Is Snowden a hero? Maybe, I dunno. Ask your fellow citizens if they want to put a statue of him in the park. That's how democracy is supposed to work. It isn't perfect, in fact it's the worst form of a government. Except for all the others.

My family member went through this process to set up a memorial statue and it was a nightmare of bureaucracy. And this was in a tiny relatively unpopular park in a small town - not a big city.

It took about 3 years to finally happen (by that I mean approved to happen, its still not completed yet) after jumping through countless hoops and making friends with the right politicians, who then had to back the idea in order to get support by the town council.

The big reason it ended up happening was the person who she became friends with ended up becoming mayor of the town.

Yay democracy.

If no, then we could honestly say that there are not enough people who care enough about the Prison Ship Martyrs compared to the memory of Snowden.

Or when MLK asked all of the south to politely, democratically fix the whole racism thing.

Sometimes protest has to break the rules. Because protest.

You seemed, to me, to be implying that all conscientious objectors must at all times observe complete obedience to the rule of law. That approach will never keep things running sanely for long. You can clearly see throughout history that it never has. Power must always be kept in check and in support of that, some of the rules ordained by that power must always be broken.

We've tried the "trust our elected officials" approach. We got mass surveillance. Next idea?

He's one of the most successful double-agents in history, with excellent public relations. If a double-agent were to happen again in the future, they'll do what they can to study how Snowden handled his case.

No, I don't think he's a "hero". At least Manning's ideology was pure, (although naiive). Snowden is almost certainly a double-agent based on the countries he fled to and who he is working with currently. Contrast Snowden with Manning: Manning didn't contact the Chinese Embassy while fleeing to Hong Kong before releasing only some of the data. Just think about it for a second. Manning released anything and everything he got his hands on. Snowden: he's visited multiple foreign countries and has direct contact with those governments.

If you want to discuss the collections programs, lets start with how you expect police to actually deal with modern criminals (ie: Swatters) if they didn't have the ability to track the location of their phone calls. You know, practical concerns that our law enforcement are attempting to solve. If tracking telephone "metadata" is too much, then what tools are you willing to give police in their battle?

EDIT: Here come the down votes. Come on people, lets see your stuff. Truth hurts, doesn't it?

1. you say: "most successful double-agents in history"

2. you say: "probably sold US secrets to China and Russia"

The NSA's leadership has repeatedly stated that they don't believe Snowden to be a foreign agent[0]. Unless you have more evidence than "based on the countries he fled to and who he is working with currently", your case is exceptionally weak. Additionally Snowden is not a "double agent". A double agent is a agent that is turned twice[1]. Even if Snowden were a foreign spy, he wouldn't be a double agent, unless he was recruited to work by a foreign government to spy on the US, but then was turned by the US to feed the foreign government misinformation. A theory that no one, outside of Alex Jones, is currently advancing.

[0]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/03/nsa-chief-micha...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_agent

In the field of counterintelligence, a double agent (also double secret agent) is an employee of a secret intelligence service, whose primary purpose is to spy on a different target organization, but who, in fact, is a member of the target organization.

In other words, if Snowden worked for the NSA and spied on China or Russia, but at the same time was passing information over to China or Russia, he would then be a double agent. That's why it's so fishy when he repeatedly says that he specifically used to work on Chinese targets (for example: [1]), chose to flee the US and go to China, and his 3rd leak in the news was giving a Chinese newspaper a list of all of Chinese computers that had been targeted by the NSA[2].

That doesn't mean he's a double-agent, but it certainly raises some eyebrows...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVwAodrjZMY#t=7m16s

[2] http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-sn...

Nonetheless, the Metadata debate remains important, so I'll continue to bring it up. I've read through the rest of these threads, and they're all "Snowden's a hero!!!" without even touching upon the debate that he's brought up.

EDIT: Its as if this "metadata collection" is the most evil thing in the world ever done. Good gosh. Its still hugely ironic to me that Snowden fled to the state with the "Great Firewall of China" literally spying on every Chinese blogger with police powers that make those guys _literally_ disappear if they say the wrong things...

While over here in the US, this forum gets their panties in a twist over metadata collection.

I am happy that we all hold the US to a higher standard, but I still hold my point: to take down a Swatter, the Police will need access to metatdata.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/22/u-s-hacked-...

Snowden explicitly collected how the US was spying on China, went to China, and then "publicly" gave out those details. I think he was expecting the Chinese Government to take him in and protect him after the big reveal.

For whatever reason, China didn't want him. Probably because China has enough issues with their own whistle blowers. Or maybe China already knew the information Snowden had, so they didn't value him at all.

Russia apparently values Snowden very much. They like him if only because he serves as an anti-US rallying cry.

Wild speculations aside, you might want to consider the revelations on their own merits rather than a ham-fisted smear against the source. The fact remains that they have been confirmed as true and are therefore not some kind of black propaganda.

More worrying in some ways is that it seems he got everything using wget and further that there was no audit trail to understand what he got. If we believe as we are told that he was a relatively low level external contractor, that means internal security is non-existent and you can guarantee that any other competent agency also has everything (at least confirming part of your China theory above).

Fair enough. I'm more interested in the political implications anyway.

So what do we do about Swatters? Metadata collection seems to be the only useful tool against them.

Actually, I don't believe that the local police are taking advantage of their resources. I think better organization needs to be done around the metadata that is collected so that it is better distributed between the police officers in the case of a swatting incident.

But actually _having_ metadata is a necessary first step to beginning any swatting investigation. Or do you not think that the first step is figuring out the phone number that the Swatter called from?

Next: I'm not entirely sure that Swatting will ever be stopped. Nonetheless, I'd like to punish those who are swatting, and I think that if they are removed from society... that is one step towards fixing the problem.

If a swatter gets caught and his criminal record is updated such that everyone knows he is a swatter, then society will benefit from it overall.

Also, bull!@#!. _CHINA_ prevented the US from traveling after he got to Hong Kong. If the US had its way, then Snowden would be in jail right now.

CHINA prevented him from traveling after he got to Hong Kong. The US had very little power over the whole issue at that point.

There are other parties at play here.

China had an extremely important role with Snowden. They didn't care about the "passport", they were buying time looking for some other country to take him in.

I guess Russia took him in after that (Snowden didn't want to go to Russia. So I doubt that Snowden is a Russian spy... but if he knew what was good for him, he probably was forced to give some of his secrets to the Russians under the table.)

Oh stop whining. You can't just accuse someone of being a spy and expect upvotes. Accusations without evidence (hint hint) are not 'truth'.

>how you expect police to actually deal with modern criminals (ie: Swatters)

Well for most crimes the police have traditionally gotten along fine without such vast metadata. For that crime specifically maybe they could use a warrant to the phone company? That seems easy to do without NSA interception. Or the police could keep track of calls to them and not have to do anything more than find the owner of a phone number.

Snowden is the first guy I'm aware of who fled to China (and later, to Russia) to protect his own free speech. Color me a little bit suspicious of him.

> Well for most crimes the police have traditionally gotten along fine without such vast metadata. For that crime specifically maybe they could use a warrant to the phone company? That seems easy to do without NSA interception. Or the police could keep track of calls to them and not have to do anything more than find the owner of a phone number.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861

> (A) a judge of the court established by section 1803 (a) of this title; or

The law we're discussing requires a judge to sign off on it. Its not necessarily a "warrant" per se, but do you think elevating these powers to require a warrant would suffice?

These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves if we actually want to progress.

There aren't that many countries who would not release Snowden to the US.

Ecuador has proven itself reliable with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It proved itself reliable _long_ before Snowden decided to pull Chinese-specific information from the US Spy agency, fly to China, release Chinese information and (probably) beg to stay.

Instead of going to a reliable country like Ecuador, he went to China. Snowden isn't a dumb guy either, he was clearly keeping up with the news. He chose China because the data he pilfered was Chinese specific.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/22/u-s-hacked-...

Once in China, after the reveal, Snowden became trapped. He couldn't fly over any other country that had US influence. He furthermore got trapped in Russia (it is extremely sketchy. I think Russia wanted him, and they got him. Russia probably won't let him go.)

I don't think Snowden is working with Russia. He was trying to get to Ecuador IIRC with help from Julian Assange. But based on what he did in Hong Kong, it is clear to me that he expected help from the Chinese Government. If Snowden went to Ecuador from the start, I'd have a much easier time believing that what he was doing was for good-will.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/02/world/americas/bolivia-preside...

FYI: Snowden was trying to get to Ecuador when Russia trapped him in Moscow.

Except when it's not truth but a random rant.

You say:

> If you want to discuss the collections programs, lets start with how you expect police to actually deal with modern criminals (ie: Swatters) if they didn't have the ability to track the location of their phone calls.

Notice "THEIR phone calls", not "EVERY phone calls".

Truth is, views like yours are clueless and/or dangerous and fail to see the big picture.

I'm sure you embrace the "I've got nothing to hide, so I don't care" stance. So yeah, fk the rest of the people, don't give a sh*t.

Educate yourself.

Have the police sit around doing nothing because they don't have the legal tools to look at business metadata? I'm trying to bring up an actual issue here. For a hundred years, the "metadata" standard has applied to mail, telephone records, business records and so forth as "free game" for the Police.

What makes the modern era so different that Police aren't allowed to look at metadata anymore?

2. There is vastly more metadata being stored now, and the police don't need access to most of it. We might even be better off with laws against storing it.

Wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...

It's been free-game for a hundred years. Keep up with the law dude. USPS "metadata" has been copied and tracked. Such information was used for the Anthrax cases of early 2000s... and other such crimes.

It is illegal for police to read the contents of an envelope, but they can (and have been) scanning the outside of envelopes and storing that metadata for police use for decades.

The difference between snail-mail and the business records provision is... terrorism was added to the words. But I'd bet what they were doing was legal before the Patriot Act was made.

> 2. There is vastly more metadata being stored now, and the police don't need access to most of it. We might even be better off with laws against storing it.

That doesn't answer the question. How do you expect to track down a Swatter without using metadata?

>How do you expect to track down a Swatter without using metadata?

As I said in my other post, you don't actually need call records to find a swatter. They called the police, the police have the number, tada. I'm not arguing against deleting everything that could possibly classify as metadata, I'm saying we should cut down the types of metadata available. And we need to stop the government from making copies of private data 'just in case' and declaring it not to be a search/seizure until some later stage.

And if the Swatter used another phone to call a Google Voice number to create a local line in another city, they will need Metadata to figure out what that _OTHER_ telephone number is.

Otherwise, they have a phone number to a fake google-account created in TOR. That's not very useful.

Phone Number 555-0000 called Google-Voice 555-9991, which THEN called the Police. Only having "555-9991" is completely worthless. You need metadata analysis to unravel the proxies.

Furthermore, executing a warrant generally requires a name and a case. You don't got a name yet, you're trying to build a case without warrant powers at this point of the Police game.

Do you think these Swatters are dumb or something? They aren't using their personal phone numbers to call the police, they're actually redirecting themselves a little bit.

> I'm not arguing against deleting everything that could possibly classify as metadata, I'm saying we should cut down the types of metadata available. And we need to stop the government from making copies of private data 'just in case' and declaring it not to be a search/seizure until some later stage.

The legal standard between 1940s (since the closure of the Office of Censorship, which straight up allowed the US Agents to read mail and censor them), and now has been that metadata collection doesn't need a warrant.

Metadata collection is NOT search/seizure in Smith v. Maryland. Its how things have operated for literally decades.

Now if you don't like it, that's fine. But know that you're moving from the status-quo. This is how the government has operated since the 1970s at very least (see again... Smith v. Maryland).

Going back to the cases before that was Olmstead v. United States, 1928, which collection of straight-up data was considered not search/seizure btw. (So we've actually cut back upon collection from a historical perspective. Police powers were greater in the 1920s than today)

If the police can't get access to limited phone metadata with oversight, the solution is to give them a way to get limited phone metadata with oversight, not to give them access to all the phone metadata.

>Now if you don't like it, that's fine. But know that you're moving from the status-quo. This is how the government has operated since the 1970s at very least

Fine, I want a change from the status quo. But it's not just that, I'm saying two things.

1. It is important that metadata (and data) collection does not expand because of the ease of technology.

2. I would prefer metadata collection to be rolled back a few decades and limited.

It's 1 that really worries me, and no amount of historical collection is going to comfort that.

Thanks for the disappointing enlightenment.

Did you read the business records provision?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861

Read it again. It requires the agencies to check off with a Judge. It already _has_ oversight built into it. If something is wrong with the oversight, then tell me what you think is wrong with it.

In addition, the NSA collects data before asking for permission. And I am doubtful that their oversight is effective.

But I don't want to argue about it for hours. I just want less metadata to be collected. Because even without the government it gets abused.

Snowden's first revealed document was the court order where the NSA / FBI was asking for permission from the FISA courts. Now I don't think you've even read Snowden's docs.

> But I don't want to argue about it for hours.

Fair enough. I hope that in our short discussion, you learned how things actually work.

> I just want less metadata to be collected. Because even without the government it gets abused.

You're welcome to have your opinion, but your opinion was tainted by horribly inaccurate facts. I thank you for being a good sport and listening to me through this.

In any case, now you know the specific law that grants the powers. You can now write to a Senator / House Representative and argue specifically against the law on your own. Even if you are on the "other side" of this debate, we Americans are much better off when all sides understand the debate. Our political system also works out well when discussions like what you and I just had happen more often.

Summary: Business Records Provision of the Patriot Act. Know it well, so you can criticize it. Take it down and the metadata of the NSA should fall.

Good luck on the political battlefield. Again, thank you for working with me in this debate.

Okay I'll be more specific. Without specific permission pertaining to a specific case, they collect whatever they feel like to sort out later. I don't like that.

>I hope that in our short discussion, you learned how things actually work.

I learned there has been more access to metadata than I previously thought, but my main worry is and has been the exploding amount of metadata and analysis, which I do have a pretty good grasp on.

Thanks for the discussion.

> Okay I'll be more specific. Without specific permission pertaining to a specific case, they collect whatever they feel like to sort out later. I don't like that.

How do you expect the Police to go after a swatter then? The creation of 'nameless warrants' is looked down upon in general, and is grossly illegal in many jurisdictions. You cannot get a warrant unless a specific person is named.

Without a warrant, police cannot continue investigating. Police need access to the metadata to get a name so that they can get a warrant.

I know John Doe warrants exist, but their use is highly criticized. And it should be! We can't have the police getting nameless warrants regularly. With that said, we have to give the Police enough room to maneuver so that they can build a case before they are granted the high-powers of a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment promises _due process_. Metadata, in my opinion is a "reasonable" search. Or at least, we should _define_ metadata as the part that can be reasonably searched. (After all, not all data is innately private. The data that is "public" should be easily searched by the Police without warrants). The debate really should be about determining which bits of data are "public" and which bits aren't.

Well we're talking about a 'nameless warrant' to only access something they could access at-will before, so I don't see that as a real problem.

>we should _define_ metadata as the part that can be reasonably searched.

That sounds like a mess. Metadata has a pretty clear meaning already when it comes to communication.

>The debate really should be about determining which bits of data are "public" and which bits aren't.

Maybe, but things are much more complicated than public and not public.

No. A warrant means they can start accessing data. Install bugs, tracking devices... the whole works. All fourth amendment protections are gone once a judge grants the Police a warrant.

The question is whether or not you want "Metadata" to be part of that pool or not. Personally speaking, I don't.

> Maybe, but things are much more complicated than public and not public.

Which is why discussion of this issue is important. The fact is, you expect something from the Police that is different than the Status Quo for the past decades.

It frustrates me to no end when all the YCombinator posters around here complain and protest in obscure ways (ie: putting Snowden up as a statue in a park), and then they don't really try and learn the intricacies of the law and try to find changes that everyone actually agrees upon.

The reason our political system is borked is because no one is actually discussing the law or how to change it. Our Congressmen get vague clues (ie: SOPA BAD!!), but they really are struggling to understand our opinion in general.

Are you serious? We're talking about a new thing that only restricts access compared to before. It would not be the same as a warrant today. That objection is ridiculous.

>Status Quo for the past decades.

Part of the problem is that it used to take manpower to spy on people, and a lot of that is getting replaced with computers that do it for nearly free. It's not a legal change, but it changes the end result in a terrible way.

Okay, I'm gonna cut off the conversation at this point. YCombinator is not a good forum for discussion. I see you're frustrated so we'll just let it end here.

I strongly disagree with your opinion, so I'm thinking its best to just agree to disagree at this point.

Why don't you trust FISA? And if you don't trust it, what reforms to the FISA courts are you proposing?

Or are you just a lazy armchair protester who doesn't even think about how to improve the world around you? Hey look, I can fling insults at you too and be unhelpful!!

Seriously, the FISA system is documented, and it is part of the debate. Do you actually have an argument, or are you just gonna leave it there?

Which as far as I'm aware, none of what has been revealed by Snowden has been shown to be illegal. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.

As "oversight" goes, that sounds rather a lot like, "That's nice, son. You run along and play, now..."

Almost all of the sitting members of the court are former law enforcement in some way, and many of them have evinced strongly statist and authoritarian views in the rulings they've made in the trial courts they also sit in.

So I'd also like to see some membership on the panel that doesn't seem hand-picked to yes-man (nearly) every request that comes along. I'm not suggesting this as a definitive proposal for changing the court, but what about including members from (or elected by) demonstrably pro-liberty organizations like the EFF or ACLU or whatever, with some kind of veto-like power?

I legitimately believe that there is value in being able to investigate suspected "bad" actors — and that sometimes those investigations must be surreptitious, or that actor will become aware of the suspicion and change his behavior. I don't buy the leap from that being the case to, "We can look into anyone at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, and then use whatever we find against you down the road, or hand it off to sibling agencies for 'parallel construction' type purposes." (And don't even try to suggest that doesn't happen. We know it does.)

So there's two thoughts off the top of my head.

Step 1. Police don't kick a person's door down and shoot everyone based upon a single unconfirmed report.

>What makes the modern era so different that Police aren't allowed to look at metadata anymore?

The volume of available metadata.

No one has died to Swatting yet, (thank goodness). But the success rate at catching swatters has been less than stellar.

I'm more concerned about the "catching swatters" part. Why the general police forces of the US seem unable to catch them bothers me greatly.

>He's one of the most successful double-agents in history, with excellent public relations.

>Snowden is almost certainly a double-agent based on the countries he fled to

All that speculation, then this gem:

>EDIT: Truth hurts, doesn't it?

But no. It's not cause your post is full of accusations and dubious speculation based on nothing and provides no evidence. It's cause you struck a nerve and showed the sheep here the truth and they can't handle it. That's definitely what it is.

I upvoted you! Of course this account I created is going to probably die because I express the unpopular opinion too!