> People who work on building surveillance, people who have done it, people who may do it in the future, are your classmates in your CS program, your colleagues in your startup, your neighbors, your fellow conference attendees, you.

Exactly. I wish more people here would realise this. The powers-that-be do realize this, and are concerned about it. I remember when the "Fifth Estate" movie came out (which was critical of Assange), everyone in our company (a large tech company that I won't name) was given free tickets (and the afternoon off) to go see it. First time ever we were given such free tickets; I wonder why?

You should name and shame the company, even if you do so anonymously.

Any Googlers want to chime in?

(The difference here being that in one case the government is the judge/jury/executioner and in the other it is the realm of public opinion.)

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Further, they're not collecting this data for any purpose – vague, questionable, and slippery though it may be – of doing "good" or "protecting our country." They're doing it, solely and without an attempt at justification, for ad revenues. And they're taking tens of thousands (if not hundreds?) of some of the brightest minds in tech away from things like drug discovery, climate change, energy research, etc.

Not trying to start a flame war, nor am I drawing equivalencies between Facebook and the NSA. I'm actually just legitimately curious how you think we can segment this spectrum.

Within Google, data's collected primarily to build better products. Or at least that's what the majority of the rank & file believe, and personally I believe the executives believe it too. This has the effect of widening the moat between them and competitors, but it also has real, tangible convenience benefits for users. I can guarantee that the majority of folks are thinking of those benefits, not the additional ad revenue, when building new products. I worked in Search for 5 years and was explicitly told by executives to ignore Ads when making decisions; they have plenty of their own engineers whose job is to optimize revenue.

This may seem hard to believe for someone who's never worked at a place that improved a product based on data, but it's a really fundamental part of the culture. You see the headlines about the NSA or Google's threat to privacy; you rarely see any news story about the A/B test they're running or the new feature in Android/Gmail/Chrome/Search that you get to use because usage logs showed that it took you too long to accomplish your task and some engineer decided to fix it.

That's may be true today, but one of features that distinguishes modern forms of surveillance from what was possible in the past is that truly massive amounts of data can now be stored "forever"[1].

Google itself may change what it wants to do with its data in the future. Worse, the fact that data was captured at all means it will be available for a subpoena or "national security letter" and Google will have little say in what happens to the data.

[1] the value of "forever" generally varies by the size of the available budget, which is "large enough" in the case of nation-states and companies the size of Google (or Apple)

The original question posed, though, was "Why do people at Google/Facebook/NSA continue to collect all this data? What's their purpose?", which I think I answered. While it may not be true in 10 years, it's true now.

Also, I think that the sheer pace of change today may insulate a lot of people from the consequences of having data available on them. The data may be out there - but by the time it gets into the wrong hands, it no longer reflects reality, which makes it largely useless. That guy who talks about having his dick sucked by sororisluts [1] may, in a couple years, be the guy with 200 million users whose company you desperately want to invest in.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/confirmed-snapchats-evan-sp...

It's not about why you collect the data. It's that a massive database of such information exists. The intent in mind when building a system has no jurisdiction over the potential uses later.

If the NSA wants the data and it's inside of a US-jurisdiction entity, they will get it. Period. Maybe they NSL some people with legitimate access and make sure they know they go to federal if they let their boss find out. Maybe they recruit some SREs. Maybe they blackmail the night watchman in the building that holds the equipment that has the dark fiber L2 encryption keys so that they can get the inter-datacenter link monitoring going again.

It doesn't matter what people intended when they built it. The fact is that it exists and the men with guns and a money printing press want it. Game over.

And then I recall about Prism. And I think about how a secret program like that costs money and significant technical involvement from the host to run. Google took public money to help run Prism, and Google techs actively supported the dragnet. Pretty shameful, IMO.

As an ex-Googler who apparently can speak out, I ask you: if Google has competitors that are privacy focused, isn't it in everyone's best interest to select the competitors' products over Google's despite Google's excellence? And, can you report if anything has been done at Google to lift this stink of surveillance from its products?

Is Google still a willing participant in Prism-style data collection of its users?

Then the news about MUSCULAR [3] broke, and people were very, very pissed [4]. I saw the internal reports where people put together what must have happened; I'm not sure what sort of details I'm allowed to say, but it basically amounted to the U.S. (well, technically the UK, acting on behalf of the NSA) conducting military operations against the property of its own citizens. Google ended up encrypting all inter-datacenter traffic soon after. [5]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_%28surveillance_progra...

[4] https://plus.google.com/108799184931623330498/posts/SfYy8xbD...

[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-enc...

This news item you reminded me of - "Google ended up encrypting all inter-datacenter traffic soon after" - makes sense as a response that the government can't argue with (yet).

Looking over the MUSCULAR wikipedia article, I wonder if the NSA could still capture the user's and enterprise's unencrypted data at the Google Front End Servers like they had been before the inter-datacenter traffic was encrypted?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2903192/safari-users-in-the-u...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/15/us-privacy-google-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-pays-fin...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/01/hamburg-google/

Please understand, I'm not saying your wrong...I'm just saying from the outside [even as someone who works in IT and relies on data to make decisions] that I've never worked at a company that had any of these issues. It could be a question of scale and the fact Google is an easy target to make a headline with.

When they'd found out what evil thing they have collectively assembled, piece by piece, each of them blinded by his inexperience and enthusiasm for pure science, it would be too late.

And I'd finally have to replace them with expensive hired guns, or more clueless people, like some SV 20-something startup kids who would kill for 20 minutes of techcrunch fame.

Google and Facebook, as contentious as some of us feel about them, produce products people like, and are voted into power by our direct and continued usage. You can't opt out of the NSA.

In the end, you're comparing an organization with a world-destroying military that regularly murders and imprisons people at all ends of the earth, to another that displays diaper ads that follow you around the internet. Not quite the same.

A subculture, yes. An "entire generation", absolutely not, this is hyperbole. You can't "opt out" of the NSA, but certainly if you wanted to, the very first step is to get as far away from Facebook as possible. Yet there is no large gap in ages amongst those gleefully participating in Facebook all day which would indicate "an entire generation" seeking to avoid government surveillance.

If you're not just being pedantic:

http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-millenials-have-historic...

The millennials are distrustful of everyone, and why shouldn't they be?

http://iop.harvard.edu/harvard-public-opinion-project

The idea that distrust of the government has suddenly leaped on generational lines implies that millennials are savvy, informed, and active in comparison to demographics over 30 who are assumed to be complacent and naive in comparison. But the reality is that most people right now will gladly answer on a poll that they don't like the government as much as they used to, and that most people are still almost entirely complacent in any case; there are no millions marching in the streets in protest, voter turnouts remain terribly low across all demographics, and everyone freely donates datapoints to Facebook all day which is one of the NSA's most bountiful conduits for information.

That's not to disagree with the very original comment here. The original comment refers to the interaction of subcultures as well, namely the "builder" subcultures who can direct their efforts towards pro-privacy or anti-privacy efforts. That is of course an important conduit.

People who were doing silly work making video games pushed the boundaries of parallel processing, created the GPU industry, and now that is relied on for serious scientific research. People making social networks so college freshman could date made tools to help those fighting authoritarian governments connect and created infrastructure technology to work on big data problems the governments might face on social issues.

Who did more to help the Asian Tigers raise from poverty to economic superpowers? Peace Corps people distorting local economies with their help, or people investing in local infrastructure because it was good value for them to make money??

What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?

Finally, a lot of really smart people end up going in to law or finance because that's where the money is. Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. I really doubt that this idea that engineers should be this monastic underclass is so great for society. I constantly hear programmer say their salary is "inflated", to which I respond "if you feel overpaid, give your money to a good charity, don't roll over for the uber rich tech-exec/VC in charge."

If you want to make a positive impact on the world, respecting market efficiency is underrated.

It's sad that so many of The Onion's attempts at over-the-top parody have turned out to be prescient.

A VC arm that's part of the government seems like a monstrous hybrid of private and public. What is the profit for? For the same reason that it gives one pause regarding what the CIA is doing investing in social media. If it's totally OK, why not have the government invest in private prison companies?

Let alone how SV was in large part funded and formed by Military Contracts

This is only half the story. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that these same databases are being used by NSA and GCHQ, enabling authoritarian governments to suppress and attack these same people.

The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up.

> What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?

That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary.

> Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive.

No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.

I don't dispute that advertising can be unethical, or that many of these big tech companies have faced some difficult decisions and debatably have made the wrongs ones. But you can do unethical things in any industry, and advertising is not fundamentally unethical.

Taking them away from those things? I doubt it - the top talent will always be sold to the highest bidder and its unlikely "climate change research" is a segment that can support thousands of of mid-high six figure salaries.

Next while these companies do collect a large amount of personal data - their purpose is clear and as is their boundaries. There is a strong effort to keep adopt data secure - if a user was found using private facebook data to stalk loved ones[1] I don't doubt thats activity that would (1) noticed by their systems they have in place to prevent data from ending up in the wrong place and (2) they would be fired for.

Lastly with Google and Facebook you have a choice - its still in your control - if you want to use these services or not and it doesn't require a secret court to challenge them.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg...

Sure, it's a choice. Just like using the Internet is a choice. Like using phones is a choice. Like choosing automobiles over walking is a choice. But not all choices are equal.

So what do you expect to see here? Are you expecting Facebook subsidize the cost of getting the users online to any destination, or do you wish to remove the choice to use facebook for anyone who couldn't pay $10?

This is more like "Like choosing taking the bus to city centre over walking directly to my office 300ft outside the city centre is a choice." Bus or no, at the end of the day I still can't afford a full fledged automobile.

Even if they paid me to use Facebook, that wouldn't affect my decision on whether or not I want them to have access to information. If the US government decides to subsidize community college and make it free, they aren't taking away my choice to go to a private school.

The NSA is not transparent and I cannot opt out of being monitored. Therefore, I do no romanticize about the free service facebook provides, but cannot agree with how the NSA conducts itself.

That's like saying that you oppose a sales tax, and you consider a retail store equivalent to the tax collectors because the retail store provides a fruitful tree for the collection of sales tax.

VS

Being part of a business (that may or may not be making any serious contribution to the common good)

Both segments violate privacy. And in both cases there are ways to correct this from within.

- The cost of ads are far greater than the loss of privacy: the opportunity cost of using products optimized for ad revenue rather than user revenue, the cost of collateral damage, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes, and perhaps the greatest cost of all, the social cost of all the manipulation and deceit inherent in advertising.

- Even the "free" part is a lie. Advertisers pass the full costs back to us via the things we buy. So we are still paying, and we're paying the overhead of indirectness on top.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237.

At least in my community, there's a strong negative pressure and stigma associated with working for certain parts of the government. And I guarantee that this impacts the NSA's ability to recruit from our talented pool of developers.

I've also met programmers who are just out to get a stable job. I bet the NSA looks for people like this. "Sit here, do your job, get this paycheck"

I graduated before the Snowden revelations; not sure if he has changed his tune or not.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/

I know some. I called them coworker and in some cases still call them friend.

A feel sorry for a great many of them. They are highly skilled network attack specialists, with basically no way to apply their skills other than working for the NSA. Even if they want out, they have no viable alternative. It's terrible.

Then again, maybe what you're referring to is that their knowledge falls along the lines of state secrets, and pedaling their skills outside the NSA could be considered treason?

Who, other than a government, is going to pay you well to find vulnerabilities in popular software? Google's Project Zero belongs to the incredibly small set of programs in that area that isn't a joke.

Perhaps a better analogy would be that asking "Why not pen testing?" is like asking why gun designers don't find new jobs as infantry.

Established security firms often focus on business with... guess who? Governments. The NSA employing people directly is not really much different from the NSA hiring contractors who employ people directly.

Not entirely. It starts as that, yes, because the first thing you do when attempting to break into a house is check the front door. There are obviously levels beyond this.

> is like asking why gun designers don't find new jobs as infantry.

But it's not entirely like that. There's plenty of firms that hire out security specialists to do code reviews for internal applications. At that point, it's like a gun designing consulting for manufacturing firmson ways to make their products more resistant to small arms. The job won't be the same, but there will be commonalities and the prior experience will transfer over usefully.

And your job is probably a lot less reliable, because short-term auditing or pen-testing contracts offer a lot less stability than 3-5 year government contracts.

"Help, I love designing guns, but the only people willing to pay me for that will use them for evil!"

If you're a talented "network attack specialist" then you're likely also a worthwhile network engineer. So work in that role and do the gun-design in your spare time and hopefully for a good cause.

Also, the skills required to be an effective network attack specialist have very little relation to those required to be a network engineer. I thought I covered this up-thread.

If you have a family to support then how about choosing a less problematic career path than "Network Attack Specialist"?

You are not entitled to making a living from your favorite hobby if that entails building a dystopian future for everyone.

This is ultimately a deeply personal choice that everyone has to make, but sometimes we really can't both have our cake and eat it too.

I also work at a government sponsored R&D lab, so I'm familiar with the conundrum (not for myself - I'm just a dumbass programmer whose skills are so pitifully generic I could go literally anywhere in the world... some of my colleagues - not so much)

Much closer would be writing boot loaders and compilers.

Why is commercial "cyber" security industry not a viable option? It pays well, there's currently a notable skill shortage and they can work in "pen-testing", "red teaming" and "exploit development" areas.

> Pen testing is a viable alternative in the same way that driving a car is an alternative to designing an engine.

"Red teaming" is little different.

Further, much of the commercial world is thinly veiled NSA work. Who do you think the biggest clients of Reversing Labs, for instance, are? They're not just any commercial firms. They're commercial firms providing services to the NSA.

Bug bounties and HackerOne are sick jokes compared to what governments pay.

I know literally none of the people behind "Reversing Labs", your comment is the first I've heard of that company, and, examining what their product does, I can't understand how what appears to be an email antivirus product is somehow helping NSA.

RL's Titanium Core is one of the best unpackers around, and thus incredibly valuable for anyone doing malware analysis. Couple it with Titanium Cloud (blacklisting/whitelisting of samples) and you have the core of a system that can go interesting places. Try not to cringe at the bill. Toss in a sandbox or three and you're really getting somewhere. Add in a couple of MITRE standards for requisite government headaches, obviously.

From what I've seen, a fair amount of security product companies are selling to the NSA. Doesn't work for SaaS and services, because the NSA tends to require that whatever you're selling run on their network.

It's worth remembering that the NSA isn't afraid to buy from tiny companies and In-Q-Tel exists to enable investment.

Who cares?

You dodged part of my comment. Once again: virtually none of the commercial security work --- or even the offensive security work --- is thinly veiled NSA work. Virtually none of it.

What on earth led you to believe you'd be able to defend such a statement?

Sure, they might sell to someone else, but nobody involved cares about that.

What I've seen suggests that there are really two commercial security sectors. One centered on the west coast and focused on the private sector. The other is centered on the east coast and centered on the US government. It's all commercial, after a fashion, but the two don't typically interact very much. Each tends to think of itself as "the security sector".

Well. Except when Mandiant decides to point fingers. Then there's briefly lots of interaction.

Yes, of course, every enterprise product company in the world --- in security, disaster response, configuration management, issue tracking, document management, what-have-you, every single one --- sells to FedGov. They all have special teams to do it. And FedGov has special requirements; for instance, Common Criteria certification.

Now: can you answer my actual question? How on earth did you feel you'd be able to defend your statement that most commercial security work is thinly-veiled NSA work? That's not just not true, it's almost literally the opposite of true.

Is your answer "there's this East Coast sector of the security industry that sees itself as the whole security industry that is almost entirely thinly-veiled NSA work"? If so: can you name 3 companies in that East Coast security sector? I've worked in security for just about 20 years now and can name many, many East Coast companies, and very few of them have ever done work for NSA, or, for that matter, done work that would be interesting to NSA.

I do know that the people in those fields tend to think of themselves as "the security industry". They also don't generally work on material that the more private-sector-focused industry cares about or gets exposed to, like how to secure a network when you have brain-damaged political network policies.

I'll have to keep a tally at the next DEFCON.

It is a true but very uninteresting statement to say that "most government contracting work is thinly veiled government work".

Obviously, you don't feel like that's what you're saying. But to defend the statement that much of security in general is thinly veiled USG work, you cite SAIC, ManTech, and (now) Raytheon. Giant government contractors.

The security industry as a whole is enormous. It includes big chunks of Cisco, IBM, EMC, Symantec, Intel, and HP, and literally hundreds of companies the likes of Duo, Cloudflare, Accuvant, and Lookout.

The clear implication of your comment upthread is that most commercial security work is not only done for the USG, but is offensive work done for NSA. That's why you compared it to HackerOne and called their rates a "sick joke". Not only would that statement still not be true if most commercial offensive work was done by NSA (government rates on vulnerabilities are not as lucrative as extragovernmental rates are), but it is itself not true at all. Ironically, the numbers get even worse for your argument when we narrow the security industry down to offensive work.

I might lose an argument about how much bogus "defensive" security product stuff gets sold through GSA teams to NSA and DoD in general. But most of my experience --- apart from the four years I spent working for what was at the time Sandvine's biggest competitor, where we never once had a discussion about selling to NSA --- is on the offensive side. Virtually none of the commercial offensive security work that is done is done to benefit NSA.

I didn't mean to imply that most commercial security work was offensive work for the NSA.

While security agencies of various governments are on the buy-side on the "zero day" vulnerability market, majority of commercial "cyber" security companies are not dealing in "cyber weapons" and are not involved with NSA. There are plentiful examples of successful "white hats": H. D. Moore, Dan Kaminsky, Tavis Ormandy, Michał Zalewski, even our own Colin Percival and tptacek etc. You don't have to do work for government to play in this area.

As a result, saying people should go to the commercial world isn't actually much of a change. It's not an alternative to the current reality because it is the current reality.

It's worth remembering that you probably don't hear about the big players very much in places like this. Endgame, MITRE, Leidos, etc. They tend to stay out of the limelight while still employing substantial numbers of people.

When your specialty is in finding novel exploits, there's not much of a market for you outside the government-o-sphere. In practical terms, pen tests are typically not focused on finding novel exploits.

Nevermind the vast difference in career expectations between salaried government work and consulting.

Ex military often have trouble finding jobs that match their skillsets as well. Not many civilian jobs encourage you to annihilate the denizens of under-developed, resource rich regions.

And why you shouldn't work for the NSA. This scene from 'Good Will Hunting' comes to mind ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw

By the same reasoning, people can haze each other (in school, the workplace, etc.) for their positions on things like abortion as a "cultural influence." Is that ethical, though?

If I personally, on reflection disagree with you about Julian Assange, should I be blacklisted from the industry? Serious question.

No, I don't work for the DoD. I live in the Washington-Baltimore metro area and know people who work for government agencies under the DoD. N = 1 sample size, all the people I know employed by DoD agencies highly amused at how misinformed places like HN are about places like NSA.

So we are relegated to using what we can verify and extrapolation being a part of human nature the blanks will be filled in according to expectation. If the reality is substantially different/better/worse then in time that too will be corrected.

Your comment is entirely content free so it does nothing at all to help improve the situation with specifics. It's just the 'U' and the 'D' from FUD.

But that does not mean that a subset of true information can't be informative either. It can be misleading, it does not have to be. And if it is misleading then there are plenty of people in a position to correct that perception, it's only a matter of time before that will happen.

I don't expect that we will see the truth be declassified here. As I recall, they usually wait until 50 years after everyone involved is dead.

It actually makes perfect sense, if the data was not genuine we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, so we use what data is publicly available and hope for more.

Think about the alternative, if Snowden would have released all of it then it would be argued that releasing all of the data was irresponsible (see previous leaks).

That's one you can't win as a leaker and so I don't blame Snowden for that (though personally I'd have preferred if he leaked all of the data without any intermediaries).

> I don't expect that we will see the truth be declassified here.

I'm pretty sure very few people expected the leaks in the first place, and yet, they happened.

> As I recall, they usually wait until 50 years after everyone involved is dead.

Yes, so the guilty are beyond reach of the law and safely forgotten. And so we are trying as hard as we can to stave off meaningful progress.

If it can't stand the light of day it is probably nothing good.

Sunlight is the best des-infectant and Snowden provided quite a bit of it.

Just put on your 'ethics' cap for a bit and you'll get it.

True believers with good intentions.

Correct, and the evidence available so far strengthens that belief.

> even though you are, on average, less informed about their mission and activities,

That's not my fault though, I'd love to be more informed, but hey, secrets!

> less intelligent,

Quite probably.

> and lazier.

That's very well possible but I actually highly doubt it.

So, why the insults? Did you feel somehow implicated?

>On average they'll be very intelligent and working harder than their counterparts in industry for less money.

People all want to feel that they're doing good things, and not evil. They'll rationalize all sorts of things to believe that.

What would the cognitive bias to rationalize it as bad be?

The reason I believe it is bad is because it violates the spirit of the 4th amendment. It gives incredible power to an organization with no effective oversight. It lacks proper judicial review, and the existing supposed review has been shown to be a farce. It makes everyone using technology less secure. It wastes everyone's resources who have to work against and around the NSA.

Everyone knows they are being watched, listened to, tracked everywhere.

The big deal, though, is the power concentration and chilling effect of such massive surveillance even the Stasi couldn't dream of.

I don't care that not everyone working for / at the NSA is small-minded or not because in the end, the sum of all those individuals failed at being moral.

You're asking us to believe something ridiculous on its face, that there AREN'T these horrible small-minded people who don't think twice about violating our rights. Congress is packed full of people like that, but there aren't any at the NSA, ehe?

edit: typo

We could do with more "attention seekers" willing to blow the whistle on illegal activity.

If he had any proof that countered the message he's trying to divert attention away from, he'd provide links to that, instead of just promising and failing to provide links that supported his unsubstantiated attack on the messenger.

It's ironic how irishcoffee wants to divert attention away from the facts and instead towards Snowden himself, much more than Snowden himself wants the attention. It's a textbook example of "narcissism by proxy". Snowden isn't a narcissist just because irishcoffee wants him to be the center of attention.

Ill try and dig up the link(s) but I'm not full of shit so here it is:

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20130609-edward-sn...

Snowden also told the Guardian that he does not want his personal story to divert attention from the larger story revealed by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”

“I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

Who was misinformed and who was spreading misinformation when Clapper directly lied under oath when he was testifying in front of congress?

How about focusing attention on the content of the leaks, and the misinformation the NSA itself is spreading, instead of Snowden's personality? I'm more interested to know how your DoD friends think about what was leaked, and what Clapper lied about, than who leaked it.

I can't speak to Clapper, only he can. I don't think its a far stretch of the imagination to say that there are far, far bigger things at play than his testimony. Have you ever visited the NSA museum? It's open to the public. The US actually intercepted the message the night before the Pearl Harbor attack happened, but didn't have the resources to decode it in time. (https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/virtua... ctrl+f 'harbor' should be the 3rd/last result). The point being, perhaps there are bigger things at play.

I can't speak for my 'DoD friends' as you ask, mostly because they don't talk about the specifics of their work. I asked a buddy once if they monitor US citizens. He said something to the effect of: "we don't need to monitor people, they monitor themselves via facebook, twitter, and instagram. How hard do you think it is to find publicly available information?" After I was 'enlightened' to that, it made sense. People literally put what they cooked for dinner on the internet. Finding out information about someone is not hard, because the information is volunteered. No laws are broken, no rights are violated. If you care about your privacy, get off social media.

Also, as much as this may annoy you, NSA (as is my understanding) doesn't care about domestic information at all. That is the jurisdiction of the FBI. This is one of the things my friends find so amusing, people seem to not understand this. That being said, if a packet goes from DC to GA to CN to CA tp US, the foreign hop means: its not domestic traffic. As we have very recently seen, CN has very little issue mucking with traffic that crosses their direct sphere of influence. Perhaps its much harder to tell what kind of foreign traffic should be inspected, and maybe the initial location of origin was spoofed, and its not that easy to figure all this stuff out. Perhaps the smartest people employed by the DoD aren't any smarter than the people that frequent this site, and there are insanely large-scale peoples to be solved, and their fucking hard to solve?

I don't think you're going to like anything I've just said, but just think about it. Do you really believe that the DoD cares about people that are not a direct threat to national security? Do you really think the DoD has the resources to actually monitor, in real time, the general US population? Perhaps, unless you get a satellite phone call from Pakistan, you're not even interesting enough to get your area code noticed? The government can hardly pass a damn budget. They're not that organized. How many people lie on their tax returns every year and get away with it? If the government can't effectively audit the almighty dollar, do you really think they're Big Brother?

Edit: I can't edit my parent response, this is the best I can do. I am looking for a specific article that detailed Snowden from highschool up to his current life. I really will try my best to find this article, and will update as soon as I can find it. My 1 y/o daughter just went to bed, and I will quickly be following suit. I would honesly be willing to do some sort of silly HN-style AMA if people are interested. I'm not some internet troll. I went to Chesapeake High school, which is in the same athletic district as Arundel High school, Where Snowden went. I have no desire or reason to grandstand about anything.

Again, this does nothing to establish why his behavior in high school is even remotely relevant to his behavior today - and even if it is, so what? He exposed the illegal behavior of the NSA because he's an attention whore? And that somehow invalidates the illegal-ness of what the NSA is doing?

The man could be a fucking sociopathic pedophile serial killer and it wouldn't matter. His personality has nothing to do with the content of the leaks. Repeat this sentence until it sinks in, please!

Why are you so hell-bent on ad-homming Snowden?

>Finding out information about someone is not hard, because the information is volunteered.

And those that are a little bit more careful? What about those edge cases? You know, and I know, and your bosses know, that it's not the people documenting their lives on Facebook that drives the NSA to backdoor encryption algorithms.

>NSA (as is my understanding) doesn't care about domestic information at all.

The content of the Snowden leaks proves this to be a a damn lie. Your understanding cannot compete with documents straight from the horse's mouth. Hell, you could be the director of the entire fucking department and it wouldn't matter - the facts disprove this narrative.

>Perhaps the smartest people employed by the DoD aren't any smarter than the people that frequent this site, and there are insanely large-scale peoples to be solved, and their fucking hard to solve?

The smartest people employed by the three letter agencies are beholden to the US constitution, something they apparently need reminded of.

If you're sucking up info from US citizens, that is not a "oops, let's get an intern to fix this broken footer" like it was a bug on some random rails site, that is a "you just broke the fucking supreme law of the land, please report to the DoJ for your inquiry"

>Do you really believe that the DoD cares about people that are not a direct threat to national security?

Everyone is a "threat to national security" until proven otherwise. Again, we have the authoritative leaks to go on, which rank about a million times higher than any apologia you can possibly offer.

And if they're not a threat to national security, then why are they in those databases? Search, seizure, and all that...

>Perhaps, unless you get a satellite phone call from Pakistan, you're not even interesting enough to get your area code noticed?

And yet, my shit is in their database. Why is that? What gives them the right?

>The government can hardly pass a damn budget. They're not that organized.

Because, yknow, the people responsible for passing a damn budget are the same ones that are responsible for orchestrating the SIGINT programs. Cmon, you know better than that. "The Government" is not a singular entity. This disorganized entity can apparently architect and effectively run programs such as PRISM, DISHFIRE, XKEYSCORE, and that operation that intercepts general purpose hardware to install backdoors who's name I can't remember right now.

Being a mess of bureaucracy and graft has never stopped any government, anywhere, from perpetrating massive crimes against its people. With that in mind, this is absolutely not a defense, nor even a mitigation, of the crimes committed.

I apologize if these posts come off as overly hostile, but you are making fallacious arguments, and you are handwaving inconvenient facts. It would be better for all concerned if you'd stop doing that.

It really just confuses me that a group like HN, generally very open-minded, are so willing to assume the very worst based on very limited, curated, non-refutable evidence. Non-refutable because of security concerns. Its like someone ripped every 18th page out of a book, and from that subset, created their own version of the book. They changed the ending, and flipped the protagonist and antagonist. The story is not accurate.

This calls into question why Sen. Wyden asked Clapper to begin with. It's illegal for Clapper to disclose classified information publicly, but as a sitting senator, Wyden would have immunity for anything brought to the Senate floor. If Sen. Wyden thought it was an issue that should have been brought forward publicly to the constituents that he represents (which he apparently did, since he asked the question in a public forum), he should have done it himself instead of trying to get Clapper to take the fall for him.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/opinion/testimony-of-the-n...

Are we talking about the same question? Your claim directly contradicts Wyden's statement on the matter.

Do you believe that Wyden's statement is true? And if not, what evidence do you have, and do you believe Wyden is a liar because he intended to mislead people by saying the following? Or did you accidentally make a "too cute by half" factual error or "least untruthful statement" when you claimed he "asked it out of the blue", and it was never your intent to mislead?

>"So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance."

http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-statem...

I have no idea what was going through Clapper's head at the time - maybe he did consider the 215 program or maybe he didn't. What he said was factually wrong and he tried to correct it but couldn't do so publicly.

This isn't trying to get the truth out - this is politics. Wyden is an elected representative - he has a duty to act in the best interests of his constituents. He was fully briefed on the program. If he felt that the information should have been public, he should have made it public - as a sitting member of the Senate he was authorized to do so. James Clapper was not. Wyden didn't correct Clapper on the spot. He didn't ask for more details. He didn't ask something like 'can you address any domestic collection programs that would fall under the Section 215 authorities?' He didn't do a damn thing publicly until the program was leaked months later, then used it as an opportunity to advance his own political career. Don't act like Clapper is some sort villain but Wyden is a hero.

Then don't you act like Snowden is some sort of villian, because he's a whistleblower.

And don't say he should have gone through the proper channels, because you know that's bullshit.

You're not interested in talking about this intellectually. Have a good evening!

I certainly am interested in talking about this intellectually, and presumably so were you when you just said "We can talk all day about politicians lying in front of congress. Would you like to?"

Yes, I would like to. Why do you think I'm not interested in talking about this intellectually? Do you not believe me when I say that? When I asked you a direct question in response to an accusation you made, and you dodged the question by trying to go meta. Did you not mean what you said when you invited me to talk about lying politicians all day?

To me, it appears that you are the one who is not interested in talking about this intellectually, so you tried to change the subject to attacks on Snowden's personality, then when that didn't work, you avoided answering a simple question by going meta, then when that didn't work, you projected your own disinterest in having an intellectual discussion onto me.

If that's the best line of argument that NSA apologists can come up with, it's no wonder they're having problems recruiting honest intelligent people.

You claimed that "They changed the ending, and flipped the protagonist and antagonist. The story is not accurate." Who do you mean, exactly? Please explain your accusations, or withdraw them if you're unwilling to support your unsubstantiated claim that the story is not accurate.

All you've offered as evidence against the story so far are your ad-hominem attacks against Snowden, right out of the US Government's playbook to demonize him and distract from the real story, just as Snowden himself predicted.

To continue having an intellectual discussion, please answer my question:

Is James Clapper a protagonist or antagonist for lying to congress?

If he chooses to post actual evidence, we should move on to discussing that. As long as he only presents his "hominem" (in the form of secondhand claims from his friends, what he supposedly read once, and what the other demands on his personal time are) as evidence, ad-hominem is the only response he'll get and deserve.

P.S. What may be irking some commenters is that HN threads are so "time-sensitive." In another hour this thread will probably slip off the front page and out of mind. So some people may be anxious to see a source before that happens. Or they downvoted so agressively, so that unsourced claims will be seen by fewer people during the small period of time the thread is active, while it could legitimately take you a few days to find a source.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009...

I'm still looking for the specific article, but this works in a pinch. He is very open and caviler about being the moral police. He decides what is right and wrong, and flip-flops his ideals when it serves him.

Edit: another link. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/06/27/snowden-partic...

Why do you feel that Snowden's alleged attention-seeking behavior is more important than the content of the leaks?

I brought all that up to say, he leaked for his own benefit, or out of anger for being wronged, or something. What he leaked, whatever you've seen, is what he wanted you to see. He painted his own picture to the world, and the people he wronged can't set the record straight because of national security concerns. Its an unfair fight.

Everyone is convinced NSA is out to get them, to monitor them, invade their privacy. throwing the law out the window and carte blanche having their way with whatever data they want.

NSA I'm sure, has a huge legal team. Before they worked at NSA, the lawyers passed the bar. They took an oath to uphold the law. They wouldn't just let people break the law, if for no other reason than, they might get caught. I'm also pretty sure each DoD entity has an IG department. If someone does something wrong, and gets caught, they get in a lot of trouble.

There is a whole series of checks and balances in place. If something is wrong, its the law you have a beef with.

And again to answer your question, he leaked what he wanted, painted the picture he wanted, manipulated people to believe whatever he wants them to, knowing he couldn't be contradicted. He could literally say whatever he wants at this point and people gobble it up. People believe what they want, based on what he says, without ever pretending to consider the idea of possibly entertaining the idea of giving the DoD the benefit of the doubt.

He asked: "Why do you feel that Snowden's alleged attention-seeking behavior is more important than the content of the leaks?"

You said nothing about why his behavior is more important than the content of the leaks. What's so unimportant about the content of the leaks, that you think something so trivial as your armchair psychiatric evaluation of his personality is more important than anything he leaked?

"If someone does something wrong, and gets caught, they get in a lot of trouble." Did Clapper get in a lot of trouble for lying to congress under oath?

It's very important to understand what Snowden's motives in evaluating the validity of the NSA documents. None of the documents have been released in their entirety, and often times the only thing that is released is a paragraph or two, or perhaps a couple of slides. Is there enough context in the partial source material presented to back up the article's claims, or is there more to the story? There have been several times when the media released one story, only to be contradicted when they later released further portions of the same document. For example, see [1], [2] and [3].

If he's whistleblowing on these program like he claims, there's no reason to doubt the validity of the documents; if he's just a disgruntled systems administrator with an axe to grind, the documents we see may cut down to remove the context and just show us what he and Greenwald want us to see, knowing full well that the NSA generally can't provide evidence denying the claims without releasing more classified information. When you add things like claims that other writers were forbidden from criticizing or contradicting Greenwald's narrative on Snowden at the Guardian[4] and at the Intercept on other subjects[5], it adds to suspicions that we're getting a distorted view of the subject.

Regarding Snowden's grandstanding, you don't even need to go all of the way back to high school to start seeing claims that don't quite mesh with reality. He lied about his qualifications to get his initial job as an NSA contractor[6] and by his own admission took the Booz Allen job specifically to gather information to leak[7]. That doesn't strike me as whistleblowing - instead of "I saw something wrong and I'm reporting it" it's instead "I'm determined to find something wrong and report it." That alone should sound sirens in everyone's head that whatever was released had a skewed perspective to it.

He claimed to be a senior intelligence official, while the NSA claims he was a low-level systems administrator. If we look at his actual words, though, compare for example his description of PRISM in 2013[8] to his description of it in 2014 after all of the details were released[9]. They're so different that it's apparent to me that he didn't actually know any of the details on PRISM beforehand except for general information mixed with his own assumptions. Other sources have documented a whole litany of other contradictions in his statements ([10] for example).

I've seen so many people say not to focus on Snowden, focus on the documents, but you can't fully evaluate the context of the documents without knowing his motive. Is he a heroic whistleblower like he claims, or is he a disgruntled ex-employee trying to lash out at his former employer and gain notoriety in the process through misleading disclosures?

[1] http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2014/04/what-is-known-about... (jump down to section 5, just below the 'PRISM Tasking Process' slide)

[2] http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/11/screenshots-from-bo...

[3] http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2015/02/snowden-would-not-...

[4] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2015/03/... (search for 'verboten')

[5] http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/02/ken-silverstein-...

[6] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-usa-security-sn...

[7] http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1268209/snowden-s...

[8] http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-says-nsa-has-direct-a... (search for "We've got PRISM")

[9] http://blog.ted.com/we-dont-have-to-give-up-liberty-to-have-... (search for "The NSA's own slides")

[10] https://www.beaconreader.com/joshua-foust/the-edward-snowden...

I do have some objections off the top of my head, if somewhat superficial.

> by his own admission took the Booz Allen job specifically to gather information to leak ... instead of "I saw something wrong and I'm reporting it" it's instead "I'm determined to find something wrong and report it."

He'd already decided there was something wrong, though: "“Much of what I saw in Geneva [as a CIA spy around 2007],” he said, “really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world.”" and "Snowden has said he first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008." On a different altercation, "The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals." And he started stealing documents before Booz Allen Hamilton, according to the NSA: "It was that summer of 2012, Ledgett says, when Snowden made his first illegal downloads."[1]

Those claims about his formative experiences could of course be fabrication to help his credibility, or maybe semi-honest retroactive re-framing of genuine incidents to justify his current course in his own mind. I'll assume they're honest, for purposes of explaining why I don't find the Booz Allen job so damning.

So, he's made a decent case that taking the Booz Allen Hamilton job, while driven by admitted "ulterior" motive, wasn't merely "I'll have a peek at secret info and see who I can 'sell' it to later". He already had some ideas what was wrong and who he wanted to tell about it. Now, I will grant you that his perception of the documents he gathered to support his opinion was then biased, and that the collection of documents available biases what they can be used to claim. But that seems an unavoidable part of humans forming and expressing opinions. So long as his "opinion" wasn't formed based on what would "play well" in the media or something like that, I don't really see an issue here.

If I haven't beaten this to death, another way to say what I'm trying to say here: imagine he worked in the same place for 5 years, and then in the last 3 months decided to start actively gathering documents to support a thesis. Would you say that skewed his results the same way? Why or why not? Because arguably, he did work in the same environment for 5+ years, and I don't see why just switching to another defense contractor for access poisons any opinion-forming or research he does there. If it does, we have to distrust anybody who has ever acted on an opinion in order to persuade us of it, because that means anything they say is skewed and they are now trying to fit facts into their narrative instead of the other way around. (Which is probably a good way to lean toward, but not very helpful if you take it to an extreme and want to ever learn about things that happen outside of your immediate consciousness.)

> is he a disgruntled ex-employee trying to lash out at his former employer

But it only became his former employer by Snowden's own choice to leak, as far as I understand both Snowden and the government say. Are you saying he now regrets losing his cushy $122k/yr job with Booz Allen, so we can't trust him? That's a stretch IMO -- the documents were obtained before his employer became the ex-employer, so they can't inherently be tainted afterward. And at this point, it's probably mostly the journalists picking through the documents and potentially coming up with misleading excerpts and framing, but why would their reason to do so be to spite their source's ex-employer? Snowden might be a naive idealist, an attention seeker, a troll, a spy, or something else, but "disgruntled ex-employee" is not making any sense to me. Maybe I'm taking it differently than you meant.

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/05/edward-snowd...

No, I'm saying that I wouldn't be surprised if something happened while he was in Hawaii that inspired him to leave with a bang. Apparently he left the CIA station in Geneva in 2009 because he received a derogatory performance report regarding his behavior and work ethic, and decided to leave prior to the CIA conducting a more thorough investigation.[1] He arrived in Hawaii in March 2012, so he had apparently only been there for a few months before he started stealing documents. He had spent around a year each working systems administration jobs under a contract Dell for the NSA in Japan and the CIA in Maryland prior.

I also don't doubt that he had planned to leak prior to switching over to Booz, since he initially contacted Greenwald about four months prior to taking the job, in addition to the government's claims that he began downloading them all in 2012. But I doubt that it was because he saw something and insisted that it must be brought to light. If that was the case, he wouldn't have walked out with so much data. He claimed to have "carefully evaluated every single document [he] disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest"[2], but he took out somewhere between 50 thousand and 1.7 million documents, depending on whose numbers you go by. This is a collection of documents that dozens of reporters, several dedicated solely to NSA reporting, haven't managed to go through over the course of two years, but somehow he himself carefully evaluated the potential damage and public interest value of every single document in less than eight months while simultaneously still working his 9-5 job. I don't buy it. If his intent was to blow the whistle on something, he would have just grabbed the few documents he needed and gone to press with them. The fact that he didn't leads me to believe that he had some other intent.

> "The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals."

What you left out from the paragraph that quote was pulled from was that it wasn't some shady intelligence operation that apparently convinced him to not work through proper channels, but that he claims was reprimanded for modifying his own performance report in a stunt to prove that there was an issue with the security in one of the systems used by human resources (there's slightly more information in this article: [3]) I don't know the details, but in every place I've worked bypassing security to modify your personnel files would be grounds for losing your job, regardless of what point you were trying to make.

And again, that's just his story - there's no evidence to back it up. Same thing for story about getting the banker drunk in Geneva to recruit him as a CIA asset; and distributing pornographic photos at NSA; and that the NSA took down all internet connectivity in Syria during their civil war; etc. Most importantly, that also goes for his claim that he voiced his concerns through internal channels. When NBC made a FOIA request to verify Snowden's claim that he had raised his concerns, the NSA responded that the only e-mail they could find was asking a generic question about legal authorities mentioned in a training program[4]. If Snowden wanted to maintain credibility at this point, he could have instantly produced the e-mails and said 'Look! The NSA is lying!' Instead, he just made a claim that they were lying without producing any evidence. I find it hard to believe that he walked out the door with thousands upon thousands of documents, but forgot to bring a copy of his own e-mails that would corroborate his story.

I'm sorry - I just think there's way too many aspects of his story that sound a bit too fishy. I could go on about other aspects regarding the NSA reporting, and Snowden's relationship with Glenn Greenwald/Laura Poitras, and questions about why he went to China and how he ended up in Russia, etc., but that diverges a bit from the subject of his grandstanding/credibility and I think that's probably enough for now

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/cia-disputes-early-susp...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took...

[4] http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/pape...

This is a fair point, especially in light of how his CIA stint ended. I started considering it myself, but didn't think much of it because it seems like the NSA & co. would be gleefully trumpeting such a thing if they knew it. For example, they said one of the first things he stole was a technical employment test with answers, and implied he used it to cheat (in my link from the last post.) Can you think of such an incident that the NSA wouldn't know about, or wouldn't reveal publicly?

And since you are arguing that he both a) leaked because he was disgruntled about something at work, and b) committed to leak months before changing jobs, the possible scenarios get even narrower, as they would have to carry over between jobs. Does he just hate the entire current US intelligence sector in general? Well, he's not keeping that a secret, so it shouldn't really be a mark against his credibility.

Now, just because I can't think of a reason he wanted to "leave with a bang" that we wouldn't know about, doesn't mean it can't be true, but it deflates that theory quite a bit IMO.

> If his intent was to blow the whistle on something, he would have just grabbed the few documents he needed and gone to press with them.

But his claim (or a popular simplification of it) is that the US is violating the rights of everyone, all the time, for any reason they feel like. He's not blowing the whistle on one office or something, it's a whole multi-billion dollar industry run by major branches of the US Government. If he just brought every document about PRISM, or just the Verizon metadata arrangement, or just personally hacking sysadmins at telecoms, or just tapping Google's private fiber lines, or just tapping Yahoo's private fiber lines, it would not be near as powerful as showing they are doing all of the above, and more! I don't know that he ever planned this, but there is also a practicality argument that it might be easier to "collect it all" first, flee, and sift through it for a few weeks full-time from the comfort of Hong Kong.

> What you left out from the paragraph that quote was pulled from

OK, and you left out where I introduced that quote with "On a different altercation, ... " Yes, I probably took too much license editing it, but it was meant as a quick allusion to his claims to have raised concerns through the "proper channels" at NSA and been ignored. In the full, more accurate context, it shows that on that occasion, he went to some lengths to work within the system to raise a concern (reading between the lines, it sounds like his boss eventually helped him to inject some Javascript tags into Snowden's personnel file, as a proof-of-concept for the vulnerability), and got nothing but trouble for trying to help in the way that was supposedly approved ("His immediate supervisor signed off on it" from your link).

> getting the banker drunk in Geneva to recruit him as a CIA asset

Yes, I am shocked the CIA didn't jump in and confirm or deny that this happened.</sarcasm> What proof would you expect? Granted, if it's not (dis)provable it's of little worth to us, but it's not really meant to be something we're persuaded to believe, just an anecdote about a formative experience. I don't know, is it inherently disingenuous to tell a story you can't prove, with the purpose of explaining your worldview?

> I find it hard to believe that he walked out the door with thousands upon thousands of documents, but forgot to bring a copy of his own e-mails that would corroborate his story.

First, that article says NBC sent a FOIA, but the single email shown was not received from FOIA. I'm not sure it matters, though.

How would anyone but the NSA and Snowden know with some certainty that any emails he did produce were legitimate? Would they admit to us if they were legitimate? (Tip: commit hashes of your proof to the Bitcoin blockchain early, so you can at least prove you were thinking about something before a certain date.) Hmm, I guess this goes for all the documents' authenticity, but I can imagine it's easier to confirm those than emails. Maybe he didn't really care about corroborating his story, or wasn't planning "a story" that far in advance. It's kind of funny that this is such a point of contention. Is anyone really saying the NSA would have stopped if they knew some sysadmin named Ed Snowden didn't like it? I guess alone it's pretty small, but it's another of several doubts about his credibility, that's why it's so hotly contested.

I agree that his claim about evaluating every document is suspect, and several of the other items you mentioned.

I don't think so for two reasons:

1) they don't talk much about anything unless they absolutely have to for classification and vetting reasons (this gets into topics like overclassification and whether or not things are really necessary for national security - but that's a different debate). For example, the op-ed that Michael Hayden wrote[1] in the USA Today in response to the 'NSA audit reveals thousands of violations' articles was apparently originally going to be written by the NSA itself, but the declassification and vetting process prevented a timely, point-by-point response[2]. I'm surprised that the e-mail was released so quickly. Overall, the NSA's response has been bumbling, and I think that has a lot to do with existing public relations policy that doesn't fit well with a fast-moving media.

2) There's a pending court case, and it's usually good policy to stay mum about anything regarding any pending cases until afterwards. I don't know that it's necessarily good policy now, as Snowden is probably never going to come back and face trial, but he is still indicted.

> Does he just hate the entire current US intelligence sector in general? Well, he's not keeping that a secret, so it shouldn't really be a mark against his credibility.

No, it's an indication that we should treat the leaks may have a skewed perspective, and we should keep that in mind when evaluating them. The credibility issue comes into place when he gets on national television and tells the American people “I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’"[3] The e-mail he sent did in fact ask a question about legal authorities, but nothing like what he described to the public; there were no concerns raised at all. Even his description of the response was a lie: instead of 'you should stop asking questions' the guy said 'Please give me a call if you'd like to discuss further'. On top of that, the e-mail was sent months after he first contacted Greenwald and Poitras - he was almost on his way out the door to Hong Kong at that point. That's the kind of stuff that speaks to his credibility. When you know that he hates the NSA and will make bald-faced lies on television should raise some flags when evaluating the leaks.

This is getting away from the Snowden credibility issue and more to issues with the reporting, but ...

> If he just brought every document about PRISM,

... for which all of the reporting turned out to be wrong. They blew a massive intelligence source over perceived mass civil liberties violations when the truth ended up being 'We can get content on specific accounts from Google/Yahoo/etc. when we present them with a court order.'

> or just the Verizon metadata arrangement,

... I probably wouldn't have had so much of a problem if he released that one and stopped there. Even so, the details from initial story still didn't match reality. On top of that, the program has debated at length in public and in Congress since it was initially disclosed back in 2005[4].

> or just personally hacking sysadmins at telecoms,

1) I don't care that GCHQ hacked Belgacom - it does not affect me at all; 2) we still lack a lot of context behind this - Why did GCHQ break in? What information did they obtain? Where they using this access to spy on legitimate intelligence targets, or something we would object to? The story was presented simply as 'they hacked a Belgian telecommunications company - be outraged!'

> or just tapping Google's private fiber lines, or just tapping Yahoo's private fiber lines,

I'm pretty sure Google and Yahoo didn't lay their own transcontinental undersea fiber optic lines. That's the nature of the internet - at some point your communications pass over lines owned by someone else. I'm a lot more angry at Google for not bothering to encrypt their transnational data than I am at GCHQ for intercepting it - that means the intelligence services of EVERY country their traffic passed through had access to it.

> it would not be near as powerful as showing they are doing all of the above, and more!

I agree with you there!

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/18/nsa-privacy...

[2] http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/beyond-snowden-ns... (search for 'interagency')

[3] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nsa-releases-snowden-email-nbc...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pa...

I am a bit bothered by the general response, "They would win this argument if they allowed themselves to tell you everything" that is often given in support of the spies. To outsiders, it's indistinguishable from "We know we'd be shut down if we admitted what's going on, but we feel the ends justify the means, or we like the money, etc." It feels unfair and underhanded, but I guess it is unavoidable and legitimate too.

That's a great point about the timing of that email. Also about "he hates the NSA and will make bald-faced lies" synergistically combining to discredit him (though I am not so convinced Snowden is the one lying.)

> the program has debated at length in public and in Congress since it was initially disclosed back in 2005

Yes, it wasn't really new, but if releasing new documents spurred greater public debate and nearly caused the House of Reps to vote to defund the program[1], is it not an effective activism tactic? I mean, you can call it traitorous, but you seem to be saying it was totally unnecessary, when its release caused a law to be drafted and voted on that probably wouldn't have otherwise.

> The story was presented simply as 'they hacked a Belgian telecommunications company - be outraged!'

And people wouldn't be outraged if there was no merit to it. Around here, we're all wondering if we will be personally hacked because of one user (or potential users) on a system we have authority over, and what consequences that could have on our personal life and reputation, employment, and our company's reputation. Yeah, it feels sort of silly to think NSA could bother me, but the targets of that hack would have said the same, until they learned the truth (or whatever filtered version the journalists fed them.)

Yeah, I was oversimplifying about the nature of those fiber lines, and you're right that it was irresponsible of them. Well, I guess you can thank Snowden for forcing companies like Google and Yahoo to clean up their act. If there's one legacy he'll have, it's that more engineers will think of the NSA bogeyman (justified or not, illegal or not, accurately portrayed or not) whenever they design things. Maybe Snowden's ulterior motive is to scare people into better security, by lying if he must? ;)

P.S. What do you think of William Binney? He basically supports Snowden and says some of the same things, but maybe doesn't have as bad of credibility issues.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07...

I don't think they're winning the argument here, at least not as far as public approval. It's completely anecdotal, but I've noticed something interesting about the kinds of responses people have on the subject: people who don't follow the issue at all tend to completely disapprove of Snowden, call him a traitor, cite terrorism, etc.; people who are somewhat passionate and read all of on the subject tend to have the polar opposite opinion; and people who go into extreme depth on the subject (reading all of the leaked documents, reading the laws, watching the debates and the congressional hearings, etc.) tend have much more nuanced opinions. It's hard to have debates on the subject because of both the amount of secrecy involved and the amount of misinformation floating around. I think the NSA needs a big adjustment to how it handles interactions with the media if it's going to gain any traction with the public. At the same, the American public needs to come to grips with the fact we employ people for the purpose of spying, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

> I mean, you can call it traitorous, but you seem to be saying it was totally unnecessary, when its release caused a law to be drafted and voted on that probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Actually if Snowden had stopped at the domestic phone records collection program, I don't think many people would really have much issue with him. It's everything that came afterwards that bugs me. The 215 program was and continues to be very controversial. What doesn't help the debate is the amount of misinformation about the program. The PCLOB laid the entire program out in one of their reports[1], and several officials have summarized exactly how they are using the data and what they're allowed to use it for (see [2] for example), but it continues to draw arguments citing things like this[3] where they include several types of metadata that the NSA isn't permitted to get like location data, names, message content. I'd love to see someone to do a research paper where pull the exact types of data collected under this program from 100 or so phones and say 'this is the actual information we were able to obtain from it'. I've done it myself on a very small sample of phones (3 phones over about two months) and made some interesting conclusions, but nothing like some of the detractors have made.

I'm not saying that legitimate violations of the law shouldn't be reported, but we haven't seen that. What we have seen a lot of is 'look at this tool/program that NSA is using', then an insinuation that it could be used against anyone without actually showing who it has been used against or why. The giant revelation that Glenn Greenwald promised showing actual Americans who were targeted by the NSA ended up instead showing 5 Americans that the FBI through FISA warrants. If something bad is going on, I want to see actual wrongdoing, not potential for wrongdoing. The police have the technical capability to indiscriminately gun down every person they see, but no one is arguing that we should disarm them based on something they could do.

> Around here, we're all wondering if we will be personally hacked because of one user (or potential users) on a system we have authority over, and what consequences that could have on our personal life and reputation, employment, and our company's reputation.

I think one of the biggest problems that has arisen from the Snowden revelations is that it's completely upended people's perceptions of the threat model. Telecommunications providers shouldn't be surprised that they're a target, because they would be a prime target for hackers even if there weren't any intelligence services. They sit in a very privileged position on the internet. For the most part, I'd say the people that have to worry about being targeted by the NSA or any other intelligence service already knew ahead of time that they were potential targets. If you don't deal with anything pertaining to national security issues or provide means to gain access to national security information, your primary concern should not be the NSA (or GCHQ/Mossad/FSB/BnD/etc.)

This leads to lots of bad security practices as people try to secure themselves from the NSA but leave themselves more vulnerable to more plausible threats. Tor is a primary example - it might hide you from someone trying to target you specifically, but will make you significantly more vulnerable to someone who doesn't care who they're attacking (i.e. just about every criminal). Articles like this[4] made me cringe: battered women were seeking some means to escape from their abusive boyfriends/spouses, and the Tor Project managed to convince them that they would be safer from them by browsing the web using Tor.

With regards to William Binney, he hasn't worked in the agency for nearly 15 years, so I don't put much credence into anything he says after 2001. His description of ThinThread, which he advocates, sounds terrifying: instead of trying to filter out and discard as much domestic communication as possible, ThinThread apparently takes in all of the communications and encrypts the domestic traffic for later use if they obtain a warrant. It's hard to definitely evaluate it without a more detailed technical description, though.

[1] https://www.pclob.gov/library/215-Report_on_the_Telephone_Re...

[2] http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/former-nsa-head-michael...

[3] http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

[4] http://www.betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-...

I don't have much to add to the discussion other than to say that people have spent miles of text, sweating this thread out, yet no one has budged a bit on either side of this discussion. Some generosity and good faith "shoe-switching" might go a long way in seeing the middle ground between "the government is completely in the clear to keep on trucking" and "the NSA should be abolished."

I wasn't trying to imply that my opinion was the correct one - of course, I am naturally a bit biased on the matter. :) I was trying to say that the whole "the NSA is 100% evil" argument is just as ignorant as the "the terrorists will win if the NSA doesn't read your e-mail" argument. Based on your 2nd paragraph, I think we're in agreement on that front.

I've watched debates like [1] where you put the NSA and ACLU in the same room and civil discussion ensues. I'd like to see more debate on those lines.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3KKEh2AS6E

So please answer my question:

Is James Clapper a protagonist or antagonist for lying to congress?

The power and influence, along with whims of eccentric players, in these contractor groups is really getting out of hand.

And we all want attention in some way, including you for posting your comments and me for mine. It could be both a noble thing Snowden did and something he wants some recognition for doing. Basing your analysis on whatever he did in high school is quite silly. Most everybody was looking for some attention then and likely going about it the wrong way.

You're not a whistleblower either: you just want to DIVERT attention from the FACTS Snowden revealed that you can't refute.

"I'll try and dig up the link(s) but ..." is in the same league with "I'm not racist but ..." and "some of my best friends are black".

Or do you actually think the material is forged?