I still can't wrap my head around the widespread dislike/hatred of Snowden, and politicians still labeling him as a degenerate or criminal that should be brought to justice, while ignoring the crimes and abuse he revealed. Seems very 1984-esque. My own friends and family don't really remember what he did, but remember him vaguely as some sort of criminal that somehow hurt the USA or sold us out. There's also a narrative that he somehow "defected" to Russia, despite the fact that the U.S. government trapped him there during a flight layover, and he never wanted to go there at all.
When I first heard his story I expected him to be hailed as a hero, and thought we might even have a holiday to celebrate him for risking his life, freedom, and career to inform us that our government is doing something deeply unethical in secret with our own money, that violates our basic freedoms. Thank you Snowden.
You don't even need to be much of a conspiracy theorist nowadays to realize that mainstream media is controlled by a concentrated set of interests. Just look at how coordinated the media was against "quiet quitting". And then against "work from home". And pushing many, many other anti worker narratives.
No surprise, following the leaks Snowden was painted as a traitor that clearly only pandered to Russian interests.
Of course it’s not a conspiracy. It’s all about the interests. Just compare coverage of Palestine and Israel. US interests lie with Israel — a US proxy ready to gladly down any nation that steps out of line using American. So Israelis are the angels and Palestinians are the devils. Who cares about the brutal occupation. Who cares about settler violence. Ignore all Israeli crimes to the point of white-washing. Meanwhile, all media outlets will rush to ensure that any Palestinian resistance against the violent occupation — whether it’s violent or peaceful — is covered as if it is terrorism or racism.
Julian Assange suffered a worse fate for doing much less and nothing illegal. The 'crime' of both was revealing information inconvenient to the powerful. The powerful had their MSM focus on the messenger rather than the message and smear them any way they could.
It's interesting to read this. My experience is completely different, but I'm Dutch and tend to read either Dutch or online media. And online media mostly in the tech sphere. Everybody is pretty positive about Snowden, and more objective about issues like "quiet quitting" and working from home.
I think there's something really fundamentally wrong with US media. And not just with Fox News, but with all of them.
I want to explain this from my perspective so you can maybe see why this is happening:
I remember all the talk about quiet quitting and working home and all that, but because media has slowly shifted away from that, I seemed to think about it less. In fact, I completely forgot about quiet quitting until you just mentioned it, when I realized they have slowly blocked it out.
Imagine that. It took me a while to realize that. And I still needed something to remind me of it. A lot of people aren't constantly reminded about it, which means they'll think more about whatever is currently in the media and keep falling for their trap.
My observation as a non-American (Canadian) -- is that Americans are very much freedom and liberty loving... until it comes to anything about their military, their foreign policy, and their associated intelligence agencies. It's a state whose first president was a general, where the military is treated with a reverence I've seen in no other country, and where I suspect the population is deeply aware that its own economic advantage is tied directly to its military advantage.
Snowden, despite the injustices he revealed, fell on the wrong side of American opinion in relation to the military, foreign policy, and associated intelligence agencies.
There's a great scene in Casablanca when Claude Raines' police chief character shuts down the gambling den he gambles at, saying that he is "Shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment" before collecting his winnings on the way out. The US thinks it needs to be in the game, wants to win at it and is willing to turn a blind eye to the implications of that.
Americans know they have spies, they know the CIA and the NSA exist and have a vague idea what they do. They know it's unpleasant and may be technically illegal and they're fine with delegating their elected leaders to deal with that for them.
Degenerate is a stretch, but 'criminal' does not seem controversial. Whether you agree with the laws or not, hate the USG, love Snowden, whatever, the fact remains that he did most likely break the law. He hasn't been convicted, true, but his own choice to stay out of the US suggests he believes he would be.
I do think he broke the law (and I still like him. If I could wave a magic wand I'd bring him back and get the judge to give him a token sentence, or remand it to a civil matter -- breach of contract since he was a contractor), but that's just my opinion. I think there's ambiguity with respect to whistleblower laws, and he might want to stay out because he doesn't feel like he will get a fair trial, which, if I were him, I would not expect.
Criminal because exposing criminalities that a powerful state just declared top secret... very controversial - not only about the criminal but also ethically questionable if this is how a good democracy should work.
This. I have friends who will say "he revealed secrets to our enemies!" and I don't even know how to respond. The U.S. government is a bigger global enemy (and a threat to me) than any Islamist in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Snowdens recent conversations around Russia and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have tinted or confirmed biases against Snowden as a traitor and stooge of the Russian government.
I read your link and don't get it. He said "Russia should not invade Ukraine" and pretty much nothing else. The criticism seems to be that he isn't more aggressively criticizing Russia? When he is physically located there, in a country that famously does not have any sort of freedom of speech, and has a wife and baby?
This is not my personal belief, my personal belief is a lot more nuanced than this, but I do find this to be a very compelling argument against him:
Snowden is a half-way martyr.
He made the decision to die for a cause, and then backed out of that decision and swore an oath of allegiance to modern day Hitler.
He showed an example of someone who didn't like the consequences of his actions and if you want to escape the consequences of your actions, you do that via corruption: swearing loyalty to someone powerful and reaping the benefits of that loyalty (them shielding you from consequences) in exchange for your servitude. In order to prevent being a victim of corruption, he chose to engage in corruption.
Him and Wikileaks together delegitimized the American government and ultimately created a fertile ground for a fascist to be elected president. (I think it's more arguable that Obama was the person who delegitimized the establishment).
His ultimate fate, to see his legacy largely ignored and unaddressed, to become a slave to a dictator, and to see that his oath of allegiance calls into question his sacrifice... I don't think America could have created a harsher punishment if we had tried.
I think America's founding fathers would understand and be sympathetic to his plight, but be disappointed.
FWIW, I have been in rooms talking about hardening infrastructure against government malfeasance. There were a lot of engineers at companies mentioned in prism docs that said "lets assume this is true, how did it happen," and worked on hardening infrastructure against the attacks they could imagine. So while outwardly his sacrifice seems largely in vain, it lives in the memory of many engineers who see hardening their systems against government action as a real importance many of whom donate to many organizations like the EFF.
So the argument against him is that he isn't Socrates? He just wanted to get the truth out there and then beyond that minimize the damage to himself and his family, when he could/should have voluntarily become a full fledged martyr, for no extra benefit to anyone?
The fact that he found refuge in Russia is a great tragedy. I strongly preferred that a European country had offered him refuge. Switzerland, perhaps? But US intelligence has long and strong arms, and I guess Russia seemed like the safest place at the time. And then Putin went full fascist and now he's stuck there.
Prevented from flying anywhere outside of Russia during a layover != defected. He's not there by choice as long as the choice is: stay in Russia and use political optics to safely criticize Putin's regime, or leave Russia and rot in prison away from his family for the rest of his life.
Snowden released unredacted classified documents that lead to real-world damage and potentially casualties. Compare that to wikileaks which redacted locations, IP addresses and other sensitive information.
He wasn't a hacker by any means. He was a lowly SharePoint admin that was rumoured to have been coerced remotely by the Russians.
He was angry with the NSA for being denied a promotion for TAO which drove him over the edge.
It isn't hard to theorize that Russian and Chinese assets lurk the corners of chatrooms, looking for depressed/vulnerable US assets to coerce and corrupt. Money well spent for the West's enemies.
If a single American intelligence asset lost their life because of Snowden's leaks would your opinion change?
Snowden released his intel to a single journalist each from two highly respected publications, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Releases to the general public were made in those publications only, according to the judgement and discretion of those journalists. It was the model of responsible disclosure.
Can you point to a specific article in the Washington Post or The Guardian which you believe lead to casualties?
(The rest of your comment is rumor, wild speculation, and in the case of 'lowly sharepoint admin', outright misrepresentation)
I‘m glad that Snowden revealed the injustices committed towards people around the world; even allies to the United States. Spying on the general public of democratic countries like my country Germany and their elected leaders is a no-no, and it doesn’t matter if a few American intelligence assets lost their life. They played with fire when they joined the criminal organizations and paid the price for it.
To be honest, he has kind of defected. Yes, he didn't mean to go to Russia initially, but he's chosen to remain there, knowing that the Russians can throw him in the jail whenever they want. By remaining there he's turned himself into Kremlin puppet, to all effects and purposes.
I believe he was trying to go elsewhere, but got stuck in Sheremetevo airport because the U.S. disabled his passport before he could board a flight to Hong Kong (or elsewhere, I don't recall where)
In what way? Has he said or done anything that makes him seem like a Russian puppet to you? I don't see how being physically located somewhere means you support or agree with them.
The lengths that the "good guys" will go to in order to spy on the "bad guys" and how they'll be lying into their graves about it.
You can't trust a single word intelligence agencies say. We have no idea what they are collecting, how it is stored, indexed, searched, or used, or how long. They actively deny operations they are currently engaged in, i.e. they lie, at the highest levels.
There are only technical limitations imposed by computational resources. Which aren't really limitations when they have effectively infinite funding at this point.
They've infiltrated hardware; inserted backdoors, not just at telcos, but into privately-developed and owned locations.
They consider encryption to be a stumbling block and are willing to intervene to weaken it to serve their purposes.
Absolutely shitbirds, all. I don't care what their ends are, their means are to create a digital dystopia that simply cannot be trusted. They basically broke tech; usurped it to serve the power structure. And so many people and companies went along with, are going along with, and are enriching themselves by doing so.
Installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel was the closest I'm come to feeling like having an actual PDA I could trust and living in a cool future. But of course it's still on Google hardware, so it's not trustworthy. And it still requires apps, some of which are not trustworthy. And, worst of all, I still have to communicate with other people on their phones, which voids most privacy efforts. I don't even give new friends my real phone number because I can't trust their contacts list not to be shared with everybody who wants to buy it.
It also, no doubt, relies on a Google-signed blob to enforce Secure Boot that is signed by Google. Where do you think that "This device has secure boot disabled" or "This device is running a custom image..." (can't remember exact terminology) warning comes from... So, in theory, Google could make a signed blob that unlocked secure boot if the government really wanted it anyway.
The thing I've never really understood about this is... to what end? I get that, on a philosophical level, it sucks that in theory your privacy can be violated and that choice has been taken from you.
But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it?
Don't get me wrong, it's not to say we shouldn't advocate for govt. orgs not doing this sort of thing - but I also don't know why you'd spend so much time and mental energy trying to avoid a theoretical bogeyman.
Encryption, etc. also merely pose inconveniences. At the end of the day, you don't need quantum computers to get access to whatever data you want. It's much easier to bribe+blackmail+threaten someone to get access to data. Or to buy zero days to access a victim's phone and go from there. Or to insert hardware backdoors and compromise a system at a fundamental level. Or install rootkits.
Those are techniques organized criminals might use. Nation states need not bother. They just do whatever they want, including inserting MITM boxes in telcos. It is safe to assume that no asymmetrically encrypted traffic in the past decade has not been stored and decoded. It's a reasonably safe assumption that all symmetrically encrypted traffic has been stored if not also outright decoded.
This kind of defeatist, "They Live", everyone-is-lying all of the time mentality ignores the huge privacy gains the internet has achieved since basically just being an open message relay between hubs.
And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.
"Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016
It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
The NSA has no jurisdiction on American soil, so making cases is basically a moot point for PRISM anyway. PRISM will allow the government to extrajudicially kill you if you join a terrorist group (or a group the government considers one), and the fact that it exists and Russian officials have been caught using Windows XP is probably why Ukraine has outperformed expectations so much.
The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
I get the impression that the intelligence communities (IC) have a lot of people who have a constant sense of it being their job to help avert national existential threats. I imagine they attract lots of smart and noble people, and that the nature of immersion in the work is going to affect a person's perspective.
People I've met who might've been involved in IC don't talk about it, at least not with me (and I assume it's improper to ask), but I did once meet someone peripheral to that, who vocalized one kind of thinking about it.
Years prior to the meeting, around the time of the Snowden thing, in a private research forum, I said something like: one of the IC orgs did important work, etc., but seemed to need guidance on Constitutional balance. It was a random comment, and I forgot about it.
Years later, I was meeting with someone from that forum, about a (non-IC) job, and their attention was divided with laptop while they talked with me, like they were also reviewing my resume or something. Suddenly, they were agitated, and seemed to be referencing -- not our conversation, nor my resume -- but my forum comment from years earlier, as they angrily started saying how people at such-and-such org "know the Constitution better than anyone", etc. Then angry impromptu speech about (public) information about threats, and (public) information about a claim of why such-and-such org had done certain things.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, and I also realized that I needed to get the interview-gone-sideways back on track, so the discussion recovered after that. But at the end of the interview, there was obvious (renewed) irritation in their voice and manner. (And that's not my worst interview ever. :)
I realized that the person's work had probably led them interact with IC orgs before, the person had been impressed by the orgs, was very concerned about threats, and was offended on behalf of the org by armchair critics like me.
I imagine that person is not the only one with strong feelings like that, but that people actually at the org, and who had similar feelings, wouldn't speak with an outsider about it.
That's a pretty good description of most people IC affiliated. I'm not sure about your interviewer friend though, doesn't sound like someone I'd want to interact with.
That said, almost all of how these things work are out there in memoirs, biographies and non-fiction books. Robert Gates is a prolific writer and did a great job in his memoirs describing the IC. I mean yes the majority are purely discreet in their current or former capacity. It took me a long time before I would discuss my affiliations etc... and I generally don't discuss anything more than structural "how it works" kind of things that can be found in a lot of memoirs etc as described.
I'm always happy to discuss to a point but most of it would just be boring stuff.
That's the thing, they can't really defend themselves in the court of public opinion. And just take a look here at the comments from people who have absolutely nothing to do with the domain.
I know I would be frustrated.
> That's the thing, they can't really defend themselves in the court of public opinion.
If if they were able, how could they possibly win people over? They've violated our trust, privacy, and (arguably) our legal rights. Even if they're literally keeping the nation from being taken over by China or Russia, they're also the bad guys. I can accept that it's possible I'm better off with them than without them... but I hate them, because they abuse me.
I haven't watched the news in a while, but my memory of it is that the intelligence agencies had a constant presence on them, with multiple former employees working for all the major cable news networks and the agencies themselves being asked to comment on basically any remotely related issue.
Maybe there's some string of successes they can't brag about, but they still regularly defend themselves in the court of public opinion and further often dominate the discussion.
To realize that the real state acts "deep state" like without requiring nefarious or shadowy behavior.
Simply make unelected people have lifelong careers within governmental organizations. Snowden talks about this in his book. Yeah a new ~puppet~ figure head gets elected every 4 years. But what about all the layers of folks who actually perform the "Government" actions? They are the same people for decades, they say yes or no to actions you can/cannot take, they influence in their every choice they true meaning of policies...
This is working as intended. At least in the United States.
Early in the history of the country, we experimented with evicting the entire government when party changed hands, all the way to individual post offices. It turned out to be ridiculously inefficient. It turns out institutional knowledge is extremely important, and institutions are generally terrible at writing everything down that the next person will need. Imagine trying to conduct a business with 95% turnover every 2 years.
As a result, we intentionally established standards for employment and safeguards against arbitrary firing of unelected bureaucratic officials. The elected officials have control over setting policy and, in the long-term, deciding the criteria by which the unelected officials retain their jobs.
None of this implies that the unelected officials are unaccountable. They are held accountable by our elected officials. But that process does require the elected officials to do their homework and, to some extent, understand the Chesterton's fences that exist in the system. A failure mode I observe is that we seem to keep trying to solve the problem by electing conspiracy nuts who are then basically ignored because they try to approach the problem of reining in unelected bureaucracy from the "Why don't you show us the secret UFO tapes?" direction instead of the "The president needs a full accounting of how many terabytes of data have been stored for terrorism fighting purposes" direction.
This is a satirical point of the British TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister. The high ranking civil servants, with nearly permanent positions, are in charge. The elected officials think they are in charge.
That first one has really gone from tinfoil to norm. The Swedish government recently recommended officials not talk about anything secret while travelling in a Volvo.
> to assume that everything you write or say to or near an internet connected device is being recorded and linked to your real life identity.
I feel like if that were exploited at scale, we could see a huge number of criminal indictments etc., of the sort of behavior that's technically illegal but nobody enforces, but would suddenly be exposed through such an effort. Of course if they took it to court they'd have to discuss how they got the evidence.
But the fact that we're not seeing this makes me think it's not as bad as we think, that some amount of discretion is used, or that there is just so much data that nobody is acting on most of it.
I frankly think the more scary abuses of the post 9/11 era are things like Guantanamo. The idea that they can round up people and hold them indefinitely, with no or little due process. If someone does warrantless surveillance and brings a case against you based on that information, the expectation is you can challenge it. If they falsely claim you did 9/11, then... Less so.
Personally, I have learnt I do not have a moral compass strong enough to outweigh the consequences that come with being a whistleblower. I'm very grateful such people exist, though.
Vindman is a perfect recent example of how easily this protections are skirted. He was a “key witness” in Trump’s first impeachment.
His career was largely derailed, and his post-retirement second career options are most likely severely limited.
To be specific (and iirc):
- He was not kicked out of the military. He retired due to “bullying” and a big congressional kerfuffle that was about to happen because of his delayed promotion to full bird.
- Iirc, he was told that he could remain in his career, but he would have to move from a hot shot track he was in to something like being commandant of a nowhere base in Alaska so he could lay low. Note that moves like this happen when being promoted to full bird, but I got the sense that this was not his trajectory pre-testimony.
- His post-retirement options probably exclude working at any organization that is pro-Trump and most that are pro-Republican, which is a not small number of DoD contractors (common landing spot for retired military).
- Note that his lawsuits were dismissed. This type of discrimination is fairly easy to do in such a way that makes it difficult to sue successfully, usually due to something like “documented personal opinion or discretion” that the discriminator had. Note that I have personally seen this knowingly done several times —- it was super creepy to see in action.
Who is 'we' in this? If 'we' is U.S. citizen I think it's something along the lines of the typical trope 'if I don't have anything to hide then I don't have anything to worry about' with the unspoken piece of the formula being '...so I should censor myself to ensure...' etc.
Readit News
When I first heard his story I expected him to be hailed as a hero, and thought we might even have a holiday to celebrate him for risking his life, freedom, and career to inform us that our government is doing something deeply unethical in secret with our own money, that violates our basic freedoms. Thank you Snowden.
No surprise, following the leaks Snowden was painted as a traitor that clearly only pandered to Russian interests.
US media is just Propaganda.
I think there's something really fundamentally wrong with US media. And not just with Fox News, but with all of them.
I remember all the talk about quiet quitting and working home and all that, but because media has slowly shifted away from that, I seemed to think about it less. In fact, I completely forgot about quiet quitting until you just mentioned it, when I realized they have slowly blocked it out.
Imagine that. It took me a while to realize that. And I still needed something to remind me of it. A lot of people aren't constantly reminded about it, which means they'll think more about whatever is currently in the media and keep falling for their trap.
Therefore corporate media ends up defending the status quo, by default or by design.
More pieces of the Zeitgeist, really.
Snowden, despite the injustices he revealed, fell on the wrong side of American opinion in relation to the military, foreign policy, and associated intelligence agencies.
Americans know they have spies, they know the CIA and the NSA exist and have a vague idea what they do. They know it's unpleasant and may be technically illegal and they're fine with delegating their elected leaders to deal with that for them.
I wouldn't be so fast to use the word "deeply" there.
Degenerate is a stretch, but 'criminal' does not seem controversial. Whether you agree with the laws or not, hate the USG, love Snowden, whatever, the fact remains that he did most likely break the law. He hasn't been convicted, true, but his own choice to stay out of the US suggests he believes he would be.
Yes, the level of wiretapping and surveillance was bad. It should have been exposed.
However, that's not all he took. And those documents have had negative effects on U.S. operations and that of their allies.
I have my conjectures and speculations, but ultimately, I do not believe Snowden is completely in the right.
I am not sure why we struggle so much with that idea given the complexity of the situation.
See: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/18/the-trouble-wi...
Snowden is a half-way martyr.
He made the decision to die for a cause, and then backed out of that decision and swore an oath of allegiance to modern day Hitler.
He showed an example of someone who didn't like the consequences of his actions and if you want to escape the consequences of your actions, you do that via corruption: swearing loyalty to someone powerful and reaping the benefits of that loyalty (them shielding you from consequences) in exchange for your servitude. In order to prevent being a victim of corruption, he chose to engage in corruption.
Him and Wikileaks together delegitimized the American government and ultimately created a fertile ground for a fascist to be elected president. (I think it's more arguable that Obama was the person who delegitimized the establishment).
His ultimate fate, to see his legacy largely ignored and unaddressed, to become a slave to a dictator, and to see that his oath of allegiance calls into question his sacrifice... I don't think America could have created a harsher punishment if we had tried.
I think America's founding fathers would understand and be sympathetic to his plight, but be disappointed.
FWIW, I have been in rooms talking about hardening infrastructure against government malfeasance. There were a lot of engineers at companies mentioned in prism docs that said "lets assume this is true, how did it happen," and worked on hardening infrastructure against the attacks they could imagine. So while outwardly his sacrifice seems largely in vain, it lives in the memory of many engineers who see hardening their systems against government action as a real importance many of whom donate to many organizations like the EFF.
Lol. After Assange/Manning, that demonstrates a singular failure of imagination.
Any proof to back up this wild claim?
Just curious, do you consider Bush, who started the Iraq war, to be a modern Hitler too?
Snowden released unredacted classified documents that lead to real-world damage and potentially casualties. Compare that to wikileaks which redacted locations, IP addresses and other sensitive information.
He wasn't a hacker by any means. He was a lowly SharePoint admin that was rumoured to have been coerced remotely by the Russians.
He was angry with the NSA for being denied a promotion for TAO which drove him over the edge.
It isn't hard to theorize that Russian and Chinese assets lurk the corners of chatrooms, looking for depressed/vulnerable US assets to coerce and corrupt. Money well spent for the West's enemies.
If a single American intelligence asset lost their life because of Snowden's leaks would your opinion change?
Can you point to a specific article in the Washington Post or The Guardian which you believe lead to casualties?
(The rest of your comment is rumor, wild speculation, and in the case of 'lowly sharepoint admin', outright misrepresentation)
It’s not like he has any good options. I don’t blame him for staying in Russia.
You can't trust a single word intelligence agencies say. We have no idea what they are collecting, how it is stored, indexed, searched, or used, or how long. They actively deny operations they are currently engaged in, i.e. they lie, at the highest levels.
There are only technical limitations imposed by computational resources. Which aren't really limitations when they have effectively infinite funding at this point.
They've infiltrated hardware; inserted backdoors, not just at telcos, but into privately-developed and owned locations.
They consider encryption to be a stumbling block and are willing to intervene to weaken it to serve their purposes.
Absolutely shitbirds, all. I don't care what their ends are, their means are to create a digital dystopia that simply cannot be trusted. They basically broke tech; usurped it to serve the power structure. And so many people and companies went along with, are going along with, and are enriching themselves by doing so.
This future sucks. I hate my own devices.
Installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel was the closest I'm come to feeling like having an actual PDA I could trust and living in a cool future. But of course it's still on Google hardware, so it's not trustworthy. And it still requires apps, some of which are not trustworthy. And, worst of all, I still have to communicate with other people on their phones, which voids most privacy efforts. I don't even give new friends my real phone number because I can't trust their contacts list not to be shared with everybody who wants to buy it.
But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it?
Don't get me wrong, it's not to say we shouldn't advocate for govt. orgs not doing this sort of thing - but I also don't know why you'd spend so much time and mental energy trying to avoid a theoretical bogeyman.
And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.
"Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016
It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
People I've met who might've been involved in IC don't talk about it, at least not with me (and I assume it's improper to ask), but I did once meet someone peripheral to that, who vocalized one kind of thinking about it.
Years prior to the meeting, around the time of the Snowden thing, in a private research forum, I said something like: one of the IC orgs did important work, etc., but seemed to need guidance on Constitutional balance. It was a random comment, and I forgot about it.
Years later, I was meeting with someone from that forum, about a (non-IC) job, and their attention was divided with laptop while they talked with me, like they were also reviewing my resume or something. Suddenly, they were agitated, and seemed to be referencing -- not our conversation, nor my resume -- but my forum comment from years earlier, as they angrily started saying how people at such-and-such org "know the Constitution better than anyone", etc. Then angry impromptu speech about (public) information about threats, and (public) information about a claim of why such-and-such org had done certain things.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, and I also realized that I needed to get the interview-gone-sideways back on track, so the discussion recovered after that. But at the end of the interview, there was obvious (renewed) irritation in their voice and manner. (And that's not my worst interview ever. :)
I realized that the person's work had probably led them interact with IC orgs before, the person had been impressed by the orgs, was very concerned about threats, and was offended on behalf of the org by armchair critics like me.
I imagine that person is not the only one with strong feelings like that, but that people actually at the org, and who had similar feelings, wouldn't speak with an outsider about it.
That's a pretty good description of most people IC affiliated. I'm not sure about your interviewer friend though, doesn't sound like someone I'd want to interact with.
That said, almost all of how these things work are out there in memoirs, biographies and non-fiction books. Robert Gates is a prolific writer and did a great job in his memoirs describing the IC. I mean yes the majority are purely discreet in their current or former capacity. It took me a long time before I would discuss my affiliations etc... and I generally don't discuss anything more than structural "how it works" kind of things that can be found in a lot of memoirs etc as described.
I'm always happy to discuss to a point but most of it would just be boring stuff.
If if they were able, how could they possibly win people over? They've violated our trust, privacy, and (arguably) our legal rights. Even if they're literally keeping the nation from being taken over by China or Russia, they're also the bad guys. I can accept that it's possible I'm better off with them than without them... but I hate them, because they abuse me.
Maybe there's some string of successes they can't brag about, but they still regularly defend themselves in the court of public opinion and further often dominate the discussion.
to assume that everything companies tell you about security and encryption is an intentional (legally bound) or unintentional lie.
to realise that there are shadow laws that we are not aware of that govern these things.
Simply make unelected people have lifelong careers within governmental organizations. Snowden talks about this in his book. Yeah a new ~puppet~ figure head gets elected every 4 years. But what about all the layers of folks who actually perform the "Government" actions? They are the same people for decades, they say yes or no to actions you can/cannot take, they influence in their every choice they true meaning of policies...
Early in the history of the country, we experimented with evicting the entire government when party changed hands, all the way to individual post offices. It turned out to be ridiculously inefficient. It turns out institutional knowledge is extremely important, and institutions are generally terrible at writing everything down that the next person will need. Imagine trying to conduct a business with 95% turnover every 2 years.
As a result, we intentionally established standards for employment and safeguards against arbitrary firing of unelected bureaucratic officials. The elected officials have control over setting policy and, in the long-term, deciding the criteria by which the unelected officials retain their jobs.
None of this implies that the unelected officials are unaccountable. They are held accountable by our elected officials. But that process does require the elected officials to do their homework and, to some extent, understand the Chesterton's fences that exist in the system. A failure mode I observe is that we seem to keep trying to solve the problem by electing conspiracy nuts who are then basically ignored because they try to approach the problem of reining in unelected bureaucracy from the "Why don't you show us the secret UFO tapes?" direction instead of the "The president needs a full accounting of how many terabytes of data have been stored for terrorism fighting purposes" direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
It was reformed for a reason! Putting politicians in charge of all hiring and firing turned out to be bad for everyone.
The rational is that you always get road assistance when needed. Never trust that conversations inside a modern car are private.
I feel like if that were exploited at scale, we could see a huge number of criminal indictments etc., of the sort of behavior that's technically illegal but nobody enforces, but would suddenly be exposed through such an effort. Of course if they took it to court they'd have to discuss how they got the evidence.
But the fact that we're not seeing this makes me think it's not as bad as we think, that some amount of discretion is used, or that there is just so much data that nobody is acting on most of it.
I frankly think the more scary abuses of the post 9/11 era are things like Guantanamo. The idea that they can round up people and hold them indefinitely, with no or little due process. If someone does warrantless surveillance and brings a case against you based on that information, the expectation is you can challenge it. If they falsely claim you did 9/11, then... Less so.
This might or might not be true, but let's say it is. But what then in 10 years when something you do or are becomes the next Red Scare?
https://www.dodig.mil/Resources/FAQs/#whistleblowerFAQs
His career was largely derailed, and his post-retirement second career options are most likely severely limited.
To be specific (and iirc):
- He was not kicked out of the military. He retired due to “bullying” and a big congressional kerfuffle that was about to happen because of his delayed promotion to full bird.
- Iirc, he was told that he could remain in his career, but he would have to move from a hot shot track he was in to something like being commandant of a nowhere base in Alaska so he could lay low. Note that moves like this happen when being promoted to full bird, but I got the sense that this was not his trajectory pre-testimony.
- His post-retirement options probably exclude working at any organization that is pro-Trump and most that are pro-Republican, which is a not small number of DoD contractors (common landing spot for retired military).
- Note that his lawsuits were dismissed. This type of discrimination is fairly easy to do in such a way that makes it difficult to sue successfully, usually due to something like “documented personal opinion or discretion” that the discriminator had. Note that I have personally seen this knowingly done several times —- it was super creepy to see in action.
Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vindman
Some of his interviews were enlightening if you search for the links.
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(Too dark?)
I love that saying. But if it would be true, then why do people lock their bathroom doors?
Julian Assange should have come to Russia, not Sweden
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