> The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated. No evidence has been found that he was, just as no evidence has been found that he was a spy for China. ... We can’t know.

Wikipedia: Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy...

This claim struck me as especially dumb. We can easily determine whether or not he was a Russian asset by asking the question "Why is he in Russia?" He is in Russia because the U.S. cancelled his passport after he left China and before he got to Ecuador. He hasn't been able to leave because the U.S. won't restore his passport. And he's still on a temporary Russian visa. And even if he found a way to fly, the last time the United States thought (incorrectly) he was on a plane, they forced the plane (which was registered as a diplomatic flight) to land.

The conspiracy that he was flipped by Russia after he got there is at least not contradicted by the obvious facts, but a claim that he was a Russian agent all along is asinine.

If we posit that his being in Russia is not good evidence for him being a Russian agent all along, that does not mean it is good evidence he was not a Russian agent all along.

Parsimony would dictate that a plan that involves them getting their asset back through a convoluted series of timing decisions the U.S. made that were completely beyond Russia's control is a terrible plan, and one that could have easily been replaced with him simply flying directly to Russia the first time and not leaving.

Why assume that things happened according to a/the plan? Things often don't happen according to plan. I was just reading that some people think Guccifer 2.0 was actually a response to blown cover.

Uncertainty and doubt are not actually bad. There are a whole lot questions we don't have good answers for, and so we should be comfortable admitting what we don't know. You can keep questions in mind without immediately answering them.

On the other hand there are what I call the "instant experts" who are quick to take sides on something they were ignorant of yesterday, just because they read something about it in the news.

You're confusing the scientific rational doubt, and projected, induced, completely irrational and paranoid feeling of doubtful fear and uncertainty that distorts peoples' perception and makes them panic and act irrational, and do and accept things and compromises they otherwise never would. The fear of the dark, if you will. And whether it's government pushing for more control, or pimps/mafia/molesters pushing their victims into submission, the mechanisms are very similar, they always first sell you the fear and then offer the protection from it (if you do as told, of course).

One person's rational doubt is another's paranoid doubt. I thought the original article expressed rational doubt.

Without evidence, I lean towards assuming Snowden's motives are what he says they are. But after all, none of us (I assume) actually know him. He's a person in the news.

People used to say Wikileaks is independent and definitely not propped up by the Kremlin. And now it's plainly apparent that they are. For me, living in Russia and knowing the kind of rhetoric our government likes to push, it was obvious all along. Once Snowden will be revealed working for the Kremlin, I'm looking forward to gloat about that too.

Can you present any solid evidence to support your "plainly apparent" claim?

See, the typical tactic of Kremlinbots is to deny all existing evidence as fake, and then ask for proofs. So, I have to ask you first: do you find the current evidence that MH-17 was shot down by a Russian Buk launcher, and that Skripals were poisoned by Russian GRU agents "solid" enough? If you don't think the evidence for these two events is "solid" (I think it is solid), then I will be unable to provide you "solid" evidence that Wikileaks cooperates with Kremlin.

I’m a long time reader but just registered to ask this. Could you share what evidence that Kremlin poisoned Scripals is solid in your view?

The interview of Petrov and Boshirov on Russia Today. They basically confirm that all evidence previously revealed by UK side is not made up, but was actually real all along. And their excuses for their itinerary are laughable. This was basically Russian government confirming "yes, we did it, and we don't give a shit". There's no way to spin that interview into Russia not being somehow involved with the poisoning.

Unintelligible and endless. I don't know what's being "reconsidered" because this adds nothing other than an weird-ass attempt to associate Wikileaks, Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald with Putin and Russia, Nazism, and the Australian far-right(?!).

Agree. Don't know why you're being downvoted. This is a dumb piece.

The Australian far right, also known as the shooters and fishers party...

Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.

Also the claim of "alignment" comes from preference runoffs, because wikileaks put them ahead of the greens. Seems like a lot of bias packed just in this one sentence.

> Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.

Are you Australian? The shard in your username makes me think you might be.* Regardless, down here the handful of people who would be considered as proponents of gun rights would also most likely align with the far right (One Nation, Shooters and Fishers, etc).

* Don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia "shards" is a slang term for ice/crystal meth.

So we're supposed to be OK with this?

>Snowden’s tweets and lectures have real-world impact. After his disclosures, Tor’s usership shot up from a million to six million. He repeatedly tweeted to his followers that they should use Tor and Signal. Tor’s default search engine DuckDuckGo, which claims to protect privacy by refraining from the profiling that other browsers do in order to provide personalized searches, saw a 600 percent increase in traffic over just a few months. One of DuckDuckGo’s partners is Yandex, Russia’s government-controlled search engine, although the company says it does not allow the collection or sharing of user data by its partners. Certification by the Snowden brand may well be the chief reason that so much faith is now placed uncritically in these platforms.

Really?

> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed by Snowden. An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search engine allows partners to collect user data; it does not. The article has been updated.

So the author spent all this time writing this article couldn't even bother to confirm how many documents were leaked and seemed to be under the assumption that DDG is data mining it's users?

This article just feels like it was written by a 3 letter agency and dropped on someone's desk.

There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.

> people he barely knew

Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?

I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they contain --- which is what Snowden did.

Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows? That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them characterized... but, this is fine.

So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad because it ran with an incorrect count.

I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article bad.

I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off.

"They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.

The first paragraph of this comment responds to things I actually said. The second looks like you may have accidentally spliced a reply to a different comment into this one.

But the flip side of that coin is that to my understanding he disclosed the information to only a handful of journalists and not the entire world. Sure, his decision wasn't ideal, but no situation was given the position he put himself in.

It was written by a three letter agency because it contained and corrected some relatively minor factual errors?

Accusing DDG of doing the very thing it claims it does not and will never do is beyond "relatively minor" in my opinion.

It's not 'accusing'. It's just making a mistake. And either way, that's not any sort of evidence of the piece being written by some three letter agency.

DuckDuckGo just really doesn’t matter to this piece (which is about ideology and power, not tech). Still an error that they shouldn’t have made, but it is a “minor” error.

I can come up with no better summation of the damage Snowden has done to liberal democracies and the rule of law than his quote near the end: "...Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving effective change"

In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't create the lasting change they hope for.

This is not only incredibly childish and destructive - it's inaccurate. Politics and the rule of law have have provided protections for racial, sexual, religious minority populations in dozens of countries around the globe, have destroyed institutional slavery, and have created the largest sustained creation of broad-based wealth in human history. It's provided universal health care for millions of people across Europe and the Americas, defeated totalitarianism in two global conflicts, launched people into space, and created the technological revolution without which we wouldn't be having this debate today.

We're not perfect. Nobody claims we are. But politics and law are how we improve ourselves.

>In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't create the lasting change they hope for.

Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately ignored.

This security apparatus undermines the very fabric of law and government that you speak so highly of.

In case you've forgotten the 4th Amendment.

>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things

So what's your suggestion?

Silently put your head down and continue to breach the Constitutional rights of the American public?

Maybe you'd have kept fighting the man from within a system that clearly ignores one of the most fundamental pieces of our democracy, our Bill of Rights?

Sure, peoples rights are being trampled on but at least the youth wouldn't get any funny ideas.

Snowden gave up more for the USA than you, me, and many people on HN likely ever will by exposing an unconstitutional surveillance system so vast it'd give the Stasi a wet dream.

Edward Snowden is a patriot and I say that without reservation.

>Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately ignored.

He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided 0 evidence to back it up. Considering he says that he only leaked information because internal methods had failed him, you'd figure he would have saved at least a single shred of proof that he tried to handle things internally, but he didn't.

He's already admitted during interviews that he applied for the job specifically to gather information to leak, and the majority of the information had nothing to do with the surveillance program in the USA. He's far from a patriot, and anyone who believes he leaked all of the sensitive information out of the goodness of his heart is just being naive.

>He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided 0 evidence to back it up.

Thanks to another one of the cornerstones of our democracy, Freedom of the Press, here is an article to refute your point.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden...

>Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden’s communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.

>The trove of more than 800 pages [see the pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the U.S. government’s long-running narrative about Snowden’s time at the NSA.

In short, it would seem that there is pretty ample evidence that some significant conversations took place between Snowden and the NSA.

You can even view the FOIA requests that revealed this information at the end of the above article.

Can you link to interviews where he said that he signed up for the intelligence job to leak information. Sounds very strange to me.

Snowden was not the first who tried official channels.Seeing what happens to Thomas Drake, I think Snowdens reaction was warranted https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...

G

So what happens if a you realize your government is not adhering to the law? Shouldn’t you inform the public?

That’s what Snowden did, with high costs to himself. Snowden taught a generation to have a moral compass.

This article adds no new insides. Instead it drifts off in conspiracy theories.

> Snowden taught a generation to have a moral compass.

And then hid with the government that definitely wasn't adhering to the law.

I'd say it's not a good example of a moral compass.

NSA programs exposed by Snowden have been ruled unlawful, unconstitutional and in violation of Human Rights. Snowden has been loyal to the Constitution in blowing the whistle, while NSA hasn't. Working within the frameworks of politics and working within the framework of the law are not the same thing.

This is like blaming the underground railroad for the civil war.

When were there two global conflicts between "politics and the rule of law" on one side and "totalitarianism" on the other side?

Perhaps the strategies you're referring to under the term "politics and the rule of law" are more effective at promoting some goals than they are at other goals?

That sounds like blaming the little kid for stripping the emperor naked. Rule of law was already ravaged by secret laws, secret courts and surveillance.

It will take more than politics to fix things. Disobedience is key to fixing evil institutions. Communist states fell when soldiers refused to shoot civilians. Technically a departure from law but the law was meant to serve us not the other way around.

This is a pretty smart article. The author makes a solid attempt to explain one of the weirder things about Snowden, Assange, and Greenwald, and the other people in their orbit — why do people who care about transparency and revealing government wrongdoing appear to defend and/or support Putin?

I’m not entirely convinced by the explanation, but it’s the best one I’ve seen so far, and a lot of these people’s actions make more sense if the author is right about what motivates them.

Can you point to one instance where Snowden supported/defended Putin or opinions of Putin? Couldn’t find one in the article.

Several such instances are listed in the article, the argument is pretty clearly stated. If you don't find it convincing, that's one thing but claiming it's not there when it plainly is is just odd.

The article claims a lot ... yet I cannot find any source interviews where Snowden defended Putin.

That's not what you asked. The article lists several occurrences which the author interprets as support for Putin. You said you read the article and found no such thing. That's not a reasonable representation of the article. Or of reading.

Several? Snowden is brought into association with Assange and Greenwald, a lot of the instances you are talking about mentioned in the article are not related to Snowden but to Wikileaks etc. I don’t know any instance where Snowden was in direct support or defended Putin (even from the article). The only “Support” from Snowden was showing up in a TV show with Putin asking him 2 questions.

Still my question holds: when did Snowden defend Putin? (and can you get a source interview or statement directly from Snowden … not associations over actions of 3rd parties).

I'm not really interested in hashing out whether you think Snowden does or does not support Putin by your personally chosen criteria of the meaning of 'support' and proof. I'm happy to agree that you think he doesn't in advance.

I don’t know. Moving to Russia?

Seems US government officials are also colluding with Russia, as they stranded him there (revoking his passport while he was in transit in Moskau).

Well, there is always some degree to "fake news" in every article you read, but yes I agree that Edward Snowden is a patriot. William Binney probably had the perfect solution to counter domestic and international terrorism, however his program was shutdown because the majority of the people working for Uncle Sam at the time wanted something far more than stopping terrorists. Sure, they may have had good intentions, but with power like this, there is no stopping others from coming along and corrupting it for their own purposes.