icecold12741 (u/icecold12741)

icecold12741 commented on How Snowden's Disclosures Made All Our Data Safer pardonsnowden.org/news/sn... · Posted by u/zerognowl

EdHominem · 9 years ago

Actually, it is. We've had whistleblowers before who tried to censor what they told us and it didn't have half the impact. As long as the leadership of the NSA keeps treasonously lying, all leaks are necessary and thus justified.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

Except they didn't lie. He said he saw them lie to Congress but that was for the open-door, public session. If you think Congress isn't getting the details in closed-door, classified briefs, then you don't understand the relationship Intelligence Agencies have with Congress.

None of this came as a surprise to any Congressman with interactions with Intel Agencies. Hell, none of this should have come as a surprise if you know anything about security/cybersecurity. As long as there are systems which hide info, there will be backdoors and people trying to break them.

The exact same things are being done by every "first world" government on the planet. And sadly, what they do is FAR less intrusive than what Google does. They make text documents out of your phone calls to try and find new products to sell you... They have copies of every text you ever made on an Android device, every site you have visited, every e-mail you wrote or received on Gmail... All the info the NSA gathered that Snowden was "abhorred" by, was less than 1% of what Google has on you. What's the difference? Google will sell it. The NSA may look through it, but they won't sell it to the highest bidder.

Every device Google makes is just another way to gather info on their users. They are, first and foremost, an advertising company. And they are the best in the world at that because of all the info they have on all their users.

icecold12741 commented on How Snowden's Disclosures Made All Our Data Safer pardonsnowden.org/news/sn... · Posted by u/zerognowl

api · 9 years ago

In my experience they caused people to get slightly more serious about security, but the effect was minimal beyond crypto heads and maybe enterprise users.

UX continues to dominate all other market factors in computing by a huge margin.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

The real question is how much of it was because of him. They assume it was him that made these changes but that's ignoring the data leak of over 100,000,000 government employees personal information, plus the University of Maryland hacks, and probably 2 dozen other high profile hacks since then. To credit the changes to him, you would have to shove that those events (individually or collectively) had no effect on privacy concerns. I would venture to guess it was the multitude of hacks that led to increased privacy concerns, since 90% of what he revealed wouldn't be defeated by using current encryption methods or changing your password... I mean what is the count on the FBI "breaking" TOR? 3x in the past year that went public?

Yes, Google added encryption but only because they were afraid of losing a competitive edge. They will still gladly sell all the information they collect (by monitoring emails, texts, phone calls, etc - which their right to monitor was defended in a district court) provided you have enough money. They are first and foremost an advertising agency. All their other services and products just serve to give them more sources of information.

icecold12741 commented on Pardon Snowden pardonsnowden.org/... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

felice_landry · 9 years ago

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.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

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.

icecold12741 commented on Pardon Snowden pardonsnowden.org/... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

whamlastxmas · 9 years ago

Looking forward to donating when they accept bitcoin. I have no expectation he'll be pardoned, but the other important thing here is that there's a documented movement for it. History will show that people wanted this and Obama and Hillary/Trump refused it. It will be more difficult for blind patriotic bias to weasel its way into the history books.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

History is written by the victor. There was a large number of people who did not want the US to secede from Britain (including John Adams) but the history books (as given to the normal population) show us a proud group of united patriots who struck out against their oppressors...

More recently, the "greatest generation" signed up for WWII in droves, right? Actually over 50% were drafted with another estimated 100,000 Americans injuring themselves or fleeing the country to avoid the draft...

icecold12741 commented on Pardon Snowden pardonsnowden.org/... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

JMCQ87 · 9 years ago

They should be condoning it. For that, a lot of things would have to change first though, like, for example, the community has to come to the realization that the (supposed) ends do not justify the means and that it's therefore the right thing to do to whistle-blow about them. They also need to realize that the internal mechanisms to whistle-blow are "not effective", to say the least.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

The internal mechanisms actually work, if you use them. Snowden has admitted in subsequent interviews to not even trying to report through any channel. Something most people that are not government don't realize about whistleblowing is that your options are not just your boss. We can report to any supervisor (given the proper clearance), a branch specifically designed for whistleblowing (including a 24 hour 1-800 number), or to any member of Congress. Do you really think all 600+ members of Congress would have turned him away? Being the Senator or Representative that brought that info forward would have guaranteed re-election... But instead, he handed thousands of pages of classified info over to a news organization and trusted them to sort through it (when he had probably never read through it in full). Now, he is begging for a pardon because it has been hinted that his stay in Russia will be up next year (when his status expires) since he decided to speak out against Putin.

icecold12741 commented on Pardon Snowden pardonsnowden.org/... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

strictnein · 9 years ago

Snowden carte blanche stole and gave up "TONS of data about TONS of things", trusting only Greenwald, et al to filter out sensitive data.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

Basically, yes. Also, the evidence shows that he didn't one day "see something wrong and decided to report it" as the narrative claims. He quit a job on one contract to take another job (which he lied about his experience to get) and then stole information from there before releasing it all roughly 6 months after he was hired. Some reports I have seen estimate that roughly 90% of the information he released was from while he was working at Dell (the previous job) on a DoD contract (I was still DoD at the time so it was of "interest" to us what he released). Additionally, there are 0 records of him trying to report it through any channel and he has said in some interviews that he chose to go public "rather than" report it because he thought nothing would be done. By the way, contrary to the narrative, he didn't have one or two channels that ignored him (had he used them), he could have actually gone to any Senator or Representative with the information and still been protected (probably moreso since Congress would have been behind him).

Plus, as someone who held a clearance in the DoD (former interrogator), I will say it can be hard (especially for someone like those journalists who never held a clearance) to tell what can directly hurt someone else. Handing off NSA program documents could have potentially put the lives of CIA and NSA agents and sources around the world...but we would never know. Even the families of those people wouldn't know. All they would know is that their family member didn't come home.

icecold12741 commented on Pardon Snowden pardonsnowden.org/... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

eternalban · 9 years ago

Let's review the leak:

* NSA spies on foreign governments. Isn't that their job?

* NSA spies on Americans, & has compromised infrastructure. Your first assumption here is that the ruling elite won't want you to know that. Have you ever considered they wanted you to know without official acknowledgement? Go find an oldhand AT&T geek and ask them about the telephony and NSA.

> Regardless of the personalities involved

You would have a point if Snowden had released the material to non-corporate actors (how about UN's human rights commission) and wasn't on the talking head [1] road show pontificating on various matters. If the actor is false then the road show is a cause for concern, don't you agree?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... I want to see a pic of our hero in Moscow, holding today's edition of whatever passes for journalism in Russia, posted to twitter, to start with.

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

Another point to be made is that while they say that "much has changed due to his actions" not all has been positive. Several court cases came out after this affirming the idea that you have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" for any internet-facing machine. In fact, the District Court in Virginia this month said that the FBI had the legal right to install malware on the computer of someone who visited a child pornography site. The ruling basically stated that in the modern era of technology, the general consensus is that no public-facing technology is safe from exploitation, so by using it (it being a computer), he acknowledged the risk that everything he did would be made available for observation from a 3rd party (whether a company or the government).

Google won a case a few years ago to the same effect. They were sued for scanning a private business' e-mail traffic and using it to target advertising. That court also ruled that if it was unencrypted communication, moving across "public" lines, then it was fair game for anyone who could intercept it.

icecold12741 commented on Ask HN: How to Learn OOP · Posted by u/ympavan

icecold12741 · 9 years ago

You can always check out Object Oriented Analysis and Design by Head First (http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfooad/). Their books are more about learning the concepts than the theory so they employ a lot of games and learning activities. They are a lot more interesting than a textbook on OO, even if the format seems a little juvenile at time (I mean they have word-searches and crosswords with key terms).