Some leaks are benifical and others are detrimental. Some leakers are heros, some are traitors, and others are somewhere in between. It's not black and white.
1) The majority of what got people riled up about Snowden's revelations was that the US government was spying ON THEIR OWN CITIZENS.
In places like China and Russia nobody batted an eye because the expectation is obviously the government already does that.
Call it naive, but the majority of the US population believed (and still believes) that their government is above that. That regardless of whatever questionable evil the US military conducts abroad in the name of "democracy", domestically people have freedom and liberty. Sure, the post 9/11 world eroded it somewhat, but GENERALLY there is still the concept of privacy.
Snowden shattered this fantasy. Everyone is being watched. All those conspiracy whackjobs, all the hollywood "worst nightmares" turned out to be true.
That the government was doing this, and that it reacted to the leaks with extreme prejudice and desire to treat Snowden like a traitor rather than a patriot is what led to people considering him a hero.
I could go deeper into the other arguments like "I have nothing to hide so why should I care that the government is monitoring what I'm saying", but I'd like to know more about your stance first. Do you think that the domestic surveillance is justified for the greater good of international security? Or do you simply believe that it's obvious and expected of the government to take on this role, and fighting it is ridiculous.
I am someone who is clearly in the camp that you criticize (in fact, more than the average of HN commenters) and I think there's a lot to talk about, including
American anti-government and anti-military cultural and political traditions (which are extremely important for American society and history, but also very diverse, and not easy for Americans to find consensus about)
How are those currents different, differently expressed, or absent in other parts of the world?
Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on a national level (Americans vs. the U.S. government)
Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on an international level (people vs. governments in general)
All of these issues are interesting and can be much more complicated than the simple accounts that we might tend to give of them at first. I don't feel like I have time to do justice to these topics at the moment, but hopefully this thread or a future one will give an opportunity to go further into these things.
Examples which I still hear repeated: The claim that NSA considers TOR users to be extremists (Based purely off XKS DSL code which was used to filter connections), claims that there is a loophole allowing NSA to collect American information via GCHQ (In reality US Person Information protections apply regardless of who collected the data), and claims that companies are willing "partners" of the NSA via PRISM (Whereas PRISM is actually the term used to describe use of the FBI and a FISA warrant+gag to collect non-US Person data from US companies using an assumed-to-be automated process, the companies themselves not actually having a choice in the matter).
NSA seems to have decided to not push back on the untrue claims or assumptions which were conveyed. There were responses along the lines of "the organization does everything within the bounds of US law for national security purposes" which is quite meaningless and only served to make people more upset. With the material already out there, NSA PR probably could have done much better if they responded in an informed and blunt manner, instead of allowing the "blanks" to be filled in by assumptions.
I understand and fully agree with your main point, but it isn't too hard to see why this attitude is prevalent regarding the US IC these days, as most folks have not read the source material and are relying on what the press coverage either stated or implied.
If that attitude has yielded "one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there", as you called it elsewhere, I don't see that as a bad thing.
That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse.
(The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)
For many of us, our loyalty is to our country as a whole, and the ideals upon which it was founded, not to any regime that attempts to abuse those ideals without our knowledge.
I spotted two names in the Vault 7 leaks which WL failed to redact. Metadata from Shadow Brokers leaks gave Equation Group member identities, and additionally the Shadow Brokers twitter account directly called out a former Equation Group operator who is a part of the Information Security community (currently private sector / pen-testing).
So this is already starting to happen. Dangerous path, especially considering the indifference you mention.
The United States is a country founded on distrust of power. Nevertheless, it is a state, and its function is to protect its citizens through monopoly of force. That tension is central to our political consciousness.
Sometimes people argue that "secrecy" is required to fulfill the duties of the state. Secrecy is required, sometimes, but secrecy requires trust, and trusting the powerful is not something we do. If we 'must', then we demand checks to prevent its abuse.
In the mythos of the United States, the government (county, state, federal, doesn't matter) is always viewed as a potential threat. America-worshiping morons notwithstanding, there is a deep moral undercurrent in this country that views the state as intrinsically corrupt, simply because it has power.
Many felt that the Snowden leaks showed that whatever mechanisms were supposed to be in place to check overreach by a potential enemy were not functioning. People who view Snowden as a hero believe that he was fulfilling his duty as a citizen to his fellow citizens.
If you wonder why someone might be paranoid about their own government in the 21st century, I think its sufficient to point out that governments killed several orders of magnitude more of their own citizens in the 20th century than they did foreign citizens in wars. I personally believe that a turn to an unchecked security state in the United States is a bigger threat to my children and children's children than a war with China (or wherever), and a vastly larger threat than "terrorism".
I hope that helps clarify why a reasonable citizen of the United States might be at least ambivalent towards leaks.
Also I hope its clear that this is a discussion about what is fundamentally a fiction: the people (myself in particular) have a bullshit narrative about governments and corruptions and heroes, you have some bullshit narrative about spies and the CIA. Both are very thinly connected to reality, because the reality we're describing is vast and overwhelmingly complicated. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have any well-researched constructive suggestions about what I would do to fix the mechanisms of verification that should be in place to check secrecy in our security apparatus. But this isn't a conversation about mechanisms and policies, it's one about narrative, and one compelling narrative in the United States is that we owe our duty to our compatriots not the government, and government is always the first and most likely place to look for something evil.
But I'm not American and neither are you. Why do we care?
read US constitution so you actually know who is the traitor here
Why do think that is? Governments that have the blind trust and loyalty of their populations are more vulnerable to corruption.
I am not sure how you reach the conclusion that being critical of USG actions is somehow praising or supporting worse international actors such as Russia.
And the bad behavior of other countries does not excuse the bad behavior our of own. I am a US citizen so I will criticize the USG because that is what affects my life most. It is also my right and the only country that I have any sort of voice in the matter (however small).
Also, patriotism as a justification for not exposing a corrupt government is a load of shit.
The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist.
Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots...
In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."
It's incorrect to equate distrust of government for hatred of a country. The reason this country is loveable is because it was forged by distrust of power.
I actually find your equation of love of government with love of country to be mind-blowing strange. What on earth?
And the myth of the US being better. Pah. China's elite are corrupt as fuck, but I don't think the US can be proud by saying "well we're very fucking corrupt, but China's worse at that!". Military-industrial complex, Halliburton, Citizens United, Wisconsin, Donald Trump and his GOP Congress still plowing through a bill that will strip health protection from millions... But oh no, look at the Chinese.
To quote Brandeis, "Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution."
You are the one inviting everyone to be a law unto himself. If any would-be-leaker feels the government is doing any wrong doing, he's free to take the law unto himself and release that information to the public along with whatever else fits into his usb key. There are proper channels to handle this, which don't involve betraying your country and breaking one of the most fundamental laws in the country, and the fact the government was acting illegaly doesn't justify breaking the law.
https://news.vice.com/story/exclusive-snowden-tried-to-tell-...
As Doge would say, "Much faith, wow.". I see it more of a mafia organization. You try to speak out within the org? You'll sleep with the fishes, metaphorically speaking.
> If any would-be-leaker feels the government is doing any wrong doing, he's free to [...] release that information
So Snowden is justified in doing what he did?
I never did address the leak of the hacking tools, IMO that is less in the public's interest and the leaker's motive is probably to damage the agency, but to re-use the Mafia comparison, someone who can see clearly what that organization does (rather than just gulp propaganda from Fox News or Russia Today) probably doesn't feel that bad if his actions damage the org/that is what motivates him.
In any other sane country, the outrage against such leakers would be far greater than the outrage against the government for doing its job. If a person was as a big traitor as snowden in my country, you'd see his whole family and friends deny him, he would think twice before doing it not only because of the chance of getting caught and going to jail, but from the actual embarassment and shame from all the people close to him.
Yet look at snowden, acting like he's some hero. Look at all the other leakers. They are barely ashamed. Your society hates the government so much you're turning traitors into heroes. Your security screening process is probably failing hard with so many leaks. How can the US allies trust it when everything leaks one way or the other. Leaking should be considered such a horrible treason the only the most psychopathic person would do it, and the screening should screen those out. But when society views leakers as heroes, and even the president freely leaks other countries intelligence to russia, followed by even more leaks than what he actually said, when it's justified as long as 1 in the 1000 documents they leaked shows some government wrongdoing (and statistically this will ALWAYS happen), they aren't traitors they are heroes. Then you don't need be a huge psychopath to betray your country. You just need some nudge in the 'right' direction.
If any of you think the right approach is to have no secrets (a.k.a. no vulnerabilities. Today it's vulnerabilities, tommorow it's CIA agents identities), you're naive. If you think your enemies will be as righteous as you, you are naive. If you think that if you disclose all vulnerabilities, nobody will have them, you are naive because russia and china will find their own different vulnerabilities.