> How could Snowden have gone through that pile in a couple of days while on the run and possibly afraid for his life?

That's the problem.

He didn't/couldn't bother to filter out unrelated documents? So he just stole a bunch of shit and leaked it all to the media and hoped they would find enough outrage in it to justify his behavior?

This isn't whistleblowing, it's reckless espionage, and fruit of the poisoned tree as well-- you wouldn't want the authorities doing this to you (the irony of him exposing the gov doing this by doing the same thing himself...).

Whistleblowing would have meant he caught wind of something illegal, secured enough evidence to prove it and leaked that to the media. Everything exfiltrated beyond that is not in scope.

I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism.

That's one way to look at it. Another interpretation would be that he knew about specific things, assumed there were other bad things he hadn't learned about yet, and couldn't filter through it himself.

He sent the documents to be filtered by trusted journalists working for one of the worlds number one investigative newspapers. It’s not like he sold them to the Daily Mail

There’s a slight irony in your comment about his performance reviews - how did that get out? Apparently leaking isn’t always a problem :)

Not all of us can grep as well as we'd like.

Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.

The government is not a person so your rhetorical device is as nonsensical and irrelevant as your unsubstantiated character assassination. Moreover, a criminal organization can make no claims to ‘fairness’. Criminal governments are no different.

And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.

At face value, no-- my source is government personnel. But it's possible there's more to the story than we've heard from the "victim."

For the same reason, I don't believe Assange was a rapist.

Why do the agencies not bother to filter out unrelated material? According to you, the responsible course of action would have to be to record only what is related to illegal activity in the first place.

Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.

>I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism.

Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).

Just to be clear - if you are trying to amass enough proof to bring to the media, but expect to be fired any day now, the logical thing to do is to exfiltrate as much of what could be relevant and sort out the rest after.

Say you exfiltrate not enough and are fired. You're shit out of luck, and there is no way to infiltrate someone else to your position to get the rest out.

I doubt you can honestly see his actions as reckless or revengeful.

> frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats.

This is a real problem, but I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's no score card on number of classified documents one has access to.

Rather, it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level. No one is going to get in trouble for mistakenly over classifying something, but theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document, not to mention the real harm that could arise from such an error.

> it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level

This!

I once had the opportunity to work on a project with DoD folks to help them write software to speed up the declassification process.

I was astonished by the current manual process. Imagine a decision tree 50 pages long that you have to apply by hand to each sentence of a document to determine what can be unclassified or not.

These were such nice people and overwhelmed by the work and genuinely trying to make it better so more information could be declassified, faster.

I realized it was a hopeless task. The only real solution is to move toward a world where next to nothing needs to be classified. To do more in the open. That needs to be the vision. Laws need to be justified so that these crazy complicated rubrics don't need to be created at all.

[The end of the story is I opted not to join that project. LLMs provide at least some hope that they can make it somewhat better, lacking the changes at the legal and organizational level that I mentioned]

> I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power.

That's pretty naive.

> theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document

The whole system is designed to make declassification risky and expensive. And you think that has nothing to do with power?

Is it just a coincidence that criminal gangs have a similar code of life-long silence?

To play devil's advocate: things that sound minor like parking spaces are regularly the grist of intelligence operations. And the targets are rarely heads of state or other bigwigs — less-prominent people are easier to recruit, kill, harass, etc.

Yeah, even if just to know which car to break into.

weren't there some intelligence operations during the vietnam war where "benign" peanut butter orders predicted troop movements?

Hilarious and cromulent enough for me.