Snowden is pointing out an issue. And he has done it with courage that I massively respect. You hardly see it these days. And that makes it anxiety and fear inducing, as the solutions are unknown.
But think of it this way - tomorrow someone might hand you a diagnosis of cancer. You can freak out about it or you can find a Cancer specialist to see what options are available. Asking the technician who gave you the report what the odds are, doesn't make any sense. He knows only how to create the report.
In this case just look to history, to understand how these things play out. History is the Oncologist.
Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.
If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage. That history (in out current environment of over information/disinformation/misinformation) is what will always be a source of hope and faith.
Again, I'm not arguing for increased security, just for understanding the way others use language.
The oncologist deals with the consequences of the observation: communicate with the patient, gives advices on treatments, makes a therapy plan, deals with families, answer to their questions, takes the hit when the relatives think that the solution is not good enough or an Indian shaman could cure everything with snake's poison.
Snowden have done good, but escaped from the consequences of his actions.
A position that made everything he's done questionable
Had he faced a trial, even the most unfair of trials, would have put him in the position of being at least true to the values he was trying to protect.
Question the authority, suffer the consequences.
Question the authority, go to Russia is not what generally the public opinion accepts as "honest".
There is much to say also about who leaked the data but didn't protect the source.
The identity of deep throat has been made public after Nixon was already dead for years and Mark Felt was already an old man suffering from dementia.
I’m pretty sure questioning the authority without fear of retaliation is what the first amendment is supposed to be about. But that aside, your phrasing is a bit misleading. Snowden didn’t question the government. He exposed illegal activities by the government.
I find it interesting that you posit Deep Throat's approach as somehow more noble. If Snowden had anonymously leaked and kept on working would that have been less questionable or more honest?
This is a good point. In an ideal world their job would be less...complicated. So our job as intelligent, capable citizens is to make the system more ideal for them to do their duties.
Making a "captive workforce" out of AI tools and robots is, to me, the ideal solution. Either way it's inevitable. Since no one else will, I'm trying to get out ahead with thoughtful early planning. Communicating a common goal for the nation without fear is the way to get the technology into the hands of the right people. It's up to us, the intelligent and "good people" communicators, to push for it.
Very true. For example I think Marx did a great analysis but his solutions lacked. Same happens often in medicine. People who observe something are asked to also explain it. But if they can’t explain the observation it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong.
The problem is how to be sure the line get not crossed ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr...
I guess one could also argue for calm on the basis that the Stasi once existed and these days East Germany is an okay place.
And the solutions to these issues are perfectly well known: the intelligence agencies need to be curtailed and reined in, and their ability to indefinitely store massive reams of data about every private citizen brought to an end.
They always has been overreach. This is not new.
I think a lot of our problems stem from the undermining of our system of checks and balances, and whatever is up with the fourth estate. I'm digressing, but I recall a time when journalists would be roasting public officials over these issues.
I think it was clear and overt during the Bush era that there were some dubious claims thrown around about "we need this to prevent another 9/11", with "this" being vague, broad, varying with the particular speaker. It was disappointing to many when Obama embraced some of these conclusions.
I based this on my theory that there are things that the general public does not know, and will never know, that influence the decisions POTUS makes. Until you are privy to that information, it’s easy to take a contrarian viewpoint. Once you have the information, and the responsibility for making decisions that might save American lives, it’s a lot harder.
I’m not saying that any of these policies are right or wrong, or that the general public should be kept in the dark about whatever it is we’re being kept in the dark about. It’s just a theory I have about how the world works. I have no way of proving or disproving it, but I think the evidence supports it.
If it weren't partisan politics, you wouldn't be seeing roughly 15 senior officials from the NSA/CIA/FBI leaving the public sector to take jobs at CNN & MSNBC.
I'm curious why most people don't find this to be deeply disturbing.
The era of rampant, selective intelligence leaks to the media started when these very same people were in administration.
The only real secret intelligence is tactical (military or otherwise), because we aren't quite that craven, exceptions notwithstanding. Everything else is intrinsically political and has a very short half-life as a secret. Work for a few years inside the Beltway, especially with or near people who are connected (e.g. lobbyists, think tank scholars, appointees, Pentagon staffers, international orgs, etc), and this becomes obvious immediately. Secrets are social currency more important than money and maybe even title. Everybody shares secrets, albeit usually in an obnoxious, obfuscated, pretentious way; even the interns.
I think you are conflating a few issues.
On the one hand there is the bipartisan surveillance issue that Snowden shined a light on.
More recently we have a bunch of Trump and anti-Trump narratives and sometimes conspiracy theories.
I suspect some people on the thread have squished those into one. But the intelligence community is likely complicated, motivations multi-faceted, people holding diverse opinions. I don't think these things are the same, or you can dismiss or endorse one cause for the other.
2) CNN and MSNBC absolutely are partisan entities, though CNN does try hard to appear less so. As long as MSNBC keeps employing Maddow and she keeps pushing debunked conspiracy theories, they will absolutely be seen as partisan. Her coverage as of late has been absolutely disgraceful and a huge stain on that network, IMO.
3) None of what you said addresses the very alarming fact that the heads of our intelligence agencies are taking senior posts in these media organizations.
If you look into the folks who were in the spotlight pushing "we need this to prevent another 9/11" they were mostly former military and some with intelligence connections... but the real connection was their political connections.
Many outright stated the information they were provided to go on TV with came from politically associated groups not some secretive internal policy. In fact intelligence groups internally pushed back on some of the claims and political appointees ignored them.
Relative to what Hillary Clinton's or Marco Rubio's foreign policy would have been, sure, Obama was a model of probity, but this is damning with faint praise.
The government isn't given the trust needed to regulate or otherwise do its job efficiently. See various civil engineering projects, explosive cost growth whenever contractors compete for bids. People justify that as evidence that governments as inherently inefficient.
Government is abusing civil liberties through spying on everyday Americans. Relatively nobody cares.
The government is being corrupt, privileging senators' pet projects or program over the good of the nation. See the Senate Launch System. Nobody cares except space nerds. At the same time, NASA also supported the various effort to commercialize space, which is a major win.
What do you propose as the magical "proper" incentivisation?
If nobody cared, the only illegal domestic data collection program in the Snowden docs wouldn't have been shut down. It has been.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-...
If nobody cared, Google wouldn't have encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic. It has.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...
Secondarily, you're not understanding the leaked documents. The leaked documents showed that the NSA believed that the phone metadata program was legal. Once there is a court ruling that it is illegal, its lawyers cannot justify the program.
Thirdly, your phrase "another whistleblower" shows that you do not know what a whistleblower is. Leaking thousands of programs where just one of them happens to be illegal but not obviously so (to the point where Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/lawye...
As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court (in which DoJ faces no opposing counsel) in order to jury-rig a fig leaf for the ongoing destruction of personal liberties. I'm made my peace with the fact that the authoritarians to whose whims we are subject will occasionally overstep their bounds in public. When they do so, the public may protest and eventually conditions might improve somewhat. When the unsupervised services harm us, their putative employers, we have no recourse.
Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower". You guys make a great team!
Snowden's documents themselves showed the legal justification for the phone metadata program. It nakes sense that Snowden would claim otherwise in the podcast because he is barely literate and hasn't actually read most of the documents he leaked.
> As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court
You don't "lobby" a court. You have lawyers justify a position.
> Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower".
You're the one making a bizarre definition of "whistleblower." Is it whistleblowing to leak all of your company's documents if you don't know they are doing anything illegal so long as somebody can later find one thing that is illegal? Obviously not.
The public outrage was due to various top officials denying that anything like PRISM was going on, when in fact it was.
So either the program was illegal, the false statements made by officials about them, or the classification of the process that prevented democratic oversight. One of the three had to be illegal, it's not really relevant to split hairs over which was one actually was.
The media won't carry a story that their numbers tell them doesn't have legs with the audience.
Why is that?
"Let me tell you: You take on the intellegence community and they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you."
Hypothetically, of course.
The two communities above are receptive to messages about government overreach and corruption, the general public seems not to care much.
I suspect this is largely because libertarians and conspiracy theorists (which do overlap to some extent) are already skeptical of government "goodness" and anything that feeds that skepticism is easily accepted. The general public places government on a higher moral plane of existence and any challenge to that is met with skepticism and excuses.
The end result is that those that speak out/expose the government are sidelined and punished through smears or government action. See: Attacks on Gabbard, Ron Paul, Snowden, Bill Binney, Assange, etc.
It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures. There is literally no question that those emails are real and unaltered.
Because there was nothing in them that painted Clinton in a bad light. They were normal boring emails that were sensationalized in conspiracy blogs but recognized as normal boring emails by professional journalists.
If the act of leaking emails about media collusion is a "bad" thing that influenced the election in one way, so can the media collusion itself be a "bad" thing that influenced the election the other way.
Despite what the conspiracy bloggers would have you believe, this is standard fact checking. If the conspiracy bloggers did that, they wouldn't have anything to report.
> Also in an email Donna Brazile of CNN agreed to forward the debate questions to the campaign before the debate.
This was heavily covered mainstream news and resulted in CNN firing Brazile. Brazile also assisted the Sanders campaign as the Sanders campaign has admitted, but we don't have the Sanders campaign emails to see how much.
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/3038...
Clinton's team was not offered the opportunity to edit or review the articles either. They were sent articles about the costs of policy proposals to respond with their own numbers. If you think this is out of the ordinary or that conservatives don't get the same consideration, what do you think " did not immediately respond to requests for comment" means at the end of news articles?
Clearly they're part of a conspiracy to make us believe, against all possible odds, that anyone still believes in Pizzagate.
(And let's note: it's not like 4chan broke open Epstein's crimes. Old fashioned FBI legwork did. And the guy had a history of sex trafficking already, which nobody in Pizzagate did. As fun as it is to pretend to be an armchair sleuth, it sure isn't a pass-time that's got a good batting average over professional investigation).
You're wrong about... everything.
FBI washed their hands of this when the rest of DoJ did, in 2008. Two things caused national attention to return to Epstein: Alexander Acosta's nomination to Labor, and Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald refusing to forget about Epstein's victims even after the rest of the media had. FBI had fuck-all to do with any of this; they don't like to investigate people who can afford to hire lawyers.
Not jakeogh though. like I said, he's part of a conspiracy to make us believe people still believe Pizzagate. The purpose of which is to undermine confidence in average human reasoning skills, which undermines faith in democracy. This is important for the next step of the Triluminati's plan.
Does it even count as "JAQing off [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions]" if one party in the conversation doesn't even bother asking questions?
jakeogh, I wish I could say I wished you the best, but I'm not a fan of conspiracy theorists and I'm not a fan of this game you're playing trying to convince people that anyone still believes in Pizzagate. Reality is already complex enough as it is.
May the Triluminati treat you gently for doing their bidding, whether or not you know you are.
Fake whistleblower: still works for CIA, whistleblowing has purely political rather than administrative effects, and ongoing adulation in the press.
If you don't want to see this on HN, then downvote and move on.
Do NOT believe that!
The reality is probably quite different. Many organizations (both private and civil) make such promises but, in truth, the complaint phone line/box/e-mail is a direct line to either higher-ups in the company or to someone in another agency who will, very quickly, pass identifying information to higher-ups. The whistleblower will be tracked down mercilessly and driven out always. Those for whom the whistle blows will, not infrequently, be rewarded.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in many public and private endeavors and, in every case, so-called whistleblower phone lines, complaint boards or monitoring companies have proven to be ineffectual and/or downright deadly to the career of anyone who contacts them. They are usually honeytraps for those poor individuals who believe their complaints will be fairly judged.
With reasonable care the press can be relied upon to vent complaints to the public w/o identifying the complainant.
A whistleblower that is heavily covered in the media because he or she aligns with the orginization's goals (sell headlines) is not 'fake'.
A whistleblower blowing the whistle on a hierarchy unable to directly fire him will also, not surprisingly, not lose his job.
"Heavily covered in the media", that's an interesting criterion for "whistleblower", and I'm sure it would serve someone's interests if it got any traction. Also "critical thinking" is now defined as "believing what the war media tell us"? This would be Orwellian, if it weren't so silly.
My claim is that media coverage cannot say anything meaningful about the authenticity of a whistleblower.
To say otherwise is a terrible argument -- Snowden himself had widespread media coverage, both positive and negative.
Media coverage tells you nothing about the authenticity of a whistleblower. You have not demonstrated any useful criterion for identifying 'fake' whistleblowers other than "I do not agree with his/her goals."
The others sited didn't follow the legal procedure which would have allowed them to also enjoy whistleblower protection.
Unsurprisingly, no one stepped forward for Crane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project#Whistleblo...
No True Whistleblower gets "glowing plaudits" and "ongoing adulation".
What is their name? IDK. What exactly did they hear? IDK. From who did they hear it from? IDK.
People here seem awfully sure about something they know nothing about.
How so?
Take the lessons of Manufacturing Consent and apply them to the contemporary political context instead of Vietnam and East Timor, even if the elite media seems to be aligned with your own political beliefs.
But I don't see any reason to belive that it constitutes 'controlling the media'.
As for the second I'm not sure what you feel the answer is there either, more what it means.
There is a whole history of folks leaking things for you to look at.
Well you are on a technical discussion board. There are many people here who are in the position Snowden described there. You can bring your brick to this discussion without having to become a hero as he said. This would push a public debate if you'd kept it up.
Why isn't it happening?
Maybe the government doesn't have to do anything at all and it's still not happening.
"You can't awaken somebody who pretends to be asleep" goes for all sides.
Can't any member of congress simply use the speech and debate clause to make what they know a matter of congressional record?
The problem here isn't even so much the government is being shady - that has happened before, it will happen again. I can understand people not feeling threatened by constant snooping even though I disagree.
To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate. The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about. Government officials are not reliable; this is far to much unaccountable power even if people involved were allowed to discuss what is happening.
Why aren't the not-technically-interesting parts of this wiretapping program legal for government agencies to talk about? If they need to be hidden, why not go straight to the logical conclusion and classify a bunch of other laws?
Democracies can't handle this level of secrecy. The whole thing is going to fall apart one way or another - the path America is going down isn't stable at all; something is going to have to change radically. Either the intelligence agencies will gain supremacy over the government, the government itself will go rogue or the secrecy will have to end.
EDIT I'm going to bed before I see the whole video, but around 1:46:00 - the bit with J. Clapper. Case in point that the whole system of checks and balances can't work.
EDIT2 And around 2:10:00. Barbaric stuff; it is like centuries of accumulated Common Law and parliamentary legal tradition never happened. People need to be able to occasionally talk about this stuff in formal setting.