Maybe a naive question, but what would the risk be for me to sign this? I wonder if I (a US citizen) might get trouble the next time at the border? Or get a higher score in some database, that combined with other things might get me into trouble? Increased scrutiny from the IRS (which should have nothing to do with this, but "they" might say hell why not?)? Inability to get security clearances in future? Being targeted for more intense data collection by the NSA?
God, I hate how quickly you can get paranoid these days. A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
This is the so-called "chilling effect" that's one of the most worrying implications of mass surveillance on a society... people feel afraid to speak out due to a concern they may be added to a list of some sort, and face negative real-life repercussions due to expressing their free speech.
There were a couple of times where I actually called the public contact numbers for NSA & GCHQ regarding particular stories about which I was especially upset, identifying myself by name and politely but firmly expressing my views. NSA told me to go away, but surprisingly the woman at GCHQ heard me out for several minutes and let me finish my rant. That's the British establishment for you I guess - they can be assholes, but polite assholes.
Snowden risked everything to inform us all of the crimes of the FVEY governments and the least we can all do is take inspiration from his actions and stand up and publicly make our views known, whatever they may be. The day people stop being willing to express their political views publicly is the day we lose something very important.
NSA - my name and XKEYSCORE selectors are in my profile. Feel free to add me to whatever lists I'm not already on.
It's not so much about mass surveillance but rather things like the TSA and stupid immigration policies which are at play here.
Really, spotting your name on a petition isn't mass surveillance. It's not even a breach of privacy in any sense, because that's exactly what petitions are for.
This chilling effect has a counterpart which would be directly amplified by pardoning Snowden.
In short, if Snowden gets pardoned, it will encourage further people to leak confidential documents and violate the Espionage act since they will be emboldened by the thought they might get pardoned down the road.
I used to work for the UK National Council for Civil Liberties - the UK ACLU if you like. (I was trying to prevent legislation removing right to silence in UK).
The organisation was well respected and had before I got there forced Britain's Security Services to admit and release to holding files on all the workers there - people who later became cabinet ministers under Blair / brown.
I have always assumed I also have a very thin file.
I am not ashamed of having that file or have having taken democratic action to change my society. What I am ashamed of is having done it so badly - the campaign did not really use web or email (This was the when of Internet cafes), I had no suit when I went to the Lords and got flustered on radio interviews.
So in answer to you, sign the petition. Be proud of your dissent and mostly do your best to make an effective protester. there is plenty of time to turn the ship around before western democracies become irredeemable. But we do need to Start. Why not here?
What is especially worrying (as partially evidenced by the OP) is that it's difficult--if not impossible, due to the proliferation of secret laws and secret courts--to know what is legal, both for oneself and for the government. Most people are not willing to test the legality of the no-fly list, so they will self-censor to avoid the risk of being added to it. The recent raid of Tor exit node operators in Seattle is enough to discourage future operators even if the raid was illegal. The government leverages a massive power and information asymmetry in the ability to argue its case in court and in the consequences for breaking the law.
chilling effects need to be kept in perspective; for example, while I'm completely fearless about telling off the govt whenever I wish, no way I'm going to reveal how I feel about Snowden to the HN community: I'd be ostracized!
i appreciate the parent's frank concern regarding signing this Petition "God, I hate how quickly you can get paranoid these days. A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US..."
your response is the body punch that reminds us who is the person at the heart of this petition and that whatever the risks referred to in the parent, they are minuscule by comparison
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
The United States government has done an excellent bit of propaganda to convince the bulk of the public that they are the most free people on earth. We salute the flag and sing the national anthem at games. We have the presidents' pictures on the walls of our classrooms. We chant "USA" at political rallies.
But the government of the United States has perpetrated terrible violence and destruction of liberty against its own citizens and many more abroad. Through endless military engagement abroad to harassment, detainment, and imprisonment at home, the government serves its own interests first, and enhancing and preserving your liberty is not among them.
I should be very concerned about coming to the attention of anyone within government -- at any level. Even the local code enforcement board can extract time, energy, and money from you should you come under scrutiny.
But as others have said, you're already on the lists. No need to be paranoid. Go ahead and sign the Snowden petition. It's just one more data point on your dossier. The government already has enough on you to put you away for life if you become inconvenient to the state. Three Felonies a Day[1] and all that.
Noam Chomsky talks a lot about "Manufacturing Consent" (he wrote a book with this title). He says that in a democratic society you can't use force to control people, so you have to control them by controlling attitudes an opinions instead.
It works well, and the people of the United States are heavily controlled by the elite, who in this case are the corporations and the media companies they control.
As an US citizen, I no longer salute that piece of cloth or sing the national anthem at sports games. I don't even bother standing for it and encourage others to do the same to show our distaste for how our own government treats us.
I was disgusted in the 2000's when being against the Iraq war was not only being flaunted unpatriotic but not supporting our troops. That's BS. I support our troops and would rather not have seen them deployed to conduct Cheney's bidding.
I will sign the petition and if some asshole gives me trouble at the border for it, so what? I'm a US citizen and entitled to re-enter my country. F them.
"If patriotism is 'the last refuge of a scoundrel,' it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether”
~ Ralph B. Perry
I think you are mistaking the resulting meta-consciousness created from the game theory in society and government with individual's based consciousness and some internal intent to deceive. While I would agree the government may try to deceive us, it does so by formally rationalizing government individual's actions as needed to "protect" us from threats. There is likely not one or two people "plotting" out what is happening. It's more probable that something like the angry meme phenomenon[1] has taken root in our government and is now attempting to isolate itself from harm. I think this came about because we tend to become fearful about things that may happen if we don't do X, Y and Z to stop them before they happen and those X, Y and Z things are now hard coded into our government and affecting the game theory around it. As a result, you get a meta-govt-conscious thing acting irrationally and making everyone very nervous as a result.
Or as Gene Belcher put it, "Everything is randomness and chaos."
>We salute the flag and sing the national anthem at games. We have the presidents' pictures on the walls of our classrooms. We chant "USA" at political rallies.
That does sound very authoritarian, honestly. Maybe that's why there are so many libertarians in the US - it's a reaction to the authoritarianism in American culture.
Yeah, destruction of evidence and seafood smuggling are just everyday activities.
(those are both real examples from the book...whether there was a great deal of intent in the lobster tail case is disputed, but it was a pattern of shipments involving thousands and thousands of pounds of tails)
You know what? I don't think that's an unreasonable concern and it's exactly why this situation is so horrible. It's the return cold war communism paranoia. "Of course I'm allowed to do this, but will this get me on some watchlist?"
I guess the ethical answer is that, the more people will sign this (think a million?), the less likely it is to be used as some kind of filter. Even though what's one million names in a database? Sigh... Awful.
You're allowed your quota of one medium-impact dissident action per week, just like everyone else. As it helps to keep up maintaining the illusion of democracy and free speech, you are actually doing your country a great service.
If you start to do more, however... Consider yourself warned. ^^
In this case, I can reassure you though:
Online petition clicktivism has been shown to be very ineffective, so it's only considered a minor-impact dissident action. You are allowed five of those per week. ;)
When I was a kid in the 70s, you could listen to distant shortwave stations and if you heard them on a certain time and freq, you could send a note and get a postcard to collect. So we picked up Moscow and thought that would be cool for the collection. We wanted to make sure we weren't going to get in trouble or a watchlist (McArthy was very fresh on our minds) so we called the FBI office first; they were amused we'd ask.
the number of chilling-effect style questions I have to ask myself increases every damn week.
you know what's even scarier? I'm scared to to even write about what those situations were for the same reason they arose in the first place. Now some friends tell me there is a threat to the legality of tor in the US, I'm actually starting to become a bit panicked by it.
I find it hard to believe anyone would seriously say that Pete Seeger should be on the list of people that should be feared for their "un-American" leanings today, but in the past apparently several people thought he was worthy of that label.
But it's also worse in a way because many people who sign these petitions think they are actually helping so they are less likely to do something more which might actually help. If they forward it to five people and create awareness then they are helping a little. If they just sign and go on their way they are doing no more than the guy who does nothing.
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
It's ironic that given all the valid concerns in your post, you also fell for the oldest piece of propaganda in the book by the very government you're concerned about and that you think that socialism has something to do with dictatorships, rather than it being just an idea that itself has nothing to do with dictatorships in itself, but was in the past implemented by dictators, same as capitalism was in Latin America and elsewhere.
Nazi ideology is much more inherently tied to strongmen and dictatorships than socialist ideology is.
You also seem to be talking about communism, rather than socialism as such and fail to see the distinction between these two, or indeed between communism and Stalinism, but that's for a longer discussion...
Your comment puts Snowden's actions in perspective. He risked his liberty, if not life, so that we could learn about the scope of US mass surveillance.
You worry about the risk of being registered as a Snowden sympathizer if you voice your support and the discomfort that might bring with it.
To quote a man who was actively surveilled by the US government for much of his later life and no one believed him...
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."
You could end up in prison. It's not likely, but it's possible. Signing this petition could get your name on a secret list of people who are likely terrorist sympathizers, and that in turn could lead to your arrest on trumped-up charges, or perhaps even non-trumped-up charges based on coincidental circumstances that would never have been noticed had you not signed. There are also a whole host of other less serious possible consequences. You could end up on the no-fly list. You could be denied a government job. Who knows?
And that is exactly why you must sign. Ed Snowden put a lot on the line so that we can know for sure that we are facing risks like this, and possibly even do something about it. The least we can do IMHO is to take a small risk to help him come home. That's why I signed (and made a modest donation).
I signed it and to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of Snowden but think he deserves an opportunity for pardon.
I'm honestly not the slightest bit afraid of retaliation, and if I was targeted it would be evidence in favor of Snowden's cause.
I don't understand how an American citizen could be afraid of exercising their free speech rights -- if they are violated, then one can vocally draw attention to their situation. I'm really not afraid of repercussions as a random American.
> I don't understand how an American citizen could be afraid of exercising their free speech rights -- if they are violated, then one can vocally draw attention to their situation. I'm really not afraid of repercussions as a random American.
Because some random American has no practical recourse in such an event.
"You shouldn't change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because were afraid we don't care about those values very much." ~ Edward Snowden
Normally I'd call that paranoia. But after reading about the case in which a Goldman Sachs programmer aroused suspicion [0] from the FBI for using "Subversion" and occasionally erasing his "bash history", I think it's reasonable to remember that anything you say can and will be used against use in the eyes of the law
"They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when
not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to
learn this particular lesson." -- Richard Stallman (http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/109)
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
what does socialism have to do with this? maybe you meant to say "a mode of thought I would expect in totalitarian police states..."
it's true that some totalitarian police states have, nominally if not really in practice, also been socialist. however, there have been just as many fascist, capitalist, monarchist, and theocratic totalitarian police states as well.
so I ask again...what does socialism have to do with this?
This exactly why I think we should sign it. The fact that you now second guess everything shows this is very wrong. It will only get worse if we keep our mouths closed.
First the pardon will never happen. Neither Obama nor any other President can or will pardon him, lest they encourage the next Snowden. So signing it will not actually help Snowden.
Second, it's entirely possible that your fears will come true - obviously the government will receive your information and they can use it how they see fit. Not only that, but they appear to be running a co-registration campaign with the ACLU, and you don't know exactly who else will get your name, email, and physical address, or who those people will sell it to. I would be also curious to see what kind of remarketing cookies they are using. You can easily be put in the bucket of "HN users that visited the support Snowden page" and be stalked accordingly by advertisers across millions of Adsense-supported sites, Google search, Facebook, and the general web with just two or three remarketing cookies.
The creators of this site undoubtedly know that their stated goal will never be accomplished. So this looks more like an attempt to build a marketing database of people with a specific viewpoint than anything else.
All acts of resistance have consequences. That's because it's important, and "they" know it's important. I think it's reasonable to assume this gets you put on a watchlist if you're not already.
As others have (snarkily) pointed out, this is a pretty mild form of resistance, so I'd imagine the consequences would be pretty mild.
Literally millions of Americans think Snowden should be pardoned. Expressing that belief won't make me a target.
That being said, I could see the government trotting it out if there were ever a separate case against you. "captainmuon is already known to harbor sympathies for known traitor Edward Snowden."
It's awful that you are thinking about this, imho, as am I. I signed it, because I'd prefer not to live under an unaccountable surveillance superpower.
Being in Australia, I'm at best, someone that kowtows to a surveillance superpower. Sucks to be me, I can't even vote to not be surveilled.
Asking, "Will the government persecute me if I democratically voice my
opinion against a crime executed by the same government?", is exactly
the type of questioning that should be avoided.
It is same as asking, "Will the mafia kill me if I speak the truth about
the murder as an eyewitness?" Government is not supposed to operate like
a mafia. (But sure they can violate Human Rights and the Constitution, and
public will not even care.)
However, I am afraid by asking that very question we are already talking
from within the context of a regime that is "totalitarian". The various
degrees to which an average US citizen believes that they are not in a
totalitarian country unlike those "other" "socialist" or whatever
countries out there, is irrelevant:
Surveillance is Totalitarianism.
It is no surprise for people get paranoid in a country with large-scale
surveillance technology. And that's the point. Because it has never been
merely about the "terrorists" who are "out there"...
For people who are concerned about getting a "high score" in whatever
threat inventory, we are all a threat already. That's the very basic
rationale behind mass-surveillance. For the record, a majority of HN
members would hypothetically get pretty "high scores"...
Back to the topic of the thread, Obama will not pardon Snowden.
By logging into "hacker news" regularly, mentioning the NSA (and probably other key terms: data collection, US citizen) I'm sure you are already on a list.
> By logging into "hacker news" regularly, mentioning the NSA (and probably other key terms: data collection, US citizen) I'm sure you are already on a list.
If the NSA really does maintain these macabre "lists", it's kind of hard to believe they'd be so unsophisticated as to put you on one for visiting a website called "Hacker News" that has nothing to do with the definition of "hacking" that they care about.
If you signed a petition in Thailand, and it had anything to do with the royal family, then you would be arrested and imprisoned under the lese majeste laws. If you signed a petition in North Korea or Syria, you would be tortured and killed.
Be thankful that you can exercise your right to sign this petition in the US, and the only thing you might need to worry about is increased scrutiny from the IRS.
I had the same thought, but I signed it, because he did a helluva lot more for me than sign a petition, and also because "failing to do the right thing because of concerns about your personal safety/convenience" is known more succinctly as cowardice.
(Whether "signing an online petition" is "doing the right thing" is outside the scope of this comment.)
I made a small donation to Glenn Greenwald, back when he was writing for Salon. (Back when concerns were hanging chads, weapons of mass deception, and the like.)
I've had occasion in recent years to speculate how many lists that has put me on. And to explain to a few friends "three degrees of separation" and what that might imply for them, as well.
I don't particularly like being listed. But I really don't like and fear the utter lack of transparency and accountability, and how such information can and apparently is "weaponized" against individuals for personal, political, and financial objectives.
Not only is it scary. It is, ultimately, a wasteful mis-use of resources. All this dirt digging and slinging and lawyering up takes away from more useful activity. Like fixing blight and illness before it engenders disfunction.
Call me an optimist. I believe -- or at least hope -- that we can do better.
I don't know what to make of this. We lose if Snowden is "pardoned", because that would mean he did something morally wrong. Snowden loses his life in the US if he's not pardoned.
I'm not American, but the issue cuts across all countries and Snowden is a representative.
I think about this sort of thing quite often, actually: Your fears are exactly why i've not signed it. I'm American, living in Norway. I don't really plan on living in the states again, but I very much want to be able to visit family. I already wonder if that doesn't put me on some sort of secret list, but there isn't a decent way for me to find out. I don't even feel I have adequate representation anymore - I can vote based on my previous address in the US, but I highly doubt I'd be listened to. Not that it was adequate to begin with, but I at least had the facade.
When you start to feel that way is when you need to stand up the most. We get further into this mess by staying silent out of fear and we get out of it by being millions strong and protesting the state of things.
> I wonder if I (a US citizen) might get trouble the next time at the border?
I would be hugely surprised to learn that anybody would spend any time or attention to whoever votes how on a petition. There are thousands of those and only so many border agents, and making trouble to an US citizen carries a non-zero risk. Your profile is too low for that.
> Or get a higher score in some database, that combined with other things might get me into trouble?
Possible, but other things should be like donating to known ISIS front or frequenting a Hezbollah darksite, or something like that. Otherwise it's just noise.
> Increased scrutiny from the IRS
Unlikely, IRS is interested in money, not online petitions. You'd need to do something more spectacular to deserve special scrutiny, that puts you out of the crowd. Voting on online petition puts you in the crowd.
> but "they" might say hell why not?
Customized treatment on these scales is rather expensive. If voting on online petition had triggered customized treatment, they'd have to do a lot of useless "increased scrutiny". If they did, you won't be different from millions of people, but most probably they don't.
> Inability to get security clearances in future?
Security clearance is one area where such scrutiny could be warranted. But given who gets clearances, at least at low levels (like terror operatives working at airports and security companies, etc.) not likely unless we're talking about very high clearance levels.
> Being targeted for more intense data collection by the NSA?
Unlikely, again, you'd have to get out of the noise level for that and voting on a petition does not do that. If you'd be a close personal friend of Snowden then it'd be a different thing...
If Snowden revealed something is that the NSA and accompanied services are very smart, very powerful and very resourceful in achieving their goals. Nothing suggests they are so stupid as being unable to distinguish between signal and noise. They may be collecting a lot, but it all would be useless if they couldn't distinguish between interesting things and noise. Signing an online petition is noise.
I don't think the paranoia is unreasonable, however, it is exactly this sort of self censorship that dictatorships bank on to stay in power. People don't speak out for fear of repercussions. Snowden sacrificed almost everything to do what was right by not only the people of the U.S. but what was right for the people of the world.
I think it's only right that we all put our neck out for him, the same as he did for us - if only to say thank you for having our backs. I'm signing it.
Why do you think this won't happen if you write that exact comment here? Quite sure for writing here we are all added to the database or our attention factor gets slightly increased if we already are in it, maybe depending on how critical the word cloud of our comment looks to their analytics software. And don't think it's different if you are a US citizen or not. They probably add people from everywhere. A few billion data sets are probably not as big a deal anymore nowadays.
I tend to doubt your fear is to have your "terrorism points" incremented in some database, but rather the cold and distant nature of the federal government makes it nearly impossible to reason through how you're _not_ a terrorist (assuming you're not). There's no organized mechanism by which you can disprove your terrorism affiliations. Otherwise, being put in a database would be as much an issue as changing the wrong address on your insurance policy.
Better to be on the right side of history. I mean, if you are asking the question, you have already made a personal decision that you would like to sign it. Not doing so would be betraying yourself. That would be worse than not getting a security clearance I would have thought. In any case, I doubt the spooks would be really that bothered. You can still spy AND take the moral high road :-)
I am reasonably certain signing this petition would increase your bad karma with NSA. This in itself may not cause a problem but next time you come on their radar this might hurt you.
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
USA is moving rapidly towards socialism though it is much behind than say UK or France. This sort of government overreach is inevitable.
The UK's "peak 'socialism'" time was in the past. Depending on how you apply metrics to socialism it would either be the good parts (Attlee/Bevan establishing schools and NHS after the war) or the bad parts ("winter of discontent" 78/79).
UK surveillance is part of the permanent state and is imperialist in nature.
In some ways, the UK is less authoritarian than in the past - the Human Rights Act has had a real effect, along with the Good Friday Agreement. There are no longer troops deployed in the streets with live ammunition nor elected MPs who are forbidden to speak on television.
There might be a risk. But if you do not act the risk is much higher. I am not talking about social good or sacrifice. Just think about the state in which your children's and their children's will live in. It is not worth living in a state like that. Its like we are being prepared for breeding future slaves.
Paranoid? Naah. I'm working on the assumption this site (pardonsnowden.org) is run by the CIA, or one of it's proxies, whatever, to gather the names of Snowden sympathisers.
Surely, right. If history has taught us anything. I mean, we know some of the things the CIA has gotten up in the past.
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
What is your definition of "socialist" ? A lot of European countries are "socialists" in a way (always a nuance) but they don't have an aggressive kind of local NSA (even if some have a local NSA).
I don't think they would have a problem with people signing this. It lets the people blow off steam with no real effect. Once you sign it, you think "well, I've done my part. I signed the online petition, and changed my Twitter/Facebook icon."
The fact that the United States government can indiscriminately designate people as being "in trouble" and then use this as an excuse to trample upon their rights. The real trouble is a situation in which Snowden is not pardoned.
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
I hate this notion. I stay in India -- a socialist nation, which has its own problems but "lack of freedom" compared to any other nation in the world is not one of them.
I accept that I've probably said enough nice or not-bad things about Ed Snowden that I'd probably never get a security clearance as a U.S. citizen; and as a dual citizen I have no hope at all to begin with.
I think signing that petition is the least of your worries, the amount of data already collected about you including this comment here will be used to profile you for years to come.
Even if there is some correlation between signing this petition and some of the things you say, the expected (in the statistical sense) damage to you is tiny compared to the cause in question and the principles, so frankly I think it is lame of you to even be writing about this, and I don't think it should be the top comment. It makes HN readers look like a bunch of #firstworldproblemers lacking perspective and fretting about minor inconveniences to their privileged lifestyles.
According to a journalist who gave a talk here (Stuttgart, Germany) last week, there is a speed radar and license plate scanner at the local NSA installation, and going by too slow gets you on the 'suspicious people' list.
About 3 years ago, a story broke up about a three-letter agency requesting from Twitter (subpoena IIRC) the list of handles who were following a particular Swedish Pirate Party politician.
I remember reading the article via twitter and after a while watching a tweet from the politician in question appear in timeline.
I didn't even recall following her, but at some point in time I did. I froze and panicked, my twitter account is eponymous.
What will happen to me when I cross the US border? Hopefully/Probably nothing, but the thought lies in the back of my mind.
Okay, not to break up the tinfoil hat party here, but you're not going to get dragged off to US prison for following Birgitta Jónsdóttir (Icelandic, not Swedish) on Twitter.
If you fear signing this, _and don't_, you really don't understand long risk mitigation and are just preparing yourself to be scared even more in the long run.
Just like privacy doesn't exist without others, signing this will at least help by giving strength, and privacy, in numbers.
Leaving this resistance alone, as if they were some heroes you respect but won't stand by, is really a cowardly way of being anti society and skipping your citizen duty.
First they came for them, etc... You know how it ends.
Morality is difficult to stand up for. Civil rights was tough to fight for (still is). The right to privacy and govt transparency in the face of tyranny is another of those difficult battles.
Let's be like the founders and stand up to our government [1].
[1] List of quotes:
- The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." --Patrick Henry
- "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." --George Washington
- "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt in the House of Commons November 18, 1783
I don't know what long risk mitigation is, but I'm offended. /s
But seriously, nobody at the NSA is going to place* you on a watch list because you are part of a small vocal minority that raised support online for Snowden, a wanted traitor and saboteur of the USA.
*There is however a good chance that the money grubbing bastards at one of the third party contractors the NSA eats up reports and analytics from will profile you into something you are not (or lets face it, you are) and that will be ingested into our intelligence pipeline.
I'd be very surprised if the NSA doesn't collect these signatures for later matching. Doesn't mean that you'll have black vans following you around because of it - they have lots of lists for all kinds of things.
The most obvious application in this case is that you would be automatically disqualified for a security rating in the future. You'd never get to know the reason of course, you'd just be rejected.
EDIT: I still think people should sign of course. Let's not let them win by default by letting our fear control us. Do you really want that security rating if these are the requirements?
>But seriously, nobody at the NSA is going to place* you on a watch list because you are part of a small vocal minority that raised support online for Snowden
I agree. They will not place you on a watch list because you support Snowden.
They will place you on a watch list because they can.
Good point. At some point in life you won't be able to run away from standing up for what you believe in (at perhaps small or medium risk to self) or else direr consequences may result.
If you believe he acted ethically, then sign the thing with me.
In addition, history is long and tech grows fast. I imagine at some future point and well within our lifetimes it will be trivial to infer our political attitudes and assign semi-anonymous screen names to real persons just by scrapping the web of 2016. Especially since absolute certainty of guilt is not the highest priority in these cases.
And since there's very real possibility of having a lunatic at the helm of government at some point, yes, one had better speak up now.
Who are these guys? Registrar is in Panama. The site says "partnership with ACLU and Amnesty International", but I cannot find any links from those sites to pardonsnowden.org
Both ACLU and AI have their own petition forms with different letters.
The top comment in this thread is paranoia about whether this site is a hostile name collection honeypot (I think if it is, so is commenting on this thread, hello nsa).
One way of combatting such paranoia is to establish trust. This site accepts donations, but nowhere does it say WHO is running it. It has neat ACLU, Amnesty International, and HRW logos at the bottom, but anyone can put graphics on a page. It has a whole list of supporters, but all without any citation of their support (you would expect the Chomskys, Lessigs, and Greenwalds, but the Soros are a bit more surprising).
This is at best a rushed, uncoordinated release. At worst, it IS a name collection honeypot.
If this group does in fact have support of ACLU, AI, and HRW, it should link to those organizations' press releases of this particular domain. If it has the endorsements of popular figures, at the very least link to a tweet of theirs.
Snowden should be pardoned because he revealed that in the land of the free, we should always be looking over our shoulder asking if this is an NSA sting job. A good way of fighting that paranoia lifestyle is with credibility. These guys are failing that fight.
I just asked a few people on the "supporters" list who said they had "nothing to do with it", after trying to figure out more about it's core and see if I could get added to the list myself (my opinions on the NSA dragnet crap are well documented, I do not live in fear of them: http://blog.neocities.org/making-the-web-fun-again.html).
I'm starting to think they just got a list of people they believed might support this petition drive, and then added them to the site as "supporters".
Saying they are "supporters" of this drive is misleading. They should change the copy to say "these are some people that also support pardoning Ed Snowden".
At this point I would be extremely hesitant to donate money to this group until its foundational structure gets clarified.
Also, the FAQ page https://www.pardonsnowden.org/faq mentions, "We've partnered with the nonprofit Center For International Policy (CIP) so that we can offer tax deductibility to donors. Your donation goes to the CIP, they enable tax deductibility, and it is then transferred to us to be used for the campaign."
I think the problem is, people do not care anymore. The scandal is over, business as usual. Only a small percentage of the population still cares about Snowden. I think the image of the NSA has been hurt and a change in legislation might get you some positive press in the future, but I do not think that pardoning Snowden would be worth the effort for a politician. On the other hand: Obama probably does not have to care.
Edit: I normally don't do these edits, but seriously, why am I getting downvoted for this? Obviously this is bad, that does not make it any less true. You must be the ones downvoting sad YouTube videos and the reason why Facebook had to introduce multiple like variants.
Snowden's actions were effectively an attack on the mechanisms of governance: if they let him off the hook, they fear they will encourage more people to act like him, and that affects the solidity of the lever of governmental power.
If government is a tool, it's a rare politician that votes to make the tool less reliable. Note that this is distinct from changing the scope of what the tool can affect: this is about the reliability of the tool. Even politicians that were in favour of what Snowden did, who thought he contributed positively, and voted against surveillance, would still likely baulk at making life too easy for more people like him. That's because government is supposed to flow from the top down, and policy change is not supposed to emanate from the machinery. The machinery is supposed to execute the orders of government.
One could argue, that it was really the press acting here, which as the 4th power is also part of the machine. Also the Nazi trials largely ended legal positivism [0].
And you know what's also awful? We expect neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump to pardon Snowden in the future. In this sense, Democrats and Republicans are not all that different. It's still all about the interest of the powerful.
The if Hilary claimed she would pardon Snowden I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. I hate her because to me she seems to want to expand the surveillance state. I hate Trump because with a surveillance state anyone who makes fun of his hands would/could be arrested...
Hence, at the moment I'm voting Gary Johnson, who I actually think is the most qualified, but also made it clear he wants to downsize the NSA
Sure, that is bad. But on a grand scale of things the president or whether or not one man will be pardoned is not really what matters for the American people. To me it is an important issue, but things like wars, mass surveillance and so on are even more important. And you cannot fix them with a broken parliament. However the parliaments are broken, because its members are invincible [0]. Name recognition beats everything. They do not have to fear to do something wrong but for their names to not be recognized anymore. So money talks.
Hard to imagine how this could be fixed. I guess you would have to restrict the amount of money to be used, but who would shoot himself in the foot? You would need shitloads of money from a source, who does not care - rare combination. Also the topic is not as sexy as "curing X".
After that the even bigger problem would be to find a way to get the media to actually report on things and/or the people to actually pay attention to such reports. A glimmer of hope to me is Jon Stewart (and the group around him, especially Last Week Tonight).
Interviewer questions have shown more care about Snowden's personal drama instead of focusing on the issues of growing censorship and surveillance.
I wish people would stop donating money to twitch gamers and instead support journalists who investigate, setup tor-relays/seed-boxes and reduce the dependence on centralization.
And then there are people like me, who don't see the situation as black&white, i.e. I am not signing that petition. In my opinion, for the sake of security, it is necessary to "cache" the whole Internet communication to prevent terrorists attacks and other dangers. Like what the Brits are doing and currently they didn't have any big attack after the London bombings.
I am not an American and I don't have a motivation to defend NSA or whoever, I just think that what Snowden did was partially wrong. Of course, caching the Internet like NSA and others are doing has human rights consequences, and those should be discussed publicly. But question the very existence of such practices is unreasonable in the situation the world is in nowadays. There are LOT of people in the world today who would want to wipe off the whole Western civilization, if they could... there must be a protection from them.
In my opinion, for the sake of security, it is necessary to "cache" the whole Internet communication to prevent terrorists attacks and other dangers.
Except you know, it doesn't prevent terrorist attacks. At all.
All it does is make the pile of hay with the needle in itthat much bigger. And a hell of a lot more expensive to the tax payer that is paying for the privilege of being spied on by their own government.
Even Snowden agrees that surveillance is necessary. However it is done outside of the public's eye and as we have seen without legal authorization. That's the part that made him blow the whistle.
Mass surveillance is deeply contrarian to our core values as a democratic society. If it is to happen there needs to be a discussion and a public decision. That's exactly what is set into motion by the Snowden revelations.
If you include other agencies or even the whole military-industrial complex, it seems to me that they are both source and solution to the problem. With Saddam still in Iraq, ISIS would not be a thing and there would not be a need for intelligence on them. Doing less can be more.
The usual justification for invading becomes ridiculous in that context: We need to restrict the people's freedom by spying on them, because we tried to bring freedom to another country.
> ... it is necessary to "cache" the whole Internet communication to prevent terrorists attacks and other dangers.
Keep in mind that while we're trying to prevent terrorist attacks against us, we're actively and have actually used those same terrorists to further our goals in other countries.
If you are so sure that this sort of surveillance is effective due to the non happening if a rare event, then I have a tiger repelling rock to sell you. It is garunteed to stop tiger attacks.
I'm still genuinely curious about what the intelligence community thinks of him, if it's bad, what are the arguments against him. I've heard Mike Baker on the Joe Rogan experience say that he did not trust Snowden one bit.
In the intelligence world, it's common to be very cautions about leaks since foreign actors like Russia can really benefit politically from such scandal.
It can be difficult to really know all the details since it's covered in secrecy, and Snowden himself will knowingly avoid to say too much to reduce the damage.
In my view, digital surveillance is a complex issue because people don't really understand how it's done, the west is still waging a war against terror to avoid attacks in land, and agencies will often want to screw the due process to catch terrorists however they can.
From what I've gathered, the intelligence community thinks bad things about him; their view is "fix it from the inside."
Public leaks can be incredibly damaging to our operational advantages against various adversaries, and it's often non-obvious which data will be most helpful to them.
The main reason I stand behind him is the matter of the director of the NSA lying to congress under oath. We don't even have the illusion of a democracy if we can't have effective congressional oversight of intelligence agencies with as broad a reach as the NSA.
That's certainly not William Binney's view, but then, as a leaker himself, I suppose he's no longer part of the "intelligence community" as he reached similar conclusions as Snowden did.
My conservative friends, not in the intelligence community, really don't like him. They try to be civil, but I can almost hear them hiss when I mention "Snowden".
It's odd to me. They don't mind digital surveillance at all. They think it's good if it makes everyone safer.
Throwing in my two cents, what interests me on the Snowden topic, is his character. While I'm glad Snowden took the initiative and risk, I don't believe he did it for altruistic reasons: sacrificing himself for the greater good. My opinion is based on seeing and hearing Edward Snowden talk in the documentary "Citizen 4" and other interviews. Many people say, "Look at what he did. He gave up his life in America. He sacrificed everything for no financial reward. He's a hero." It's true he took a big risk; he could still spend a lot of his life in prison. But he has gained huge from this risk. He is famous and respected by many; they're making a fucking movie about him. It reminds me of the line at the end of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford": "You know what I expected [after I killed Jesse James]? Applause."
I really wish I could understand the people that are:
1. "patriotic" but don't respect those who stand up for ideals in the Constitution
2. "anti-government" or "anti-authority" but don't respect those who stand up to challenge the blind power grabs by the government and say things like "fix it from within" (when they would never, ever say the same thing about the IRS, for example)
3. "libertarian" but again, don't actually seem to care about liberties other than the Second Amendmend and finding ways to defund public services so they can pay less taxes.
Just seems like a lot of cognitive dissonance at play among the libertarians who don't support Snowden.
If I recall correctly, Snowden didn't even have concrete plans to escape from Hong Kong after revealing his identity. Wikileaks sent someone to get him to Russia. He just assumed he'd get caught.
If this is true, I find your theory implausible.
Also, from hearing him talk, I'm quite convinced he thought long and hard about the moral implications of what he's doing. To the point where it would surprise me very much if "the greater good" weren't his primary motivation.
well I'm conservative and all this surveillence runs roughshod over the 4th amendment. What we have is a bunch of control freaks in government who are afraid of their own shadows. I worked for years in black hat type ops and the attitude especially of the FBI is both creepy and hyper paranoid. Interestingly enough when it's someone very high up in the government incompetently and negligently dumping a bunch of intel (like some former sec of state) it's hands off. But crucify the guy who tries to expose gross abuse of power and bring down the machinery.
The machinery wants to crucify him and make a huge example. The machinery needs to be fixed and Snowden's actions need to be better examined by a group not so invested the massive machine.
Are you sure you're not thinking of Assange or Manning? Snowden and his team have been much more careful and restrained with what they release than, say, WikiLeaks.
The thing I hate about all petition sites is that they ask for my personal information for... what purpose exactly? They don't even seem to try to verify anything. They just look like scams to me, which is a shame because I really think they shouldn't be...
The fact that your name and address is known to the entity receiving the petition shows that you really mean it. Also, for some entities it might be illegal to be moved by petitions signed by non-citizen. Unfortunately, those petitions systems only ask for your address, not for your citizenship. But we can assume citizenship from the address for the first order.
I know. Notice my complaint was about the lack of verification or other genuine need of the information. Not about the request for personal information itself. If they made legitimate use of it (and ONLY legitimate use), I would understand. However, the ones I have tried do not seem to verify anything, and instead use your contact info as a way to send you campaign materials and advertise to you in the future. That's the part that rubs me the wrong way - it feels like a scam designed to get your personal information. And in this age of identity theft, I really have little incentive to risk it.
To prevent ballot stuffing I would assume. With a name and email address you might check the validity of a petition by randomly mailing some of the petition signers to validate that they did sign it themselves.
I am for a full pardon. The risks to our privacy are greater now than they have ever been and a lot of people think it will keep us safe. If I knew more about history I'd be tempted to compare it to something like a more insidious version of the cuban missile crisis, but it's probably a bad comparison. Any historians around here - what would you compare it to?
How about comparing it to the war on drugs over the last 100 years? is the war on privacy taking a similar path?
Starts out using racism by claiming we need to restrict privacy (drugs) to prevent muslims (hispanics) from terrorizing us. Next it's associated with sexual deviants (reefer madness), and anyone who opposes it must be one of them. Then people start to realize that privacy isn't just an ideal, but it's a physical feeling of freedom - a feeling that they have never felt before, the freedom to be the captain of your life (damn hippies!) - people have tasted freedom and they want more of it. To fight against it, governments spends trillions of dollars hunting out anyone who provides privacy services (drug smuggling).
Eventually there is reform,etc etc... so, it took like a century for cannabis.. 20 years for privacy?
Lots of crazy shit has been walked back over the years, and I assume it felt very doom-y at the time. That said, I don't see this being walked back. Snowden outed the US Government as ever conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare minus lizard people, and the country kinda shrugged.
I'm not a historian, but consider that the "medium" if you like, the Internet, all it's awful mudpie history of protocols etc, is ripe for the plucking by both sides.
Do you stand idly by while the hostile ones (whatever that might mean) use it to their advantage, or do you get your government with their huge funds to help in this regard?
The latter, of course. Trouble is when that agency becomes rogue, which it certainly seems like the NSA have, with rubber stamping.
But we still need some form of accountable defense I think. It's just gone horribly wrong.
That debate will always be at the forefront of security. In the 19th century, when the first professional police departments were established, people were outraged and convinced that the police were there to take away their liberty.
It doesn't excuse all action to improve security, but we do have to occasionally align our security with modern standards. What would happen if we left all cybersecurity (including banks, power systems, etc) to the private sector?
And then, where do we draw the line? Is it okay for the FBI to target people who visit a child pornography site? Most would say yes... People who download The Anarchist's Cookbook? Probably another yes. But what about collecting info on the people who supported that whole ordeal with Clive Bundy? Or people who belong to a non-state sponsored militia? That's where the line starts to gray for many. The point being, it's never cut and dry.
Yeah it's a tough question, and due to the complex nature of the technical and political systems involved, it's probably impossible to simplify/distill the situation down so that ordinary people can have any sort of informed opinion. Right now, people say "give us privacy" because it's a smart thing to say - but they don't understand what they're fighting for so I fear they'll be quick to give up at the first sign of resistance.
There might not be a single person in the world who understands all the moving parts well enough to say what's right.
To pardon Snowden seems like a very popular opinion around here. Can anyone help me change my opinion on this matter?
The way I currently see it:
- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
- The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.
- Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security / defense of the US.
- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
- Snowden's documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.
- Snowden's innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to "clam up", and place more mistrust on "outsiders", such as high-school diploma Snowden.
- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing. As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
I have a lot of respect for whistleblowers, and also for Snowden. What he did is nothing short of heroic. But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia. What's missing for me?
Here is a well produced oxford style debate between qualified debaters on the topic. I found it very enlightening and hope everyone gives it a listen. It's available as a video or podcast. http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/snowden-was-jus...
Thank you for posting this great debate video. Although it did not change my opinion on the pardon, I now have a more nuanced view on this matter. I thought all the debaters in this video had good points, but I still agree with the opposition.
facts. you mis-stated several things about the story. I don't have time to do your research for you. there's a lot about it on the internet already. begin by educating yourself about the facts and then make your judgments.
> high-school diploma Snowden.
vicious cheap shot and ad hominem. why did you say that? do you only respect people with piece of paper signed by a university dean?
He did the same thing by making sure to reference Greenwald's "boyfriend". He wanted to make sure to emphasize to you, the reader, that Glenn Greenwald is gay and is therefore bad.
The "internal channels" have been broken for years, and do not work. Snowden was aware of this, and AFAIR has commented on that on several occasions.
> - Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
What? Incompetent? They managed to do their job, in the face of GCHQ and the NSA. Just because they made some mistakes, that doesn't make them "incompetent". If they were, we wouldn't have heard anything at all!
> - Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
So, being competent is a strike against Snowden, but being incompetent is a strike against Greenwald (who presumably doesn't have any training from GCHQ)?
> - The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.
Everyone who was paying attention knew a lot about the clearly illegal stuff that NSA have been doing, from previous leaks - that doesn't mean the leaks didn't have value.
> I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia.
The first part was in my eyes a prerequisite for having a sizable useful set of documents to leak. The second part is really two parts: he fled - he didn't submit himself to capture, torture and/or assassination in the US. He did this by fleeing to Hong Kong.
Then he went to Russia, the only port within reach that offered sanctuary. I'm ashamed that Norway didn't - for example. But of course we're NATO allies, and with the not too distant history of Mossad carrying out a botched assassination (successful kill, wrong person) on Norwegian soil, and Norway being complicit in extralegal detention and torture by allowing CIA's "white planes" to transit through - it would probably have been hopelessly naive for Snowden to try to flee here, even if offered "safe passage".
> So, being competent is a strike against Snowden, but being incompetent is a strike against Greenwald (who presumably doesn't have any training from GCHQ)?
I think you laid bare my mental split on this issue and for that I thank you. I will concede the point on Snowden being competent.
I said it because it felt (and still slightly feels) wrong to me: Like a kung-fu student hitting his master with a punch he was taught by that same master. Snowden used the trade craft he picked up at the NSA and CIA against these same organizations.
But he would have been foolish to ignore his own skills and I can't expect him to forget these and put his life in danger (more than he already has).
> Snowden used journalists (really just greenwald) to vet the documents.
It's a form of vetting, yes, but useful? Hard to say. It's also trusting a lot of information that could get people killed in someone's hands. Who's to say someone didn't pay Greenwald $10 million for a copy of all of it? You'd never be able to prove this happened unless they were really stupid about it.
> He did attempt to use internal channels.
The only thing I found regarding this was that he emailed a few "district heads" which, last time I did work in the area, don't really do anything. There is an actual, official channel to go through to reporting stuff like this (there are actually multiple; one for the NSA and one for the DoD in general). There are also more appropriate people he could have emailed.
Now I'm not saying internal channels would have worked but I haven't seen anything that showed me Snowden really tried hard to go through those channels in the first place.
> His original intent was not to go to russia, it was a last resort.
China is also not the greatest place to go. Honestly anywhere outside of a SCIF and you could get picked up by interested parties. But since he did go to China and Russia we have no way of knowing if both of those countries have a full copy of his data or not.
"Snowden used journalists (really just greenwald) to vet the documents."
But isn't that the crux of the problem?
Let us assume the best about Snowden: that he did do this for noble reasons, that he was acting on his own initiative, that he did attempt to restrict the documents he took to those dealing with unethical or unconstitutional espionage that a fair and impartial Inspector General or similar authorized party should have reviewed.
What happened if something completely unrelated (but classified) was also in the dump (say, information about Russian nuclear forces or Pakistani cooperation with a terrorist group) that ended up being vetted not by him (in an authorized facility prior to his flight) but by Greenwald or another journalist (out in the wild)?
At that point, regardless of his intentions, he has disclosed classified information to a non-authorized party and has broken the law.
At that point, whistleblowing has nothing to do with it.
Note, I'm not arguing against a pardon for Snowden-as-whistleblower. I simply think that such a vetting argument doesn't hold water.
While I think it's true that he took too many documents and probably released too many documents, I think his intentions were good, and overall was an important contribution to public knowledge of the way our governments work. It was an eye opener for a lot of tech companies, to be sure.
He was essentially forced to flee to Russia-- no other country could protect him. I don't think it's where he wanted to end up.
I don't think he should be pardoned. He committed crimes, and possibly could have found a better way to get this information out there. I do think he should be offered a generous plea-bargain in return for coming home and debriefing the NSA/CIA and congress about what exactly he took, how he took it and the status of all of those secrets.
My goodness, this reads like Stewart Baker is sock-puppeting. If you'd like to convince someone, perhaps sticking to the truth when stating "facts" would be a start. For instance,
> - Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
is simply false.
> - Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
Nice innuendo. Please state your concerns in a concrete fashion. If it is that he fled, then it doesn't matter to where. If it is that he was stranded in a regime unfriendly to the U.S. regime, what do you expect him to choose? England? Canada? It is also good to remember that U.S. actions are responsible for him being in Russia.
> - Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
You elide the difference between taking documents and releasing them. As others have said, vetting was done by journalists.
> - Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security / defense of the US.
1) Assuming "damage" is defined as spending money and time to evaluate the breach and implement corrective measures, sure. I've yet to see anyone point to anything beyond "I can't tell you, but be very afraid". Remember how the release was going to lead to imminent terrorists attacks in Missouri?
> - Snowden's documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.
Proof, please.
> - Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
"Secret agent skills?" Isn't that normally spelled with a "z" on the end?
> - Snowden's innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to "clam up", and place more mistrust on "outsiders", such as high-school diploma Snowden.
"High-school diploma"? WTF? Have the courage to say what you mean or cut the cheap shots. I except that sort of low-rent smearing from Slashdot and gov-contractor flacks, not Hacker News. And which is it - is Snowden a mad-1337 super agent super hacker, or and uneducated outsider? Character assassination works much better when you're a bit more consistent.
Anyway, shorn of the non-sequitur schoolyard taunting, what is the complaint? Intelligence operatives, shown to have expanded surveillance far beyond the imaginations of the voters in the democracy that supposedly as a voice in what they do, had their feelings hurt when they were exposed?
This is the same argument made by police apologists: if you keep taking pictures of us illegally killing people, we'll stop doing our jobs.
> - Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
So you don't like Greenwald. That's lovely. Now please describe how the romantic connection indicates incompetence, and what exactly the bad result that said incompetence lead to.
> But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia.
Please describe the conditions under which whistleblowing is acceptable to you. If Snowden had received the documents from someone else (thus hadn't "misuse[d] hist admin privileges"), would that make it OK for him, but not for the hypothetical other person? Of it he hadn't been stranded by the U.S. in Russia (he didn't choose to stay)?
Based on your litany above, it sounds like intelligence whistleblowing is only acceptable to you when the documents involved are officially released, the release doesn't damage any existing power structures, no intelligence operatives have their fee-fees hurt, and the leaker is better educated and collaborates with journalists you personally like more.
You ask for parent to provide proof in some places but don't provide it yourself which makes me think you're more interested in arguing versus being productive (which, to be fair, some of parent's points sound like they're coming from a similar place). But just in case I have a few questions
>> - Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
> is simply false.
As far as I was ever able to find Snowden emailed "district heads". That was the only internal channel he went through that I could find. Considering the NSA and the DoD in general each have channels to go through along with far, far more appropriate people to email / call about it (district heads is something you basically never hear about in the intel space; they're not useful at getting anything done) I would also say he did not go through internal channels.
If you have proof outside of this I'd love to read it.
> If it is that he fled, then it doesn't matter to where.
Why does it not? He had a very, very large corpus of classified intelligence that any enemy of the United States would love to get their hands on. Granted he had little choice once he got to China but I don't understand the claim that it doesn't matter where he went considering the payload he was carrying.
> You elide the difference between taking documents and releasing them. As others have said, vetting was done by journalists.
I'm not sure I would consider that vetting. Regardless a large corpus of classified and likely damaging data was taken, carried and given to multiple parties. A vetting prior to documents being indiscriminately taken would have been far more responsible though the considerable time that would have taken would have made leaking impossible in the first place.
I wouldn't be so quick so side with every single thing Snowden did to avoid being cast as a zealot.
> "High-school diploma"? WTF? Have the courage to say what you mean or cut the cheap shots.
As someone with only a high-school diploma myself, I do not like others with only a high-school diploma, who blow the chances they've been given.
Should Snowden only have been glad someone took a chance on him and shut up? No. He did a brave thing.
Will it be harder in the future for someone with only a high-school diploma to get admin access at the NSA, as a result of Snowden's actions? Yes. NSA will start focussing on Ivy League students and family members of NSA employees.
> So you don't like Greenwald. That's lovely. Now please describe how the romantic connection indicates incompetence, and what exactly the bad result that said incompetence lead to.
I think Greenwald is an ok journalist. I think it is grave incompetence to use your romantic interest as a document mule. Journalists may be able to handle sensitive documents. The partners of those journalists... not so much. They are basically civilians.
The bad result is that his partner was caught by customs and detained. A bad result may have been that other agencies got to his partner before the UK did. Everyone around Greenwald became a target the moment he was in possession of the cache. That he actually gave the documents to his partner, shows that he was a valid target at that.
Do you honestly think Snowden thought it was a good idea that Greenwald let his partner handle these documents?
Most of you points are simply blatantly false tho.
>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
That's why he gave them to a small group of well respected journalists, so they could use their professional discretion to vet them.
>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
I highly doubt that, but even if it that were true those documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists, only the ones showing the NSA doing illegal things are.
>- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
Yes he did.
>- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent. He just copied files, fled to China and shared them with a small group of people, none of which required "secret agent skills"
>- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
So? You can't blame Snowden for that, blame the Justice department. If Snowden could have been even remotely safe anywhere but Russia, he wouldn't be there now. You can't chase after somebody then blame them for hiding somewhere safe.
>- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
No he didn't, he gave them to perfectly competent journalists. Greenwald is very competent and well respected as a journalists. Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain the important thing is that he did without them getting leaked earlier than he wanted.
>If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing.
He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
>As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.
> That's why he gave them to a small group of well respected journalists
You can not vet encrypted documents. These documents were unencrypted and handled by journalists who could never stand the full attention of the world's intelligence agencies.
Laura Poitras was very qualified. Greenwald... not so much. He had to receive a crash-course on computer safety. He left unidentified USB-sticks in the laptop with the documents. He gave the documents to his non-journalist partner in an attempt to smuggle them through customs. Greenwald is a professional. He just did not get the gravity or technicalities of most of the documents he saw.
> those [standard-operating-procedure] documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists
They are not being leaked to the general public (with a few exceptions). But one has to assume they made it to the competitors of the US. And it points to indiscriminate leaking -- maybe Snowden did not even fully realize what he all had, as he took everything he could get his hands on: mailing lists, internal collaborative wiki's, technical details on ongoing missions.
> Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
I do not think Snowden went through the official internal channels. He may have tried to ring the alarm bell with some people internally. If you have anything to challenge this, I'd be interested.
> Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent.
He was a former CIA operative. He took his job at BAH with the full intention of leaking everything he could get his hands on. His flight, undercover operation, and handling of the documents, was all very deliberate and possible due to his trade craft.
> [Snowden fled to Russia] So? You can't blame Snowden for that
Why not? Proponents almost make it sound he was chased to Russia, or that Wikileaks kidnapped him and released him there. He ended up in Russia. I think both destinations were chosen very deliberately, to avoid rendition, prosecution (or worse: assassination or torture).
> Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain
I think it does. From journalists we can expect them to maybe handle very sensitive documents. The partners of these journalists? Not so much... That is as close to civilian as you can get.
> He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
So he downloaded everything else, filled 4 laptops, and now we do take him seriously? Maybe I have missed something here? Did Snowden try to leak these important documents before he went to Poitras and Greenwald?
> Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.
Sure, Russia and China won't come out and say that:
- we have the documents
- Snowden was one of our own
But to think these documents are not in the possession of every competent intelligence agency in the world may be a bit naive. I'd reckon these intelligence agencies knew of these documents the moment news agencies around the world starting working on them.
Readit News
God, I hate how quickly you can get paranoid these days. A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
There were a couple of times where I actually called the public contact numbers for NSA & GCHQ regarding particular stories about which I was especially upset, identifying myself by name and politely but firmly expressing my views. NSA told me to go away, but surprisingly the woman at GCHQ heard me out for several minutes and let me finish my rant. That's the British establishment for you I guess - they can be assholes, but polite assholes.
Snowden risked everything to inform us all of the crimes of the FVEY governments and the least we can all do is take inspiration from his actions and stand up and publicly make our views known, whatever they may be. The day people stop being willing to express their political views publicly is the day we lose something very important.
NSA - my name and XKEYSCORE selectors are in my profile. Feel free to add me to whatever lists I'm not already on.
Really, spotting your name on a petition isn't mass surveillance. It's not even a breach of privacy in any sense, because that's exactly what petitions are for.
In short, if Snowden gets pardoned, it will encourage further people to leak confidential documents and violate the Espionage act since they will be emboldened by the thought they might get pardoned down the road.
The organisation was well respected and had before I got there forced Britain's Security Services to admit and release to holding files on all the workers there - people who later became cabinet ministers under Blair / brown.
I have always assumed I also have a very thin file.
I am not ashamed of having that file or have having taken democratic action to change my society. What I am ashamed of is having done it so badly - the campaign did not really use web or email (This was the when of Internet cafes), I had no suit when I went to the Lords and got flustered on radio interviews.
So in answer to you, sign the petition. Be proud of your dissent and mostly do your best to make an effective protester. there is plenty of time to turn the ship around before western democracies become irredeemable. But we do need to Start. Why not here?
i appreciate the parent's frank concern regarding signing this Petition "God, I hate how quickly you can get paranoid these days. A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US..."
your response is the body punch that reminds us who is the person at the heart of this petition and that whatever the risks referred to in the parent, they are minuscule by comparison
as you said "the least we can do"
The United States government has done an excellent bit of propaganda to convince the bulk of the public that they are the most free people on earth. We salute the flag and sing the national anthem at games. We have the presidents' pictures on the walls of our classrooms. We chant "USA" at political rallies.
But the government of the United States has perpetrated terrible violence and destruction of liberty against its own citizens and many more abroad. Through endless military engagement abroad to harassment, detainment, and imprisonment at home, the government serves its own interests first, and enhancing and preserving your liberty is not among them.
I should be very concerned about coming to the attention of anyone within government -- at any level. Even the local code enforcement board can extract time, energy, and money from you should you come under scrutiny.
But as others have said, you're already on the lists. No need to be paranoid. Go ahead and sign the Snowden petition. It's just one more data point on your dossier. The government already has enough on you to put you away for life if you become inconvenient to the state. Three Felonies a Day[1] and all that.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
It works well, and the people of the United States are heavily controlled by the elite, who in this case are the corporations and the media companies they control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG5YTEOWCpE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kusAX4Th4N8
I was disgusted in the 2000's when being against the Iraq war was not only being flaunted unpatriotic but not supporting our troops. That's BS. I support our troops and would rather not have seen them deployed to conduct Cheney's bidding.
I will sign the petition and if some asshole gives me trouble at the border for it, so what? I'm a US citizen and entitled to re-enter my country. F them.
"If patriotism is 'the last refuge of a scoundrel,' it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether” ~ Ralph B. Perry
Or as Gene Belcher put it, "Everything is randomness and chaos."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
That does sound very authoritarian, honestly. Maybe that's why there are so many libertarians in the US - it's a reaction to the authoritarianism in American culture.
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(those are both real examples from the book...whether there was a great deal of intent in the lobster tail case is disputed, but it was a pattern of shipments involving thousands and thousands of pounds of tails)
I guess the ethical answer is that, the more people will sign this (think a million?), the less likely it is to be used as some kind of filter. Even though what's one million names in a database? Sigh... Awful.
If you start to do more, however... Consider yourself warned. ^^
In this case, I can reassure you though:
Online petition clicktivism has been shown to be very ineffective, so it's only considered a minor-impact dissident action. You are allowed five of those per week. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QSL_card
And even as a non-U.S. national I worry if it would land me in trouble if I wanted simply to visit the U.S. on holiday again.
you know what's even scarier? I'm scared to to even write about what those situations were for the same reason they arose in the first place. Now some friends tell me there is a threat to the legality of tor in the US, I'm actually starting to become a bit panicked by it.
"Pete Seeger on being Black Listed in America, 1965: CBC Archives | CBC" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_IME9WsHQ
I find it hard to believe anyone would seriously say that Pete Seeger should be on the list of people that should be feared for their "un-American" leanings today, but in the past apparently several people thought he was worthy of that label.
It's ironic that given all the valid concerns in your post, you also fell for the oldest piece of propaganda in the book by the very government you're concerned about and that you think that socialism has something to do with dictatorships, rather than it being just an idea that itself has nothing to do with dictatorships in itself, but was in the past implemented by dictators, same as capitalism was in Latin America and elsewhere.
Nazi ideology is much more inherently tied to strongmen and dictatorships than socialist ideology is.
You also seem to be talking about communism, rather than socialism as such and fail to see the distinction between these two, or indeed between communism and Stalinism, but that's for a longer discussion...
The latter meaning is mostly used when referring to the former. But this is only kind of interesting if you're not American. :)
You worry about the risk of being registered as a Snowden sympathizer if you voice your support and the discomfort that might bring with it.
Democracy and rule of law doesn't come for free.
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."
-Earnest Hemingway
You could end up in prison. It's not likely, but it's possible. Signing this petition could get your name on a secret list of people who are likely terrorist sympathizers, and that in turn could lead to your arrest on trumped-up charges, or perhaps even non-trumped-up charges based on coincidental circumstances that would never have been noticed had you not signed. There are also a whole host of other less serious possible consequences. You could end up on the no-fly list. You could be denied a government job. Who knows?
And that is exactly why you must sign. Ed Snowden put a lot on the line so that we can know for sure that we are facing risks like this, and possibly even do something about it. The least we can do IMHO is to take a small risk to help him come home. That's why I signed (and made a modest donation).
I'm honestly not the slightest bit afraid of retaliation, and if I was targeted it would be evidence in favor of Snowden's cause.
I don't understand how an American citizen could be afraid of exercising their free speech rights -- if they are violated, then one can vocally draw attention to their situation. I'm really not afraid of repercussions as a random American.
Because some random American has no practical recourse in such an event.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130923/11543424624/borde...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M#t=1840
[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
what does socialism have to do with this? maybe you meant to say "a mode of thought I would expect in totalitarian police states..."
it's true that some totalitarian police states have, nominally if not really in practice, also been socialist. however, there have been just as many fascist, capitalist, monarchist, and theocratic totalitarian police states as well.
so I ask again...what does socialism have to do with this?
Otherwise it's hilarious, especially in this context.
Second, it's entirely possible that your fears will come true - obviously the government will receive your information and they can use it how they see fit. Not only that, but they appear to be running a co-registration campaign with the ACLU, and you don't know exactly who else will get your name, email, and physical address, or who those people will sell it to. I would be also curious to see what kind of remarketing cookies they are using. You can easily be put in the bucket of "HN users that visited the support Snowden page" and be stalked accordingly by advertisers across millions of Adsense-supported sites, Google search, Facebook, and the general web with just two or three remarketing cookies.
The creators of this site undoubtedly know that their stated goal will never be accomplished. So this looks more like an attempt to build a marketing database of people with a specific viewpoint than anything else.
As others have (snarkily) pointed out, this is a pretty mild form of resistance, so I'd imagine the consequences would be pretty mild.
That being said, I could see the government trotting it out if there were ever a separate case against you. "captainmuon is already known to harbor sympathies for known traitor Edward Snowden."
Being in Australia, I'm at best, someone that kowtows to a surveillance superpower. Sucks to be me, I can't even vote to not be surveilled.
It is same as asking, "Will the mafia kill me if I speak the truth about the murder as an eyewitness?" Government is not supposed to operate like a mafia. (But sure they can violate Human Rights and the Constitution, and public will not even care.)
However, I am afraid by asking that very question we are already talking from within the context of a regime that is "totalitarian". The various degrees to which an average US citizen believes that they are not in a totalitarian country unlike those "other" "socialist" or whatever countries out there, is irrelevant:
Surveillance is Totalitarianism.
It is no surprise for people get paranoid in a country with large-scale surveillance technology. And that's the point. Because it has never been merely about the "terrorists" who are "out there"...
For people who are concerned about getting a "high score" in whatever threat inventory, we are all a threat already. That's the very basic rationale behind mass-surveillance. For the record, a majority of HN members would hypothetically get pretty "high scores"...
Back to the topic of the thread, Obama will not pardon Snowden.
If the NSA really does maintain these macabre "lists", it's kind of hard to believe they'd be so unsophisticated as to put you on one for visiting a website called "Hacker News" that has nothing to do with the definition of "hacking" that they care about.
Be thankful that you can exercise your right to sign this petition in the US, and the only thing you might need to worry about is increased scrutiny from the IRS.
(Whether "signing an online petition" is "doing the right thing" is outside the scope of this comment.)
I've had occasion in recent years to speculate how many lists that has put me on. And to explain to a few friends "three degrees of separation" and what that might imply for them, as well.
I don't particularly like being listed. But I really don't like and fear the utter lack of transparency and accountability, and how such information can and apparently is "weaponized" against individuals for personal, political, and financial objectives.
Not only is it scary. It is, ultimately, a wasteful mis-use of resources. All this dirt digging and slinging and lawyering up takes away from more useful activity. Like fixing blight and illness before it engenders disfunction.
Call me an optimist. I believe -- or at least hope -- that we can do better.
I'm tired of living in perpetual fear.
I just signed and donated $50.
I'm not American, but the issue cuts across all countries and Snowden is a representative.
It is really unnerving truth be told.
I would be hugely surprised to learn that anybody would spend any time or attention to whoever votes how on a petition. There are thousands of those and only so many border agents, and making trouble to an US citizen carries a non-zero risk. Your profile is too low for that.
> Or get a higher score in some database, that combined with other things might get me into trouble?
Possible, but other things should be like donating to known ISIS front or frequenting a Hezbollah darksite, or something like that. Otherwise it's just noise.
> Increased scrutiny from the IRS
Unlikely, IRS is interested in money, not online petitions. You'd need to do something more spectacular to deserve special scrutiny, that puts you out of the crowd. Voting on online petition puts you in the crowd.
> but "they" might say hell why not?
Customized treatment on these scales is rather expensive. If voting on online petition had triggered customized treatment, they'd have to do a lot of useless "increased scrutiny". If they did, you won't be different from millions of people, but most probably they don't.
> Inability to get security clearances in future?
Security clearance is one area where such scrutiny could be warranted. But given who gets clearances, at least at low levels (like terror operatives working at airports and security companies, etc.) not likely unless we're talking about very high clearance levels.
> Being targeted for more intense data collection by the NSA?
Unlikely, again, you'd have to get out of the noise level for that and voting on a petition does not do that. If you'd be a close personal friend of Snowden then it'd be a different thing...
If Snowden revealed something is that the NSA and accompanied services are very smart, very powerful and very resourceful in achieving their goals. Nothing suggests they are so stupid as being unable to distinguish between signal and noise. They may be collecting a lot, but it all would be useless if they couldn't distinguish between interesting things and noise. Signing an online petition is noise.
I think it's only right that we all put our neck out for him, the same as he did for us - if only to say thank you for having our backs. I'm signing it.
Edit: I have signed it
> A mode of thought I would expect in socialist countries, not the US...
USA is moving rapidly towards socialism though it is much behind than say UK or France. This sort of government overreach is inevitable.
UK surveillance is part of the permanent state and is imperialist in nature.
In some ways, the UK is less authoritarian than in the past - the Human Rights Act has had a real effect, along with the Good Friday Agreement. There are no longer troops deployed in the streets with live ammunition nor elected MPs who are forbidden to speak on television.
Surely, right. If history has taught us anything. I mean, we know some of the things the CIA has gotten up in the past.
What is your definition of "socialist" ? A lot of European countries are "socialists" in a way (always a nuance) but they don't have an aggressive kind of local NSA (even if some have a local NSA).
You are now concerned about getting on the no-fly list.
Think about being concerned doing a Google Search, Buying this item, Putting much money into this and this.
I hate this notion. I stay in India -- a socialist nation, which has its own problems but "lack of freedom" compared to any other nation in the world is not one of them.
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I remember reading the article via twitter and after a while watching a tweet from the politician in question appear in timeline.
I didn't even recall following her, but at some point in time I did. I froze and panicked, my twitter account is eponymous.
What will happen to me when I cross the US border? Hopefully/Probably nothing, but the thought lies in the back of my mind.
Just like privacy doesn't exist without others, signing this will at least help by giving strength, and privacy, in numbers.
Leaving this resistance alone, as if they were some heroes you respect but won't stand by, is really a cowardly way of being anti society and skipping your citizen duty.
First they came for them, etc... You know how it ends.
Let's be like the founders and stand up to our government [1].
[1] List of quotes:
- The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." --Patrick Henry
- "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." --George Washington
- "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt in the House of Commons November 18, 1783
But seriously, nobody at the NSA is going to place* you on a watch list because you are part of a small vocal minority that raised support online for Snowden, a wanted traitor and saboteur of the USA.
*There is however a good chance that the money grubbing bastards at one of the third party contractors the NSA eats up reports and analytics from will profile you into something you are not (or lets face it, you are) and that will be ingested into our intelligence pipeline.
The most obvious application in this case is that you would be automatically disqualified for a security rating in the future. You'd never get to know the reason of course, you'd just be rejected.
EDIT: I still think people should sign of course. Let's not let them win by default by letting our fear control us. Do you really want that security rating if these are the requirements?
I agree. They will not place you on a watch list because you support Snowden.
They will place you on a watch list because they can.
If you believe he acted ethically, then sign the thing with me.
And since there's very real possibility of having a lunatic at the helm of government at some point, yes, one had better speak up now.
Both ACLU and AI have their own petition forms with different letters.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/get-involved/take-action/edward-s...
https://action.aclu.org/secure/grant_snowden_immunity
Wondering if ACLU and AI are a little late to confirm, or if this is an elaborate attempt to get qualified contacts info.
The top comment in this thread is paranoia about whether this site is a hostile name collection honeypot (I think if it is, so is commenting on this thread, hello nsa).
One way of combatting such paranoia is to establish trust. This site accepts donations, but nowhere does it say WHO is running it. It has neat ACLU, Amnesty International, and HRW logos at the bottom, but anyone can put graphics on a page. It has a whole list of supporters, but all without any citation of their support (you would expect the Chomskys, Lessigs, and Greenwalds, but the Soros are a bit more surprising).
This is at best a rushed, uncoordinated release. At worst, it IS a name collection honeypot.
If this group does in fact have support of ACLU, AI, and HRW, it should link to those organizations' press releases of this particular domain. If it has the endorsements of popular figures, at the very least link to a tweet of theirs.
Snowden should be pardoned because he revealed that in the land of the free, we should always be looking over our shoulder asking if this is an NSA sting job. A good way of fighting that paranoia lifestyle is with credibility. These guys are failing that fight.
I'm starting to think they just got a list of people they believed might support this petition drive, and then added them to the site as "supporters".
Saying they are "supporters" of this drive is misleading. They should change the copy to say "these are some people that also support pardoning Ed Snowden".
At this point I would be extremely hesitant to donate money to this group until its foundational structure gets clarified.
So, we're good?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37341804
> Front features artist Shepard Fairey's iconic portrait of Edward Snowden
> Back includes ACLU logo and pardonsnowden.org URL
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/09/13/us-obama-should-pardon-e...
Also, the FAQ page https://www.pardonsnowden.org/faq mentions, "We've partnered with the nonprofit Center For International Policy (CIP) so that we can offer tax deductibility to donors. Your donation goes to the CIP, they enable tax deductibility, and it is then transferred to us to be used for the campaign."
Edit: I normally don't do these edits, but seriously, why am I getting downvoted for this? Obviously this is bad, that does not make it any less true. You must be the ones downvoting sad YouTube videos and the reason why Facebook had to introduce multiple like variants.
If government is a tool, it's a rare politician that votes to make the tool less reliable. Note that this is distinct from changing the scope of what the tool can affect: this is about the reliability of the tool. Even politicians that were in favour of what Snowden did, who thought he contributed positively, and voted against surveillance, would still likely baulk at making life too easy for more people like him. That's because government is supposed to flow from the top down, and policy change is not supposed to emanate from the machinery. The machinery is supposed to execute the orders of government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
Hence, at the moment I'm voting Gary Johnson, who I actually think is the most qualified, but also made it clear he wants to downsize the NSA
Hard to imagine how this could be fixed. I guess you would have to restrict the amount of money to be used, but who would shoot himself in the foot? You would need shitloads of money from a source, who does not care - rare combination. Also the topic is not as sexy as "curing X".
After that the even bigger problem would be to find a way to get the media to actually report on things and/or the people to actually pay attention to such reports. A glimmer of hope to me is Jon Stewart (and the group around him, especially Last Week Tonight).
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php
The reality is, I think you're right. Sadly, for the majority of people, this is not an issue they care about.
I wish people would stop donating money to twitch gamers and instead support journalists who investigate, setup tor-relays/seed-boxes and reduce the dependence on centralization.
Until another terrorist attack happens on a favored Western city, Westerners will be ambivalent about ISIL.
Until a newspaper prints another photo of a child dead in the sand, Westerners will be ambivalent about refugees.
I am not an American and I don't have a motivation to defend NSA or whoever, I just think that what Snowden did was partially wrong. Of course, caching the Internet like NSA and others are doing has human rights consequences, and those should be discussed publicly. But question the very existence of such practices is unreasonable in the situation the world is in nowadays. There are LOT of people in the world today who would want to wipe off the whole Western civilization, if they could... there must be a protection from them.
Except you know, it doesn't prevent terrorist attacks. At all.
All it does is make the pile of hay with the needle in itthat much bigger. And a hell of a lot more expensive to the tax payer that is paying for the privilege of being spied on by their own government.
Mass surveillance is deeply contrarian to our core values as a democratic society. If it is to happen there needs to be a discussion and a public decision. That's exactly what is set into motion by the Snowden revelations.
The usual justification for invading becomes ridiculous in that context: We need to restrict the people's freedom by spying on them, because we tried to bring freedom to another country.
"Big attacks" are vanishingly rare. But, just for the sake of argument, they haven't had an attack until they do.
The point of this is the US is actually harvesting way more data than the U.K., and we have so-called "lone wolf" attacks every couple of months.
Mass surveillance doesn't keep you safe.
Keep in mind that while we're trying to prevent terrorist attacks against us, we're actively and have actually used those same terrorists to further our goals in other countries.
In the intelligence world, it's common to be very cautions about leaks since foreign actors like Russia can really benefit politically from such scandal.
It can be difficult to really know all the details since it's covered in secrecy, and Snowden himself will knowingly avoid to say too much to reduce the damage.
In my view, digital surveillance is a complex issue because people don't really understand how it's done, the west is still waging a war against terror to avoid attacks in land, and agencies will often want to screw the due process to catch terrorists however they can.
Public leaks can be incredibly damaging to our operational advantages against various adversaries, and it's often non-obvious which data will be most helpful to them.
The main reason I stand behind him is the matter of the director of the NSA lying to congress under oath. We don't even have the illusion of a democracy if we can't have effective congressional oversight of intelligence agencies with as broad a reach as the NSA.
Did he? Everything I've read is that he used true words, but didn't explain what those true words actually meant.
It's odd to me. They don't mind digital surveillance at all. They think it's good if it makes everyone safer.
Throwing in my two cents, what interests me on the Snowden topic, is his character. While I'm glad Snowden took the initiative and risk, I don't believe he did it for altruistic reasons: sacrificing himself for the greater good. My opinion is based on seeing and hearing Edward Snowden talk in the documentary "Citizen 4" and other interviews. Many people say, "Look at what he did. He gave up his life in America. He sacrificed everything for no financial reward. He's a hero." It's true he took a big risk; he could still spend a lot of his life in prison. But he has gained huge from this risk. He is famous and respected by many; they're making a fucking movie about him. It reminds me of the line at the end of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford": "You know what I expected [after I killed Jesse James]? Applause."
1. "patriotic" but don't respect those who stand up for ideals in the Constitution
2. "anti-government" or "anti-authority" but don't respect those who stand up to challenge the blind power grabs by the government and say things like "fix it from within" (when they would never, ever say the same thing about the IRS, for example)
3. "libertarian" but again, don't actually seem to care about liberties other than the Second Amendmend and finding ways to defund public services so they can pay less taxes.
Just seems like a lot of cognitive dissonance at play among the libertarians who don't support Snowden.
If this is true, I find your theory implausible.
Also, from hearing him talk, I'm quite convinced he thought long and hard about the moral implications of what he's doing. To the point where it would surprise me very much if "the greater good" weren't his primary motivation.
The machinery wants to crucify him and make a huge example. The machinery needs to be fixed and Snowden's actions need to be better examined by a group not so invested the massive machine.
The fact that your name and address is known to the entity receiving the petition shows that you really mean it. Also, for some entities it might be illegal to be moved by petitions signed by non-citizen. Unfortunately, those petitions systems only ask for your address, not for your citizenship. But we can assume citizenship from the address for the first order.
Yes, that's how any petition works. People really need to learn the basics of citizenship at school.
A petition only works if each vote is tied to a real individual.
Starts out using racism by claiming we need to restrict privacy (drugs) to prevent muslims (hispanics) from terrorizing us. Next it's associated with sexual deviants (reefer madness), and anyone who opposes it must be one of them. Then people start to realize that privacy isn't just an ideal, but it's a physical feeling of freedom - a feeling that they have never felt before, the freedom to be the captain of your life (damn hippies!) - people have tasted freedom and they want more of it. To fight against it, governments spends trillions of dollars hunting out anyone who provides privacy services (drug smuggling).
Eventually there is reform,etc etc... so, it took like a century for cannabis.. 20 years for privacy?
Do you stand idly by while the hostile ones (whatever that might mean) use it to their advantage, or do you get your government with their huge funds to help in this regard?
The latter, of course. Trouble is when that agency becomes rogue, which it certainly seems like the NSA have, with rubber stamping.
But we still need some form of accountable defense I think. It's just gone horribly wrong.
It doesn't excuse all action to improve security, but we do have to occasionally align our security with modern standards. What would happen if we left all cybersecurity (including banks, power systems, etc) to the private sector?
And then, where do we draw the line? Is it okay for the FBI to target people who visit a child pornography site? Most would say yes... People who download The Anarchist's Cookbook? Probably another yes. But what about collecting info on the people who supported that whole ordeal with Clive Bundy? Or people who belong to a non-state sponsored militia? That's where the line starts to gray for many. The point being, it's never cut and dry.
There might not be a single person in the world who understands all the moving parts well enough to say what's right.
The way I currently see it:
- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
- The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.
- Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security / defense of the US.
- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
- Snowden's documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.
- Snowden's innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to "clam up", and place more mistrust on "outsiders", such as high-school diploma Snowden.
- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing. As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
I have a lot of respect for whistleblowers, and also for Snowden. What he did is nothing short of heroic. But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia. What's missing for me?
facts. you mis-stated several things about the story. I don't have time to do your research for you. there's a lot about it on the internet already. begin by educating yourself about the facts and then make your judgments.
> high-school diploma Snowden.
vicious cheap shot and ad hominem. why did you say that? do you only respect people with piece of paper signed by a university dean?
See Binney, eg:
"William Binney HOPE 9 KEYNOTE": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI
The "internal channels" have been broken for years, and do not work. Snowden was aware of this, and AFAIR has commented on that on several occasions.
> - Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
What? Incompetent? They managed to do their job, in the face of GCHQ and the NSA. Just because they made some mistakes, that doesn't make them "incompetent". If they were, we wouldn't have heard anything at all!
> - Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
So, being competent is a strike against Snowden, but being incompetent is a strike against Greenwald (who presumably doesn't have any training from GCHQ)?
> - The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.
Everyone who was paying attention knew a lot about the clearly illegal stuff that NSA have been doing, from previous leaks - that doesn't mean the leaks didn't have value.
> I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia.
The first part was in my eyes a prerequisite for having a sizable useful set of documents to leak. The second part is really two parts: he fled - he didn't submit himself to capture, torture and/or assassination in the US. He did this by fleeing to Hong Kong.
Then he went to Russia, the only port within reach that offered sanctuary. I'm ashamed that Norway didn't - for example. But of course we're NATO allies, and with the not too distant history of Mossad carrying out a botched assassination (successful kill, wrong person) on Norwegian soil, and Norway being complicit in extralegal detention and torture by allowing CIA's "white planes" to transit through - it would probably have been hopelessly naive for Snowden to try to flee here, even if offered "safe passage".
I think you laid bare my mental split on this issue and for that I thank you. I will concede the point on Snowden being competent.
I said it because it felt (and still slightly feels) wrong to me: Like a kung-fu student hitting his master with a punch he was taught by that same master. Snowden used the trade craft he picked up at the NSA and CIA against these same organizations.
But he would have been foolish to ignore his own skills and I can't expect him to forget these and put his life in danger (more than he already has).
He did attempt to use internal channels.
His original intent was not to go to russia, it was a last resort.
It's a form of vetting, yes, but useful? Hard to say. It's also trusting a lot of information that could get people killed in someone's hands. Who's to say someone didn't pay Greenwald $10 million for a copy of all of it? You'd never be able to prove this happened unless they were really stupid about it.
> He did attempt to use internal channels.
The only thing I found regarding this was that he emailed a few "district heads" which, last time I did work in the area, don't really do anything. There is an actual, official channel to go through to reporting stuff like this (there are actually multiple; one for the NSA and one for the DoD in general). There are also more appropriate people he could have emailed.
Now I'm not saying internal channels would have worked but I haven't seen anything that showed me Snowden really tried hard to go through those channels in the first place.
> His original intent was not to go to russia, it was a last resort.
China is also not the greatest place to go. Honestly anywhere outside of a SCIF and you could get picked up by interested parties. But since he did go to China and Russia we have no way of knowing if both of those countries have a full copy of his data or not.
But isn't that the crux of the problem?
Let us assume the best about Snowden: that he did do this for noble reasons, that he was acting on his own initiative, that he did attempt to restrict the documents he took to those dealing with unethical or unconstitutional espionage that a fair and impartial Inspector General or similar authorized party should have reviewed.
What happened if something completely unrelated (but classified) was also in the dump (say, information about Russian nuclear forces or Pakistani cooperation with a terrorist group) that ended up being vetted not by him (in an authorized facility prior to his flight) but by Greenwald or another journalist (out in the wild)?
At that point, regardless of his intentions, he has disclosed classified information to a non-authorized party and has broken the law.
At that point, whistleblowing has nothing to do with it.
Note, I'm not arguing against a pardon for Snowden-as-whistleblower. I simply think that such a vetting argument doesn't hold water.
He was essentially forced to flee to Russia-- no other country could protect him. I don't think it's where he wanted to end up.
I don't think he should be pardoned. He committed crimes, and possibly could have found a better way to get this information out there. I do think he should be offered a generous plea-bargain in return for coming home and debriefing the NSA/CIA and congress about what exactly he took, how he took it and the status of all of those secrets.
> - Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
is simply false.
> - Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
Nice innuendo. Please state your concerns in a concrete fashion. If it is that he fled, then it doesn't matter to where. If it is that he was stranded in a regime unfriendly to the U.S. regime, what do you expect him to choose? England? Canada? It is also good to remember that U.S. actions are responsible for him being in Russia.
> - Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
You elide the difference between taking documents and releasing them. As others have said, vetting was done by journalists.
> - Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security / defense of the US.
1) Assuming "damage" is defined as spending money and time to evaluate the breach and implement corrective measures, sure. I've yet to see anyone point to anything beyond "I can't tell you, but be very afraid". Remember how the release was going to lead to imminent terrorists attacks in Missouri?
> - Snowden's documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.
Proof, please.
> - Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
"Secret agent skills?" Isn't that normally spelled with a "z" on the end?
> - Snowden's innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to "clam up", and place more mistrust on "outsiders", such as high-school diploma Snowden.
"High-school diploma"? WTF? Have the courage to say what you mean or cut the cheap shots. I except that sort of low-rent smearing from Slashdot and gov-contractor flacks, not Hacker News. And which is it - is Snowden a mad-1337 super agent super hacker, or and uneducated outsider? Character assassination works much better when you're a bit more consistent.
Anyway, shorn of the non-sequitur schoolyard taunting, what is the complaint? Intelligence operatives, shown to have expanded surveillance far beyond the imaginations of the voters in the democracy that supposedly as a voice in what they do, had their feelings hurt when they were exposed?
This is the same argument made by police apologists: if you keep taking pictures of us illegally killing people, we'll stop doing our jobs.
> - Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
So you don't like Greenwald. That's lovely. Now please describe how the romantic connection indicates incompetence, and what exactly the bad result that said incompetence lead to.
> But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia.
Please describe the conditions under which whistleblowing is acceptable to you. If Snowden had received the documents from someone else (thus hadn't "misuse[d] hist admin privileges"), would that make it OK for him, but not for the hypothetical other person? Of it he hadn't been stranded by the U.S. in Russia (he didn't choose to stay)?
Based on your litany above, it sounds like intelligence whistleblowing is only acceptable to you when the documents involved are officially released, the release doesn't damage any existing power structures, no intelligence operatives have their fee-fees hurt, and the leaker is better educated and collaborates with journalists you personally like more.
>> - Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
> is simply false.
As far as I was ever able to find Snowden emailed "district heads". That was the only internal channel he went through that I could find. Considering the NSA and the DoD in general each have channels to go through along with far, far more appropriate people to email / call about it (district heads is something you basically never hear about in the intel space; they're not useful at getting anything done) I would also say he did not go through internal channels.
If you have proof outside of this I'd love to read it.
> If it is that he fled, then it doesn't matter to where.
Why does it not? He had a very, very large corpus of classified intelligence that any enemy of the United States would love to get their hands on. Granted he had little choice once he got to China but I don't understand the claim that it doesn't matter where he went considering the payload he was carrying.
> You elide the difference between taking documents and releasing them. As others have said, vetting was done by journalists.
I'm not sure I would consider that vetting. Regardless a large corpus of classified and likely damaging data was taken, carried and given to multiple parties. A vetting prior to documents being indiscriminately taken would have been far more responsible though the considerable time that would have taken would have made leaking impossible in the first place.
I wouldn't be so quick so side with every single thing Snowden did to avoid being cast as a zealot.
As someone with only a high-school diploma myself, I do not like others with only a high-school diploma, who blow the chances they've been given.
Should Snowden only have been glad someone took a chance on him and shut up? No. He did a brave thing.
Will it be harder in the future for someone with only a high-school diploma to get admin access at the NSA, as a result of Snowden's actions? Yes. NSA will start focussing on Ivy League students and family members of NSA employees.
> So you don't like Greenwald. That's lovely. Now please describe how the romantic connection indicates incompetence, and what exactly the bad result that said incompetence lead to.
I think Greenwald is an ok journalist. I think it is grave incompetence to use your romantic interest as a document mule. Journalists may be able to handle sensitive documents. The partners of those journalists... not so much. They are basically civilians.
The bad result is that his partner was caught by customs and detained. A bad result may have been that other agencies got to his partner before the UK did. Everyone around Greenwald became a target the moment he was in possession of the cache. That he actually gave the documents to his partner, shows that he was a valid target at that.
Do you honestly think Snowden thought it was a good idea that Greenwald let his partner handle these documents?
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>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
That's why he gave them to a small group of well respected journalists, so they could use their professional discretion to vet them.
>- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
I highly doubt that, but even if it that were true those documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists, only the ones showing the NSA doing illegal things are.
>- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
Yes he did.
>- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent. He just copied files, fled to China and shared them with a small group of people, none of which required "secret agent skills"
>- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
So? You can't blame Snowden for that, blame the Justice department. If Snowden could have been even remotely safe anywhere but Russia, he wouldn't be there now. You can't chase after somebody then blame them for hiding somewhere safe.
>- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
No he didn't, he gave them to perfectly competent journalists. Greenwald is very competent and well respected as a journalists. Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain the important thing is that he did without them getting leaked earlier than he wanted.
>If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing.
He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
>As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.
You can not vet encrypted documents. These documents were unencrypted and handled by journalists who could never stand the full attention of the world's intelligence agencies.
Laura Poitras was very qualified. Greenwald... not so much. He had to receive a crash-course on computer safety. He left unidentified USB-sticks in the laptop with the documents. He gave the documents to his non-journalist partner in an attempt to smuggle them through customs. Greenwald is a professional. He just did not get the gravity or technicalities of most of the documents he saw.
> those [standard-operating-procedure] documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists
They are not being leaked to the general public (with a few exceptions). But one has to assume they made it to the competitors of the US. And it points to indiscriminate leaking -- maybe Snowden did not even fully realize what he all had, as he took everything he could get his hands on: mailing lists, internal collaborative wiki's, technical details on ongoing missions.
> Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
I do not think Snowden went through the official internal channels. He may have tried to ring the alarm bell with some people internally. If you have anything to challenge this, I'd be interested.
> Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent.
He was a former CIA operative. He took his job at BAH with the full intention of leaking everything he could get his hands on. His flight, undercover operation, and handling of the documents, was all very deliberate and possible due to his trade craft.
> [Snowden fled to Russia] So? You can't blame Snowden for that
Why not? Proponents almost make it sound he was chased to Russia, or that Wikileaks kidnapped him and released him there. He ended up in Russia. I think both destinations were chosen very deliberately, to avoid rendition, prosecution (or worse: assassination or torture).
> Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain
I think it does. From journalists we can expect them to maybe handle very sensitive documents. The partners of these journalists? Not so much... That is as close to civilian as you can get.
> He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
So he downloaded everything else, filled 4 laptops, and now we do take him seriously? Maybe I have missed something here? Did Snowden try to leak these important documents before he went to Poitras and Greenwald?
> Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.
Sure, Russia and China won't come out and say that:
- we have the documents
- Snowden was one of our own
But to think these documents are not in the possession of every competent intelligence agency in the world may be a bit naive. I'd reckon these intelligence agencies knew of these documents the moment news agencies around the world starting working on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_Ulfkotte#The_book_.22Bough...
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
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