This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.
"Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation."
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow [0]
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Not just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.
As I recall he became fixated on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, to the extent that he got himself fired from The Intercept over it. Maybe he saw the pictures of naked Biden and became absolutely obsessed with the photo gallery of coke and dong.
It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
>A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
In that it was perfectly legal. Snowden, with his high school dropout reading skills thought it allowed the NSA to pull any account's data directly off the companies' servers, and Greenwald, with his technical illiteracy, believed him. The Guardian didn't have a competent news editor and allowed the story to be printed without verification from an expert, while pretty much every other news agency got the story right.
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
The Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians").
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
And yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
That doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example.
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Be afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency
According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB.
Nor was it put to any other minister.
"This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.
This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
[0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/
Why does it post the Intercept in a bad light?
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
I think the real answer is the Overton window shifted to accommodate what was previously scandalous,
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
>We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming.
In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
Your comment started out well within the Overton window, but in the second paragraph it jumped out.
Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
I like that terminology.
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
here's a bogeyman for you, accepting money in a representative democracy for political action is maybe mere nanometers from the definition of bribery.
Perhaps a bit ahistorical, but I'm put in mind of the quote "Not even Masada began as a suicide attempt."
Interesting times indeed.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
That's still a single window. Otherwise what are the radical, unthinkable positions between abhorrent, fine and moot?
(TL;DR: It's just a metaphor).
thats the tough thing about investigative journalism / whistleblowers. You have to hope there's an audience who will care.
Plenty of people care.
Empathy is, after all, free.
Action has a price.
It's a figure of speech. It's short for "care enough to to take action."
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
He could have returned to the US. He chose to exile in Russia. He was already fleeing. I posted a bunch about it below
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
I once publicly stated here that I think some accounts are astroturfers, and I think some are deep state too. I am not making specific accusations.
i just had that conversation about 'industrial' effort and 'actors', we have recent examples of monetary corruption in the sacklers.
If one country wants to kill you why wouldn't you flee to a different one and give them everything you have against the first country?
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
That's a conspiracy theory I haven't heard before which I'm pretty sure I'll never hear a shred of evidence for.
It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
"Only had a few years behind bars"
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...
Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?
No.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
>Assange didn't commit a crime
Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.
> And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion
Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.
> pretend that plea deals are coercion
That's exactly what they are.
Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
> Assange didn't commit a crime
Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is
He'd served his time for that.
didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time
one is true and one is false
We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges
He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy
You mean the rape charges that were dropped? Incredible that people still tout this obvious psyop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50473792
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events. "Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation."
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
>But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart.
It was not the original intent from what i understand.
But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
> But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
As i wrote he probably took the easiest way out for himself. We are in agreement.
I just say what's better for himself is not necessarily better for the debate/cause. I don't know how that is controversial.
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
Nepal UAE Belarus Mongolia Vietnam Laos Montenegro Indonesia
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
"doesn't have a public interest defence".
Can't be serious.
There isn’t one under the law so no.
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
What he exposed was found illegal by US courts. And the govt had to stop it. What more evidence do you want?
A single program he leaked was illegal. The vast majority was not, including the hacking of Chinese targets that he leaked directly to SCMP.
Is Snowden able to talk freely in Russia?
The OP was right - avoiding a unfair trial is still fleeing.
The word "flee" is not a pejorative in any way. For example flee North Korea all the time.
No. It is pejorative in the way it is used. Context is important.
Russians had a joke about him back then: "For the crimes against the US Snowden was sentenced to the life in Russia"
I would say Snowden's legacy is the push to get HTTPS everywhere.
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
What???
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
> in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
> We kill people based on metadata.
Sure, but they also kill people based on content.
> It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
I wholeheartedly disagree :)
If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...
One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lol> If you will refer to the “survivability onion”
> I am here → Don't be seen
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
I too ran Squid. It was more annoying than not (except for images, where I do think it was quite useful)
It seem you concede the point about survivability though?
Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
> if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing
Just visiting, sure but if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
Say you are on your school network and leak something damaging about the school on Wikipedia.
Prior to Wikpedia switching to HTTPS, both the school and any intermediate network could see
After HTTPS, your school could see That's strictly better in every way.Doesn't encrypted DNS make a lot of that metadata moot ?
And of course the additional options available
No, it doesn't. You still see the domain name in the TLS headers.
So what? They have Cloudflare. "SSL removed here"
That’s true
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
Wasn’t he departing from Hong Kong to Ecuador and was stuck in Russia because his passport was revoked in transit?
I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.
Yes so his default option was to return to the US and face arrest so he applied for asylum (as a US citizen still)
> I am still a citizen and so was he.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
I get it I didn’t leak national security information but it doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t stateless. That’s the part I was referring to
That just feels like a slightly different false equivalence - and having said that, I may be making yet another version of it by saying this:
If a person has a 'state', but that state would immediately jail the person for treason upon their return, is that materially different to stateless?
That feels like the reason that many countries allow 'political asylum'.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
Russia offers asylum to stateless people.
The only problem with getting asylum anywhere while being stateless is proving who you are. And it wasn't a problem for him.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.
> He just faced arrest if he returned
You seem to continue to minimise the seriousness of the situation.
Oh it was very serious what he did. But it was odd he went to Hong Kong then to Russia on his was to Ecuador. It wasn’t well thought out
It wasn't odd at all the list of places he could flee to was very limited because of his job.
It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.
He didn’t have to flee at all
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
(inb4: No, you're wrong, he wasn't stateless.)
Words mean things.
If you decide your words mean something else to the common usage, people will react to that.
> If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"
Hence established! ^
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
Eeesh, the propaganda must be strong in the US if you're getting downvoted for this. You're essentially summarising documented facts.
He got stuck in Russia. He didn’t flee to Russia. Don’t twist facts.
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
You could literally watch the snowden movie alone and get half of facts right. Don't have to even read good journalist pieces. Just a movie. Come on.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
He didn't flee. Just went home.
The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.
It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.
People don't care about things unless/until they become part of the Omnicause.
What's that?
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow [0]
Also, please refer to a reply to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
> it changed absolutely nothing.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
Could you explain PRISM? I don’t understand PRISM either.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
It's right there on the leaked slide: https://imgur.com/setOJIm
For somebody staying quiet as fuck he sure likes to repost russian bs.
The term "responsible disclosure" may no longer have any meaning.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Not just Assange, basically everyone involved except maybe Poitras took a hit. Appelbaum was driven out of his work with Tor (and from public life) after a smear campaign, Greenwald had to shift to alt media, and Snowden had to flee the country. Other journalists and editors “moved on” from their work with the papers.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
> Greenwald had to shift to alt media
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
far-right lunatic? do you have a source for this or an example
I read his substack, he seems to be critical of the US security state and not inline with alt-right principles at all
... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.
Very generous indeed.
As I recall he became fixated on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, to the extent that he got himself fired from The Intercept over it. Maybe he saw the pictures of naked Biden and became absolutely obsessed with the photo gallery of coke and dong.
It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.
But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:
* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.
* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.
https://masternotions.com
So are you saying Applebaum was framed?
I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.
He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.
Did the Assange allegations fall apart? I thought he just hid until it became pretty irrelevant.
Stop the conspiracy talk. This was Jake's chaotic personal life coming home to roost. It's not more complicated than it seems.
A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
>A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
> a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork
It wasn't one. It was eight women who put themselves in the firing line of (mostly) men, who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
I believe them.
Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
> Greenwald had to shift to alt media
Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
dont confuse 'anti right' with 'left'.
There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.
It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.
You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.
Is that Glenn Greenwald's form?
Or maybe he just realized that politics is just one big club and he ain't in it. And neither are the people.
His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.
Since 2016, he's appeared repeatedly in conservative outlets (including pushing conspiracy theories about Ukraine), gotten fired for uncritically pushing unsubstantiated claims from the Trump campaign as journalism, hosted a video podcast giving a voice to folks like RFK Jr.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a very typical liberal 'resume.' Now it's more or less the exact opposite on many of these points.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of liberal today would hold values deemed quite conservative, even by the standards of the past.
But this is also not particularly unprecedented. In the early 20th century the Republican and Democrat parties largely swapped roles. There was no formal agreement or acknowledgement of such. It happened quite organically, spurred along by decades of relatively significant events. I think we're seeing the outlines of such happening again, in much the same way.
When one debates aforementioned 'certain brand' types today, it often feels like a blast to the past. They share many of the characteristics of the die hard conservatives of times past - self assuredness bordering on divine authority, seemingly blissful ignorance of their numerous self-declared 'enemies', that trademark rabid intolerance, and more. The main thing that's changed is the dogma of choice.
Who besides the conservatives right now is broadly opposed to free speech?
RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holistic level, it looks pretty bad. Mental illness rates are skyrocketing, testosterone is plummeting, IQ is declining, obesity is skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. The status quo isn't doing so hot.
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
"It's obvious that the internets is doing something so let's blame vaccines for autism ...
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.
You need to look up what 'ad hominem' and 'straw' men are because you've also misused those terms.
--> "Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role," <--
This is nonsense. That's not sraw man or ad hominem.
Your attempt to defend RFK Jrs nonsense and misrepresentation of reality, but using your own 'stream of consciousness logic' is exactly the problem with RFK Jr himself. Done with bad faith, at scale, it's destructive tabloidism.
I'm not the biggest fan of him, but him showing up on conservative outlets because the other ones wouldn't platform him (due to going against US Dept of State propaganda) does not mean he is "conservative".
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
Here is him ranting about how destructive "peak wokeness" is because apparently we need to save black people from each other, not from white people or the cops: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...
Conservative enough for you?
Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.
If this is a team sport issue, Glenn made it that way by ranting with little substance about wokeness: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
He endorsed Bernie through 2023 when he (accurately) noted Sanders shifting away from anti-war/anti-imperialism positions, which seems to be Greenwald’s #1 focus. He was opposed to what he saw as the Biden admin’s role in perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Biden-era “counter-disinformation” initiatives, which he is unsurprisingly opposed to. He maintains these positions under Trump while conservatives have moved against them; they are not “conservative” positions.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.
I disagree with you. It’s important to understand the perspectives of people actively involved in politics. Even (perhaps especially) those with fringe beliefs.
If these interviews actually helped share perspectives I might agree. But they're not psychology journal articles, they're (paid) ads.
In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
[1] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
[2] - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Have you heard of "sealioning" though? This is where you push an agenda using the surface appearance of a rational discussion.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.
And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.
That's what sealioning does. It makes it seem like you're ignoring a possibility unless you wholeheartedly engage with a disingenuous possibility. I'd get banned from HN if I tried to demonstrate because I'm not very good at it, but the original comic that coined the term is good.
if he is slightly left leaning than Bernie is farthest of the far right US politicians
Why must there be?
You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.
In what way is PRISM a nothingburger? You’ve been making this claim repeatedly in this thread.
In that it was perfectly legal. Snowden, with his high school dropout reading skills thought it allowed the NSA to pull any account's data directly off the companies' servers, and Greenwald, with his technical illiteracy, believed him. The Guardian didn't have a competent news editor and allowed the story to be printed without verification from an expert, while pretty much every other news agency got the story right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
My browser (FireFox) shows a warning before opening the site. Followed by a blocked message by my DNS provider because the site is malicious. I'll need to do some network changes if I want to see this.
Using FF here, no such warning on my side. Likely your ISP?
[flagged]
It's really never been the worst thing. From MKUltra to Operation Sea-Spray and many, many more.
The Palmer Raids involved mass detention and deportation without trial. These raids were significant because they happened under Federal authority. US repression certainly involved torture and mass murder previously but mostly done locally (and sure, respond, "that was 'just' done to slaves and indians").
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids
Two dead and few dozen ill doesn't quite sound like the worst thing. Random street cops do that to more people for no good reason in any given year.
The level of desensitisation…
Not really? It's just trying to make an honest ranking.
Those are all conspiracy theories. ;)
Neither of those are theories. Both are well documented and have had public hearings and governmental disclosure.
What? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.
I'm assuming the winking emoji was used to indicate sarcasm.
doh!
They are saying it tongue-in-cheek, and even added an emoji for additional emphasis of that point.
Besides the undisclosed portions of the Snowden archives, I was also disappointed that the Assange/Wikileaks insurance files were never decrypted.
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=wikileaks+insurance+torrent
and look what playing fair and tying its hand behind the back got the us. Hacked by its opponents and driven towards civil war. The limitations on secret services are part of the fiction of the lawful western world-order.
If you leak it, leak it everywhere!
IIRC he tried to find people he could trust to redact in a way that would protect US national security interests.
And yet he still gets straight up accused of being a Russian asset. It seems nuance is beyond the grasp of a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
(although of late my surprise is decreasing).
Snowden got into action because he believed that the US was fundamentally good and needed to get back on track. Over the past 12 years, in the US and around the world, this belief completely vanished. Whatever remains in the archive no longer holds any valuable news.
Therefore there should be no harm in releasing it.
That doesn't equate. Something can have no value as news but incredible value as security. Your passwords, for example.
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
You are correct of course.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
Eh, the outrage never really materialized into anything worth continuing the leaks. Look at the Epstein files. "They" can just wait it out.
The banality of the day after outrage.
JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.
Both.
The first part because the second part.
Worth noting that nothing that could possibly be called the "The Epstein Files" was released and this is how the situation is understood by the public.
"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.
In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
Be afraid, folks. Don’t read about the man behind the curtain, you’re better off knowing nothing. I’m sure everything is a-ok even without public supervision. Trust the authorities.
That’s a gross misrepresentation of their point.
I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.
Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.
What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?
They are talking about tradeoffs.
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
A state's primary purpose is to maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence and to secure its continued existence. Generally this is at odds with its founding myth, but it's pretty obvious that states are also subject to a process that resembles evolution by natural selection. That said, I'm not even aware of any notable state or state-like entity that was created with the goal of "ending blood feuds". The vast majority of these territorial monopolies were created by means of conquest where the goal was to acquire resources owned by the people in some territory or with the goal of pooling resources to defend against such conquest.
> Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
Here you go: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12846917/
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
I wouldn't call Five eyes very democratically supervised.. It seems there is hardly any oversight at all.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/512315/updates-foreign-a...
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB. Nor was it put to any other minister. "This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
> the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
Surely you mean oligarch-supervised institutions.
Our institutions are supervised by representatives elected on the dime of corporate and billionaire benefactors. They pull the strings.
It became a banana republic when money became speech.
It was a mistake to flee the US and a bigger mistake to never return.
He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.
Had he stayed in the US whatever could he have done? The US are not known for their ability to accept wrongdoing.
If he stayed in the US he would've been thrown into a dark, black hole for all eternity to be tortured by the same types of sociopaths in the US gov't who committed atrocities like Abu Ghraib. I'll take being a Russian "asset" over the wrath of the US intelligence services any day of the week.