Just making sure I understand your argument. Is the following hypothetical in line with your thinking?

The important difference was if you agree with the administrations goals when they abuse power.

So if Obama spies on all American's private conversations, only to stop only totally evil child pornographers... that's ok.

But if future President Jeb Bush spies on all American's private conversations, in order to find Russian spies and retaliate against their countries interference in our election... that would be wrong.

Obama didn't do that. If Bush was going after people for political activity who weren't Russian agents your analogy would be correct.

Obama was no saint.

https://sharylattkisson.com/2017/09/24/obama-era-surveillanc...

The first thing that would come to mind is that people may feel threatened by what Snowden revealed, but not by Raines

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...?

I see this sort of comment every time Snowden comes up on HN. Someone alludes to secret knowledge about him, then makes a dramatic statement that doesn't have any actually-testable component. It's true, the extent of the damage Snowden caused may never be known - even if there wasn't any!

Could you perhaps clarify any of this?

I'm particularly interested by "the Honolulu hackerspace that he later used for his politics". To my knowledge, the only involvement he ever had was to throw a single crypto party there, which none of the attendees have described as being especially political or unusual. Hosting crypto parties at hackerspaces is a pretty standard practice from what I've seen.

Did Snowden do something else political or detrimental at HiCapacity? And does that somehow tie into knowing "a thing or two" about him, given that no one at HiCapacity (or anywhere) seems to have known about the leaks until they were national news?

edit: Seeing as the parent was deleted, I should say that there wasn't anything interesting there. A weird allusion to Snowden screwing up a hackerspace, but no actual substance to justify the mystery.

By damage do you mean indirect political damage stemming from the controversy surrounding Snowden, or direct damage to the US intel programs caused by the actual information that he released? To my knowledge there wasn't really any direct damage at all as a result of Snowden's actions (which is not always true of leakers, see Chelsea Manning)

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Personally, I don't doubt that Snowden caused some damage to the IC community. However, I would argue that the benefit to people who would like to live in a modern democracy far outweighs that damage.

I truly believe that the only reason more people are not be outraged by the IC's actions is by not understanding their capabilities. I'm a graduate student in CS and am still amazed at what they could do. There's no way in heck I expect my mother to appreciate the gravity of the danger of such a surveillance state because she can't even begin to comprehend what is possible.

EDIT: why delete your comments? You should stand by your views even if others disagree. Well, not to the point of being stubborn, but in this case I don't get it.

Since it's gone now, I'll toss in context for those confused: there was yet another comment descending from this one that was also deleted.

It too advanced a weird suggestion that the Hi Capacity makerspace was somehow deeply tied into politics and the intelligence community, and was disrupted by Snowden. (And, of course, offered no support for that claim.)

I had edited/removed the comment for a reason, so your revival of it via inaccurate takeaway isn't particularly appreciated.

In light of the responses, I re-considered whether it was best to keep such information here, but you've simply made things more difficult for me with a false representation of a removed post, that I cannot remove and to which I do not wish to respond.

It was my mistake for deciding to share what was posted here, but it would have been common courtesy to let it go (and not revive the comment in interpretive form), since it was removed by me. You could have contacted me privately to discuss further, as a courtesy to me.

Confused as to the deletion of comments as well. The parent didn't seem to be alluding to any confidential or classified information specifically enough for it to matter, merely its existence, which is obviously already public knowledge

PGP was publicly accessible long before Snowden so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say