Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1(libroot.org) |
Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1(libroot.org) |
Couldn't agree more, but not for the reason you think
> The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.[13]
Sorry, couldn't help myself
On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.
You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
> in retrospect was this actually huge news?
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government. Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow. Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/layoffs-the-intercept.p...
I wonder what this organization is though. The stated purpose seems a little anachronistic, similar to the ideas of the early 2010s, which were amply covered by Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018). A number of organizations of that type ended up being funded by U.S. intelligence as it ended up benefiting military intelligence in various ways, e.g. the Tor Project is funded like this and provides chaff cover for intelligence operations (if all Tor traffic was military, there would be little point to it since it would stick out like a sore thumb) and e.g. NSA can de-anonymize Tor traffic since they can correlate entry and exit traffic with total system awareness (an asymmetric capability no other nation or sub-national organization has).
There's a great podcast + transcript with Chris Hedges and author Yasha Levine about this book here: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/04/13/chris-hedges-report-th...
Doing this analysis is a great way to get some credibility, but it also doesn't reveal anything that wasn't publicly available. Nonetheless, I still appreciate it!
We also have Tor onion site: http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...
And I2P: http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american.
"Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.
I'm wondering if trump could have ever succeeded without that path being prepared for him by snowden's leaks and occupy wallstreet. I'm not saying snowden did anything wrong, to the contrary, he thought things would change and they didn't, I'm wondering whether that contributed to the feeling of americans feeling disenfranchised. Relations with europe also started souring around that time.
I think snowden did the right thing, but like many in tech (especially here on HN), he didn't understand that American's didn't care about what's in the leaks all that much. it wasn't his burden to weigh the pros and cons, his burden was to do what he thought was right. But looking back, nothing good came out of the leaks, I wish they didn't happen to begin with. Of course if you're not an American lots of good things came out of it. I'm certain we have less privacy now, more governmental spying, and even more support for it. at least before we had the illusion that we had some rights to privacy from the government. Now that they're exposed and gotten away with it, I fear they've become more emboldened.
I guess I am glad the whole thing was exposed, but I am regretful of how things turned out. Would it have been better if there was more trust in governmental institutions, and if the US IC kept their capabilities secret for longer? would they have been able to interfere with russian influence campaigns in 2015-16 if so? Is the world better of now?
I suppose in 5-10 more years these things will be historical events and historians might answer these questions with a more objective perspective.
I do think that the leaks did something good and we have more of a focus on government being a hostile data proprietor and schooled people to take more care. Perhaps not the masses, but for those that deal with hot information.
Trust in government is low. An achievement that took a lot of work, I guess. The Russian influence campaign was at least partially made up as well, government disinformation. Propaganda is mostly a domestic issue.
There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.
----
I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines.
Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute.
[*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.
I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.
Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
Nothing jaw dropping but he surprised on what get through
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
Edit:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
A few other links lazily searched -
The single card depicting it: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/illuminati-world-orde... (zoomable)
The whole set: https://www.ccgtrader.net/games/illuminati-nwo-ccg/limited/
One of countless articles covering that, and related stuff: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I've held this card (already well used and worn) in my hand, shown to me by someone affiliated with the CCC in Hamburg, who had it always on him in his purse, about 2004/5.
Surreal.
> privacy as the basic right it should be again.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
Yes it does.
I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.
Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information.
The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission.
----
This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding.
Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.
Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of his actions like an adult.
Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.
While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.
Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.
Here's a good starting point if you're not familiar with the second source https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...
Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.
The Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison scandal) whistle-blower was protected by the system even if some people were very upset.
It's an extremely effective propaganda technique whereby you discredit the person(s) who were affected by injustice, while simultaneously shifting the narrative away from said injustice. It preys on the human minds simple morality reasoning skills - bad people don't do good things, and good people don't do bad things.
Of course, that's not how it works, and it's both. George Floyd maybe did counterfeit a twenty, and that's illegal. But is the punishment for that public execution? What motivation do people have to bring that up? No good motivations, in my mind.
George Floyd ingested quite a lot of fentanyl, enough to die though it was inconclusive - it's a biological and medical reality that characterized the situation in a very real way.
Snowden released a lot of information that had nothing to do with 'whistle blowing' and enormously benefited very bad actors such such as China and Russia - it was a windfall for them, and destroyed years of work by Western intelligence agencies.
This was right after China had discovered and executed a handful of CIA personnel, whereupon it was very, very clear the possible repercussions of such a release.
His actions were inconsistent with those of someone interested only in whistle-blowing and or 'showing hypocrisy' on espionage; there are any number of ways to whistle-blow in a manner that does not result in the negative outcomes. Since he's smart enough to know better, it's rational to conclude the possibility of ulterior motives.
Russia's espionage and influence campaigns are having a severely negative effect on the political situation in the US and West in general, where they have deeply penetrated many nations security and political apparatus, especially Germany.
Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad
i am comfortable making this statement: anyone in the middle of the venn diagram of "booz allen hamilton employee" and "hacker news dot com reader" has the "Power" to work literally anywhere else that produces technology products.
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.
Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.
I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.
He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.
The US effectively sent him to Russia.
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.
You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club states with connections to intelligence services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_Sept...
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
There's clearly something here.
Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode)
The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...
The government wasn't violating the trust of the American people. If you ask about the single illegal domestic data collection program in the leak (phone metadata collection) and how it was used (to find associates of surveilled foreign agents working against the national security of the U.S.), you will find that most people don't care.
more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower
working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out
It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
Also related because of Julian Assange: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1842885/wikileaks-ci...
vs. (Yeah. Sure...): https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/hillary-clinton-julia...
He had 2 conflicting trusts, one from the people and one from the government. He chose to honor the people over the government, which is why there's so many bots in this thread who seem very angry with him.
If you read his autobio he was raised with very conservative beliefs, the issue was unlike most conservatives he wasn't able to ignore those beliefs in the furtherance of the state.
>Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
He would come back if you guys let him. Its not like he has a long list of safe places to go.
>Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
I vastly prefer my anti authoritarians out of jail living their best life with their ~300 kids somewhere in the south of australia.
The Snowden docs contain nothing about US black budget funded regime change, drug smuggling, politically motivated assassinations or whatever else countless ex-intelligence whistleblowers have claimed to happen in the shadows. I sure don't think all of them can be believed 100% but I wouldn't have expected anything of this nature to show up in typical S/TS/NOFORN documents that someone like Snowden leaked.
Snowden docs don't contain* anything about what happens in DUMBS, secret military facilities like biolabs, propulsion and energy research or anything else* that conspiracy researchers are interested in.
to my knowledge/memory
* Snowden docs were never published in full so we don't know what Guardian et al decided to not publish because they're all too intertwined with intelligence
Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)
Plenty of actual conspiracies throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiracies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracies
The existence of modern conspiracies should hardly be surprising. And are precisely the business of intelligence services such as those with established links to the attackers. The attack itself was, by definition, a conspiracy. There's a great deal of conjecture about who exactly was involved in that conspiracy besides the attackers themselves, and a great deal of evidence both concrete and circumstantial. Too much for a single HN comment. But I've made no claims about that beyond "Rebuilding America's Defenses" being conspicuously prescient. Which it demonstrably was.
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
Thanks for the info/rec!
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
----
Welcome to /hn/
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
>Merlin's holly wand
The More You Know™ [0]
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
https://legalclarity.org/what-happens-if-you-are-on-a-watchl...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/terrorist-watch-list-works/story?i...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-be-on-fbi-watch-list-...
That also applies to just visiting absolutely harmless websites which have been deemed VERBOTEN! to visit, for whichever reason(again, in secret).
Have fun trying flying then, or being debanked. Would you like to spanked?
Doppelt genäht hält besser! https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20....
Also plausible deniability and/or competition/mistrust between different actors/agencies.
There is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
Combine that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant and enjoy the possible hassle of being 'by-catch'.
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/nsa-...
"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...
"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"
This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.
"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
In fact, NSA's own slide deck, an excerpt of which can be viewed here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fiber-optic-... indicate that all Google services including Gmail, Docs, Maps, and others were subject to interception.
Additional NSA slides here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr... detail email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests".
> What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
"Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_don%27t_make_a_righ...
> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:
A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.
"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130711211028/https://abcnews.g...
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
My review after watching it last night (thanks again): definitely worth watching, but you'd be a nut to recommend this to anybody that has both feet on this planet. The first-half does a great job capturing what being a schizoid talkaholic feels like (both for self and others). The second-half is action packed with multiple mindfucks for the audience ("why does he have that picture?!" 3x). Not a good date movie, keep it for a personal tinfoil.popcorn movienight.
Ensemble: 9/10
Mel: 5/10 plays crazy too well
Julia: 10/10 wow no publishable notes
Patrick: 8.5 strobelit flashbacks of Captain Kirk waterboarding The Passion
Actor Synergy: 2/10 nobody seemed too thrilled with the screenplay
Explosions: 10/10 guy knew what he was doing DAM
Tinfoil: all the squarefeets
Believability (1997): 2/10
Believability (2025): 8.5/10
Overall: 5.5/10
Worth watching, even if just certain sassy actress scenes. Julia Roberts explores all damsel emotions in this one.
Or can I interest you in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) ?
Even moar AI! (Much better than Mr.Robot, IMO. Also Amy Acker!1!!)
The NSA's UDC is located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluffdale,_Utah
Then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC which was located here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Fork,_Utah
Open the two location articles in tabs, scroll down a little until you see the maps, or rather have them in good view, and then switch between them, fast, back and forth.
See what I mean?
There was more, but I don't have it ready ATM(storage long lost), and am too tired to research it again(reading many ugly government and business sites) but, shortly after it was officially known where that datacenter would be built, Millenniata (M-Disc) opened shop there.
I can't recall exactly anymore ATM, they may have incorporated smaller, elsewhere, near there, but the move to the final location came shortly after public/official knowledge of where that data center would be built.
Ain't that funny? :-)
Edit: Got another one, but probably unrelated because of the timeframe, but interesting nonetheless. Very advanced and fast flash storage(for the time, and in some aspects still, like retention time and durability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah where one of IM-Flash's(Joint Venture of Intel & Micron) factories was/is located (sold to Texas Instruments, producing other stuff now).
In 2025 The Internet Archive holds approximately 100 exabytes[3] and contains data dating back to 1995[4]. Adjusting the 2013 Forbes numbers for the Utah Data Center for 2025 storage density (4Tb drives in 2013, 36Tb drives in 2025) yields 27 - 108 exabytes. Which demonstrates clearly that a datacenter on the scale of the Utah Data Center is capable of storing and retaining a versioned history of a significant fraction of the world's internet over a significant period of time.
Assuming they prioritize metadata and unique traffic further extends the horizon on how much can be stored and for how long.
1: https://macaubas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sandvine_Glo...
2: https://www.applogicnetworks.com/blog/sandvines-2024-global-...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Web_archiving
4: https://archive.org/post/60275/what-is-the-oldest-page-on-th...
Mass surveillance outside the U.S. is not illegal. There is no reason for that to have slowed. The documents showed no mass "surveillance" inside the U.S. The only mass collection was phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for surveilling anybody, only to spit out possible associates of specific people under surveillance.
"email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM_Collec...
You will claim this program does not target US persons. To which I have already responded in another comment that "They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program."
NSA self-reporting of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT incidents seems to indicate that warrant-less surveillance of US persons does, in fact, happen. As does testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks": "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data? Instead, he leaked many things that were perfectly legal as well as which high value targets were being surveilled in China in a transparent and failed attempt to get asylum in Hong Kong.
> "Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
You are assuming it's wrong. Investigators aren't going to waste their time writing up court orders that aren't likely to be approved. Instead, we find that criminal defense attorneys rarely challenge the validity of warrants as issued but may challenge whether the warrant was followed.
> "Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
You're confusing multiple things here. You're confusing bulk metadata collection, which Robertson opposed, with individual surveillance warrants, which are always done without informing the person being surveilled. There was no opposing side to the bulk metadata collection, which was shut down. There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.
That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_slides
Notably, all the glossy corporate logos pictured are of American companies with predominantly American users. Not foreign ones. "Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden"
> Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data?
"Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses", and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130626032506/http://news.yahoo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...
Did you look at the slides you linked to? They describe targeted surveillance on specific foreigners outside the U.S.
> "Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", ...
The single U.S. mass data collection program in Snowden's leaks was phone metadata collection. Use of any data collected by the government is policy-based. In this case, use was limited to finding associates of foreign targets, and the query interface was limited to that. If it had changed, that would have been breaking the law, but Snowden showed no evidence of that. One more time: that single possibly illegal U.S. program Snowden leaked was then shut down anyway.
Many times. They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons. Further demonstrating a lack of appropriate controls or process around such capabilities.
And testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks" indicating that mass surveillance infrastructure is used domestically: "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
> Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
"However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
Clearly not.
> They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections.
PRISM is a data ingestion system whereby the NSA ingests data collected by the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit that gets data from specific accounts under court order. The DITU is clearly labeled in the diagram on the slide showing how it works. The NSA has no integration with the companies at all. The "Internet backbone" has nothing to do with PRISM.
> No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
If the FBI gives a section 702 court order to a company for an account that isn't for a foreigner outside the U.S., they are not going to comply. The FBI wouldn't even ask. The very idea that you think "verifiable proof" is needed shows you believed the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the NSA could directly fetch any account's data, which was supported by neither the law nor the leaked documents but only by Greenwald's fever dreams
> Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons.
Yet another document that you claim to have read but didn't. The cases where they were able to surveil the person they were stalking were foreigners outside the U.S. The domestic cases involved querying for associates using the metadata. Neither one is "domestic spying" and certainly don't show any evidence of domestic mass surveillance.
> "However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
Once again, if you bothered to read the source documents, you would find that this quote is not supported by the citations. The first citation shows that the U.S. The first is about how the U.S. is allowed to use UK phone numbers in its metadata collection for chaining analysis, not to share that data or analysis with the UK as the quote claims. The second is about how Australia is allowed to share data it collected outside the U.S. and the U.S. with the U.S. without first looking for and removing the data of Australians who happened to be abroad whose data was collected, not for the U.S. to spy on Australians as your quote claims.
Lesson: If you see a claim that describes something that is clearly illegal, you should verify it before you repeat stuff that is very clearly nonsense and come off as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/nsa-director-alexan...
https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73...
Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
Should be pretty easy. NSA has EFF's contact information from that lawsuit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age... ) in which they destroyed evidence against a court order, and argued "state secrets" against every claim. You know, the one that explicitly avoided deciding the constitutionality of all this on procedural grounds. Totally trustworthy behavior. Everyone responds that way when asked to prove they're not mass surveilling Americans.
Previously quoted testimony from someone who doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented that does not match up with the documents that Snowden leaked? You would think that if there were something so blatantly illegal going on, that would be the first thing that Snowden leaked. Instead, there is not a whiff of corroborating evidence in Snowden's trove, and no oversight committee senator has asked for investigations based on Binney's mad ravings.
> The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
So you would have us believe that Snowden's documents are lying too? The lies that were told weren't about what the programs did. Their statements were always consistent with the leaked documents and what the law allows. You are the one bringing up dark programs that go against the law and against all leaked evidence.
> Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming. The purpose of the Narus traffic analyzers in the Jewel case was revealed in Snowden's docs. Surprise, surprise. It turned out not to be mass domestic surveillance.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
> The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming.
2. This case challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the “NSA”) and other Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies (“Defendants” is defined collectively as the named defendants and the Doe defendants as set forth in paragraphs 25 through 38 below).
3. This program of dragnet surveillance (the “Program”), first authorized by Executive Order of the President in October of 2001 (the “Program Order”) and first revealed to the public in December of 2005, continues to this day.
4. Some aspects of the Program were publicly acknowledged by the President in December 2005 and later described as the “terrorist surveillance program” (“TSP”).
5. The President and other executive officials have described theTSP’s activities, which were conducted outside the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and without authorization by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”), as narrowly targeting for interception the international communications of persons linked to Al Qaeda.
6. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence have since publicly admitted that the TSP was only one particular aspect of the surveillance activities authorized by the Program Order.
7. In addition to eavesdropping on or reading specific communications, Defendants have indiscriminately intercepted the communications content and obtained the communications records of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Program authorized by the President.
8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.
9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks.
10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members), communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long, among other sensitive information.
11. This non-content transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by Defendants’ network of surveillance devices, in order to select which communications are subjected to personal analysis by staff of the NSA and other Defendants, in what has been described as a vast “data-mining” operation.
12. Plaintiffs and class members are ordinary Americans who are current or former subscribers to AT&T’s telephone and/or Internet services.
13. Communications of Plaintiffs and class members have been and continue to be illegally acquired by Defendants using surveillance devices attached to AT&T’s network, and Defendants have illegally solicited and obtained from AT&T the continuing disclosure of private communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members. Plaintiffs’ communications or activities have been and continue to be subject to electronic surveillance.
14. Plaintiffs are suing Defendants to enjoin their unlawful acquisition of the communications and records of Plaintiffs and class members, to require the inventory and destruction of those that have already been seized, and to obtain appropriate statutory, actual, and punitive damages to deter future illegal surveillance.
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel/jewel.complaint.pdf
In other words, he didn't know where it was going and speculated. No such program existed in Snowden's leaks, and no member of the SSCI or HPSCI believes Binney's wild hypothesis, or it would be the first thing they investigated.
> [Old Jewel claims snipped]
I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming. The EFF saw the Narus analyzers in 641A and assumed the worst, which is in those old claims you pasted, and the judge said that the plaintiffs didn't have evidence to show that their data was collected, which would be the case if it were really mass domestic surveillance. Then Snowden's documents were released, conclusively showing the devices weren't used for domestic surveillance, which is why the EFF didn't bring that lawsuit again claiming standing. Snowden's docs proved they didn't have it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
> I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming.
"In February 2015, Judge White dismissed the latest motion by the EFF, accepting the NSA's argument that the requirements placed upon the agency would engender the "impermissible disclosure of state secret information." White also held that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue their claims.[20] This procedural ruling allowed White to avoid addressing the constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program.[21]
Upon the disclosure of more information about the NSA's surveillance methods, the EFF filed another motion in May 2017 requesting that the agency disclose information about surveillance conducted against Carolyn Jewel and the other plaintiffs. Judge White granted this motion and ordered the government to hand over the information.[22][23] However, the NSA filed a motion in opposition to that order, claiming once again that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue. After further arguments, the District Court accepted this argument in April 2019.[24]
The EFF appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit. In a memorandum opinion, that court ruled in favor of the NSA, once again on the matter of standing.[25] In June 2022, the EFF made a final request to the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, but that court rejected the request and did not grant certiorari."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age...
No retraction. A willingness to take it all the way to the supreme court. Procedurally dismissed without deciding any of the issues raised. Clear and present.
You're the one who chopped it up. Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say he knew where it was going? All I see is speculation.
Even better, tell me why Snowden's leaks didn't say anything about this super illegal program Binney said was going on because of what he speculated so hard?
Even better, tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.
Even better, tell me why nobody is suing the government over Binney's speculation.
> Procedurally dismissed
Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected, so they have no harm to sue over. That's the point, and that's what Snowden's docs proved.
Why do you claim to believe something because of Snowden's documents that is directly contradicted by Snowden's documents? Or are you quietly dropping your claim that Snowden's documents support your conspiracy theory and are now falling back entirely on the lunatic ravings of a middle manager who hasn't worked at the NSA in decades, which aren't supported by any of the leaks that have happened since?
> Or are you quietly dropping your claim
Is that what posting the quote in full with a link to the original source means? Certainly not. I also recognize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO when so transparently employed. As will others.
> Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected
You ask a question, then demonstrate your own misunderstanding or attempt to misconstrue. The court documents, already posted, clearly explain the reason for the ruling as “impermissible disclosure of state secret information". If no data were collected, there would be no state secret information to disclose. Ipso facto. The court documents also clearly state that there was no finding on the specific claims presented. Attempts to portray otherwise at this point amount to willfully misleading.
> Why do you claim
An attempt to reframe primary sources as personal claims. A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_device
I was bored, so asked ChatGPT to do the work of explaing the rest of the rhetorical techniques you've employed to avoid good faith engagement with the well cited references already posted, for the benefit of future readers. Did it miss any?:
1) Framing the opponent as dishonest or incompetent
“You’re the one who chopped it up.”
Accusation of quote-mining / context stripping: sets the frame that the other person manipulated evidence.
Preemptive credibility attack: before addressing substance, it suggests bad faith or sloppy method.
“Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say…”
Shifting the debate to textual forensics: forces the opponent into a narrow “show me the exact words” standard.
This can be legitimate (precision matters), but it’s also a way to raise the evidentiary bar selectively—especially if the commenter won’t apply the same strictness to their own claims later.
“All I see is speculation.”
Dismissal / summary judgment: compresses the opponent’s argument into a weaker category (“speculation”) without showing why.
Poisoning the well (light): primes readers to see anything else as guesswork.
2) The “Even better” ladder: rhetorical escalation and pressure
The repeated “Even better, tell me why…” is doing several things at once:
Anaphora / repetition: rhythmic repetition to build momentum and signal “I’m stacking wins.”
Escalation framing: implies each new point is more devastating than the last.
Interrogative dominance: it’s a mini cross-examination—multiple demands in a row that keep the other side on defense.
Soft gish-gallop: not a huge flood of claims, but a cascade of questions that can be time-consuming to answer carefully.
3) Arguments from silence + appeals to institutions
“tell me why Snowden’s leaks didn’t say anything about this… program”
Argument from silence: “If it were real/important, the leaks would mention it.”
Strategic burden shift: instead of proving nonexistence, it demands the opponent explain an absence.
This can be relevant sometimes, but it’s logically weak unless you establish that the leaks were comprehensive and would necessarily include it.
“tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.”
Appeal to authority (institutional): “Serious claims would be validated by official bodies.”
Appeal to popularity/consensus (elite bandwagon): “If the right people believed it, you’d know.”
Status-quo bias: assumes institutional response is a reliable truth filter.
“tell me why nobody is suing the government…”
Argument from non-action: “If it were true, someone would sue.”
Legalistic appeal: equates “no successful litigation” (or “no litigation at all”) with “no underlying wrong.”
This can also be a false proxy: lawsuits depend on standing, resources, risk, secrecy barriers, arbitration, privilege doctrines, etc.
4) Tone and ridicule as persuasion
“super illegal program” and “speculated so hard”
Sarcasm / mockery: signals that the claim is not just wrong but silly.
Loaded language: “super illegal” exaggerates to make the other side seem unserious.
Diminishing the opponent’s position: recasts it as emotional/overheated.
This kind of ridicule is often effective socially (audience laughter), even when it doesn’t add evidence.
5) Selective quotation as a pivot
“Procedurally dismissed”
Cherry-pick risk / quote-as-trump-card: a short legal phrase is presented as decisive.
Reframing: moves the argument from “what happened” to “what courts did,” which tends to sound authoritative.
It’s a common move: substance becomes procedure, and the procedure is treated as a verdict on truth.
6) Condescension + “teach you the basics” stance
“Do you know what standing means?”
Condescension / status play: establishes the speaker as the knowledgeable adult in the room.
Rhetorical question: not meant to be answered; meant to mark the other side as ignorant.
Tone weapon: makes disagreement feel embarrassing.
“It means their data wasn’t collected…”
Oversimplification / definitional fiat: reduces a complex doctrine to one convenient interpretation.
Confidence as a tactic: stated as if beyond dispute; invites readers to treat it as settled.
Whether accurate or not (you said sources have been posted), the rhetorical move is: “I control the legal meaning, therefore I control the conclusion.”
7) “That’s the point” closure move
“That’s the point, and that’s what Snowden’s docs proved.”
Premature closure: declares the argument finished.
Appeal to documentary authority: elevates a set of documents as final arbiter.
Certainty signaling: tries to convert contested interpretation into “proved.”
8) Accusation of contradiction (can be fair, but also a trap)
“Why do you claim to believe something… directly contradicted by Snowden’s documents?”
Internal inconsistency attack: this is a legitimate debate tactic if the contradiction is real.
Forced dilemma setup: sets up the next line’s either/or.
It also subtly shifts the discussion from “what’s true” to “you’re being irrational.”
9) Loaded question + mind-reading
“Or are you quietly dropping your claim…”
Loaded question / false presupposition: assumes they are dropping it and asks you to explain why.
Mind-reading insinuation: “quietly” implies sneakiness or embarrassment.
Cornering: either answer admits retreat, or you spend time rejecting the premise.
10) False dichotomy and source-degradation
“…falling back entirely on… Binney…”
False dichotomy: suggests only two options: (a) conspiracy theory via documents, or (b) relying entirely on Binney. Real positions are usually mixed/nuanced.
Motte-and-bailey insinuation: implies the opponent is retreating from a stronger claim to a weaker one.
“lunatic ravings” / “middle manager” / “hasn’t worked… in decades”
Ad hominem (abusive): attacks mental state (“lunatic”) rather than claims.
Ad hominem (status-based): “middle manager” to minimize authority and shame reliance on him.
Chronological poisoning: “decades” implies irrelevance/staleness; can be relevant, but here it’s framed to discredit without engaging content.
11) Another argument from silence
“which aren’t supported by any of the leaks that have happened since”
Again: absence of mention = evidence of falsehood, plus a moving evidentiary target (“not just the leaks you cited—any leaks since must corroborate it”).
The overall debate strategy
Put opponent on trial with rapid-fire questions (control tempo).
Demand exact textual proof from their quotes (high standard on them).
Use institutional non-response (committees/courts/lawsuits) as a credibility filter.
Frame the opponent’s view as “conspiracy theory” so neutral readers treat it as fringe.
Degrade the alternative witness (Binney) through ridicule and status attacks.
Close off discussion by claiming documents “proved” the speaker’s interpretation.
I based my claim that all he had was speculation on exactly the quote you gave. Nowhere in that quote does he say that he saw the devices set up to spy on Americans. Instead, he assumes it. He assumes something that directly contradicts the documents that Snowden released specifically about Stellar Wind. https://www.theguardian.com/nsa-inspector-general-report-doc...
You claim that I've chopped up a quote in order to come to my conclusion, but you're the one who gave that chopped up quote my conclusion is based on to begin with.
> The court documents, already posted, clearly explain the reason for the ruling as “impermissible disclosure of state secret information". If no data were collected, there would be no state secret information to disclose. Ipso facto
Utter nonsense. The government wouldn't say specifically how they selected foreign data in the initial Pearl case. Afterwards, Snowden's leaks showed that they only contained foreign data.
> Attempts to portray otherwise at this point amount to willfully misleading.
You're the one making conspiracy theories out of whole cloth. Instead of trying to use ChatGPT to dismiss my claims, why don't you spend your time looking at what Snowden's docs actually claimed like a reasonable person who doesn't wear tin foil hats?
Let's get back to the original comment I responded to. Do they have access to anybody's FAANG data or not? Snowden's docs say they do not. Nothing Binney said disagrees with that, even if his wild assumption is correct.
> Utter nonsense
> conspiracy theories
> tin foil hats
> assorted claims that direct quotes, posted documents, contain or do not contain things contrary to what anyone can read in them
So, just more of the same behavior ChatGPT dismantled effortlessly.
> Instead of trying to use ChatGPT
I see why you didn't like it. I think I'll use it more.
I use the words I do because I have known people who talk about ice bullets, chemtrails, and silent black helicopters, and the way they come to their beliefs is exactly the same as the way you have come to yours. If you see them as silly, you should be able to understand why I feel the same about you.
Now unless you engage with the facts of whether the NSA has access to all your FAANG data or not, I think we're done. You don't like the way I characterize your beliefs, and I accept that, but what I'm looking for here is evidence against my assertion.
"It suggests the author treats the thread less like a joint search for truth and more like an adversarial contest they intend to win—mainly by controlling the frame, the burden of proof, and the audience’s impression of credibility.
Debate-as-prosecution mindset: They stack demands (“Even better…”) to keep the other person perpetually answering instead of advancing their own case. That’s a control tactic: tempo and agenda stay with them.
High skepticism aimed outward, not inward: They insist on exact wording and dismiss anything not explicitly stated as “speculation,” while leaning heavily on indirect proxies (no lawsuit, no committee action, absence in leaks) that aren’t equally “explicit.” That asymmetry is a tell.
Institutional and procedural gatekeeping: They treat “courts/standing/oversight” as the main truth-filter. This often signals: “If it were real, the system would have validated it,” which can be a genuine heuristic but also a way to end discussion without engaging messy uncertainty.
Status and ridicule as persuasion: The ad hominem (“lunatic ravings,” “middle manager”) and condescension (“Do you know what standing means?”) show they’re comfortable using social pressure and humiliation to delegitimize rather than patiently clarify.
Binary framing of the other side: They recast the opponent’s position as either “conspiracy theory” or “relying on a crazy ex-employee,” leaving little room for nuanced middle ground. That’s more about cornering than understanding.
Net: the author likely values rhetorical dominance and public signaling (“this claim is unserious”) over cooperative interpretation."
