101001 | 19 hours ago
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
whatshisface | 19 hours ago
BLKNSLVR | 19 hours ago
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
walrus01 | 19 hours ago
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
dinfinity | 19 hours ago
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
lern_too_spel | 17 hours ago
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
winter_blue | 16 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 12 hours ago
It's right there on the leaked slide: https://imgur.com/setOJIm
drugstorecowboy | 5 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 5 hours ago
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/no-evidence-of-nsas-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mini...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-did-mainstream-media-get-t...
https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...
https://medium.com/prism-truth/the-prism-details-matter-82a1...
drugstorecowboy | 3 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 3 hours ago
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
dinfinity | 10 hours ago
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
lern_too_spel | 7 hours ago
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
dinfinity | 7 hours ago
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
lern_too_spel | 7 hours ago
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
TiredOfLife | 17 hours ago
phendrenad2 | 20 hours ago
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
corndoge | 19 hours ago
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
octoberfranklin | 18 hours ago
mitxela | 14 hours ago
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.
mitxela | 10 hours ago
Quothling | 16 hours ago
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
_nobody | 11 hours ago
Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!
tyrabound | 13 hours ago
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
BoggleOhYeah | 18 hours ago
He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.
ktallett | 14 hours ago
BoggleOhYeah | 9 hours ago
sensanaty | 13 hours ago
BoggleOhYeah | 8 hours ago
I’d argue he is more physical danger now being in a mafia state near an active war zone.
That said, I wouldn’t come back and subject myself the whims of this administration.
sriramraja251 | 17 hours ago
ivolimmen | 16 hours ago
ak39 | 15 hours ago
jeroenhd | 12 hours ago
You can try this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260921054500/https://libroot.o...
ivolimmen | 11 hours ago
Pikamander2 | an hour ago
The site owner should appeal the block here: https://spa.xfinity.com/report
21asdffdsa12 | 14 hours ago
tancop | 12 hours ago
A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.
They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.
jasonvorhe | 12 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 12 hours ago
The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
XajniN | 11 hours ago
pjc50 | 9 hours ago
UncleMeat | 9 hours ago
Arodex | 9 hours ago
Chris2048 | 11 hours ago
There's a difference between caring about NS, and letting the government dictate how to do so.
ethbr1 | 10 hours ago
Free journalism in a democracy is inherently political, which means there is always an ethical balance between the duty to inform and potential harm.
For example: the name of a secret foreign agent
It is a fact. It is news. It has potential harm. What are the pros and cons of publishing it?
Traster | 12 hours ago
I think the answer to what happened is really straight forward though - they published as much of it as they could, what they published is probably pretty representative of other stuff in the archives and there's no news value to publishing 100 variations of the same story. If they published 1% of the archive, but the other 99% is just a million details about the same basic decisions then I don't think it matters much. It's also a really slow and painful process to make sure you're protecting the identities of people.
Having said that, I could see some value in a team taking a privately hosted open source AI model, feeding into it the archive and any related news articles into it and asking it if there's anything newsworthy that we missed.
irthomasthomas | 10 hours ago
throwaway85825 | 10 hours ago
segmondy | 9 hours ago
majkinetor | 3 hours ago
1. Use all variants of local AI to categorize documents and remove PII. Different AI's can be used to doublecheck results
2. Publish output as a torrent
Then wider community can find whatever patterns exist there.
righthand | 11 hours ago
ivolimmen | 11 hours ago
craniumjello | 10 hours ago
marysol5 | 10 hours ago
Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.
31337Logic | 9 hours ago
sc68cal | 6 hours ago
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.
RankingMember | 4 hours ago
jLaForest | 3 hours ago
autoexec | an hour ago
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since. I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
cm2012 | 3 hours ago
jra_samba | 3 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...
cm2012 | 2 hours ago
raincole | 2 hours ago
phainopepla2 | 53 minutes ago
root_axis | 2 hours ago
grugagag | 2 hours ago
GuB-42 | 2 hours ago
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
autoexec | an hour ago
Not wanting to be subjected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... doesn't unmake someone a hero
antman | an hour ago
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
GuB-42 | 40 minutes ago
A hero of the world, not a hero of the US. That's what I wanted to say.
tonymet | 5 hours ago
First, he seemed to embellish his role and authority at NSA. Based on his vernacular, and the artifacts that he presented, I believe he was an IT admin, who happened upon these files. His archive was predominantly design / spec docs with screenshots, rather than code artifacts (compiled code, 1st hand screenshots, configs). In his interviews he didn’t seem to have a deep technical grasp of the systems, and he was cagey about his areas of responsibility.
Second, XKeyScore and other system implementations seemed too primitive for the claimed capability. It was claimed they could google everyone’s email (or some large share of the population, let’s say 100-500m individuals, in real time), but the designs were primitive collegiate level , single-instance mySQL databases and CRUD UIs. I didn’t see any indications the system capability met the claims .
I’m not an expert, I’ve read No Place to Hide, watched some interviews, and used to follow him on Twitter.
I’d like to see how this community assessed him personally and the artifacts he shared.
tonymet | 5 hours ago
mixmastamyk | 5 hours ago
tonymet | 2 hours ago
mixmastamyk | 17 minutes ago
Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.
tonymet | 2 hours ago
can you elaborate on this ? what were his responsibilities and what role did he have in setting up the system?
He seemed to imply that he helped deploy these systems (though he never authored them), but from his interviews & the evidence provided, I don't even think that was the case. I got the impression he was sort of a backup & storage manager.
mixmastamyk | 24 minutes ago
Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.
He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.
tonymet | 18 minutes ago
What's your overall take? do you think evidence was presented to confirm these systems were active around his tenure e.g. 2012? I'm maybe 20% confident they were active.
mixmastamyk | 9 minutes ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.
Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.
tonymet | 2 minutes ago
A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 4 hours ago
kleiba2 | 3 hours ago
garganzol | 3 hours ago
freebsd_lovefes | 3 hours ago
baist0 | 2 hours ago