justcommenting

Moxie Marlinspike on 17 Mar 2026

The Amazon Echo Show seems very much like a telescreen, straight out of Orwell's 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

The question I'd ask in response to this post is "So where did the money actually go?"

I suspect inequality and wealth transfer explains much more of the observed trends than the author acknowledges at the end. In each of the verticals discussed, there have been strong (albeit sometimes less obvious) trends for consolidation among institutions and organizations. This includes companies, government contractors, and even vendors in ecosystems we tend to think of as decentralized like local schools, where significant consolidation might be occurring over time at the level of food suppliers like Aramark, utility companies, or diesel fuel suppliers for school buses.

These organizations' compensation and capital structures, in turn, likely grew increasingly unequal over time. Stockholders, stakeholders like executives, and intermediaries like insurance companies in those organizations likely extracted more and more capital relative to traditional stakeholders like the college students, physicians, and teachers addressed in the post.

Wealth transfer from traditional stakeholders (college students, physicians, teachers) to organizational stakeholders (execs, stockholders, suppliers in consolidating markets) seems like both a cause and a consequence of the 'cost disease' discussed in the post.

Turncoats.

Invoking the concept isn't out of bounds, but having watched a decent number of presentations, talks, and interviews by/about this particular person, the lack of nuance in describing someone whose views seem especially easy to find was frustrating and likely deliberate. It took me all of five seconds to find Snowden's last tweet on the particular argument Gladwell references, which was about a week ago (bold font): https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/805868198138703873

Gladwell's uninformed gee-whiz speculation seems like an excuse to parrot the claim that Snowden "may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service" without mentioning any evidence or even a clear argument beyond its appearance in a book. Maybe Snowden was that or worse, but the only argument Gladwell seems to construct to support the claim is that he was a dupe/fool because he didn't go Harvard like Ellsberg.

I wouldn't disagree with your friends and acquaintances on that point, but would suspect that they reached their conclusions differently from Gladwell.

Another potentially self-serving issue that Gladwell conveniently glosses over in this piece: We could also make the argument that Ellsberg also had a much more effective and courageous press and educated population behind him. But it's easier to smear community college drop-outs and discuss a hypothetical "Edward Snowberg" than a hypothetical New Yorker with more reporters like Jane Mayer than commentators like Gladwell.

Mostly the far-from-charitable interpretation of "When we talk about saving lives, when we are talking about fighting cancer, treating AIDS, ameliorating poverty, these solutions typically are not coming from government. . . . While law is important . . . at the end of the day law is simply letters on a page."

My argument was that Gladwell is painting a cheap caricature of a "hacker" when it's both easy and reasonable to interpret a quote like the one above in the broader context of the full speech/event and the dozens of others that he's given in recent years.

I'm not trying to argue that Snowden has or doesn't have respect for governing institutions. I think that's Snowden's story to tell. But my read of the piece is that Gladwell reached some "clever" sounding conclusion - perhaps in a "blink" - and then found a quote that supported his narrative, which reads more like Harvard-worship in Ellsberg's favor than careful presentation of arguments/evidence. This strikes me as misleading and dishonest in light of the sheer volume of interviews, tweets, etc. from Snowden that (at least to me) paint a more nuanced and careful picture.

One could just as easily argue that if Ellsberg had focused on making documents public more quickly, more lives could have been saved during the Vietnam War.

Both were imperfect people in unique situations, but Gladwell's distinction seems to boil down to "Harvard, game theory, & Nobel prize winning PhD advisor" in the case of Ellsberg vs. "community-college dropout" in the case of Snowden, followed by Gladwell falling over himself to redefine "insider" right after spelling it out in detail with the language of class, prestige, and societal privilege.

I don't think Gladwell understands enough about either person - or "leaks" in general - to draw meaningful conclusions.

To give an example, Gladwell cherry-picks quotes to misrepresent Snowden's views in this piece. The strong stench of elitism and intellectual dishonesty in insinuating that Snowden is a fool because he claims that non-governmental institutions have important roles to play in solving social problems is typical, and I would venture to speculate that Gladwell would never say the same thing about someone like Larry Lessig (who has actually spoken with Snowden), even though they happen to hold similar views on those topics, particularly in relation to the examples Snowden gave in the quote.

Gladwell's process serves well enough as a lazy caricature for the piece but doesn't represent a good-faith articulation of his subject's views, which is hard to excuse in light of the dozens of events, thousands of tweets, etc. that are much more accessible than Ellsberg material was decades ago.

Gladwell could have interviewed Snowden and Ellsberg but probably chose not to, perhaps because it was easier to trash-talk someone whose life is under threat at an especially sensitive time (pardon consideration) for a "clever" contrast with Ellsberg than to try to represent his perspective in good faith.

see also http://seclists.org/dailydave/2016/q3/51

Does anyone else recall Jacob Appelbaum referring to RC6 constants [0] in public talks (e.g. 30c3) back in 2013?

I'm surprised Appelbaum hasn't been directly suggested as a potential source[1,2].

[0] https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75812/the-equation-giv...

[1] http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/12661/what-could-l...

[2] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/jacob-appelbaum-30c3-...

Does anyone else recall Jacob Appelbaum discussing this publicly a while back?

These are bogus arguments that sound reasonable in the absence of a relevant comparison but are all flimsy and uninformed upon inspection.

For example, by what definition would this not be 'safe'? Do you mean in comparison to Firefox's defaults, which enable profoundly privacy-invasive tracking, hide the contents of the cookie management dialog box, and enable the delivery of malvertising at will by visiting "safe" websites - just to name a few?

MitM positions exist on the internet for all users today, both for HTTP and in the situation of "new HTTPS bugs". So you point out risks taken when using the internet in general, and the Tor Browser Bundle already mitigates many of those risks via NoScript and various patches. I've used Tor Browser Bundle daily for all purposes - including online banking and shopping - for several years with zero problems. Malicious exits exist and get flagged out of the network rapidly. Essentially all remaining risk is trivially defeated by toggling the 'block all unencrypted requests' pref in HTTPSEverywhere, which is part of the Tor Browser Bundle and could be built into an implementation in Firefox with a warning for HTTP traffic.

And you're probably thinking of 2009-era Tor network experience. For me, Tor network performance routinely boils down to ~200ms additional latency with ~1.5-2MB/s download speeds. The difference between that and an average broadband connection is barely noticeable.

I recommend using the Tor network and the Tor Browser Bundle before criticizing this idea.