This is so important. Thanks for reviving this, and all the other work that you do!!

The "Snowden Docs" were just a wget --mirror of the internal wiki. So there was a lot of cruft in there.

Greenwald just wanted to make a bigger name out of himself (and he's made bank on that) by claiming there was "millions" of documents. When only a tiny selection were of any usability to publish.

“The Media” is a bunch of diaper wearing cowards that capitulate to the feds. Plain and simple.

It was a mistake to flee the US and a bigger mistake to never return.

He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.

I wish I had the Millennium Falcon to fly off this fucking planet.

"When you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts

I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.

Nobody cares. Or too stupid. Even genius here.

The weird part is that an archive can be technically “public” and still disappear from ordinary reach. Makes me wonder how many other important collections have quietly fallen off the map.

In 2026 these kind of articles must be a bait to receive the latest pegasus-style payload on your honeypot devices.

No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.

With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.

Snowden was a false flag, a very craftily engineered one, however valuable prima facie, and a distractor, carefully timed, from things a lot more sinister.

I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.

Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.

What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?

> maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence

For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.

We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".

The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.

This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".

Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.

Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.

Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?

As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.

I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.

If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.

This article (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/why-ame...) is basically canonical for things wrong with the media and it was written in 96.

More like died around 1920, if it was ever alive.

The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.

I deeply hate Noam Chomsky for his hypocrisy, but his 80's analysis that the press as a business can't do its job is profoundly right. It got much worse since then.

> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.

There's a difference between caring about NS, and letting the government dictate how to do so.

> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.

They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since. I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though

I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.

His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!

I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.

People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.

You are correct of course.

Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).

Maybe Americans will rid of both of them...

Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.

But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.

Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.

It's a figure of speech. It's short for "care enough to to take action."

It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.

He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.

Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.

It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.

There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.

Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.

This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.

This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.

GP is implying that Russia is his canonical home because Snowden was acting like a spy

Both.

The first part because the second part.

> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?

If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?

You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.

He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.

A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.

I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.

Not wanting to be subjected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... doesn't unmake someone a hero

The level of desensitisation…

that's an interesting perspective thanks for sharing

As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.

Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.

Of course it can. Just not without the user's knowledge and consent. Let the user load your CA and you can cache and repeat whatever you want.

In practice, those caches were all done for malicious purposes, usually for injecting ads and selling tracking information through injected headers.

Those shared caches were monitored just as strongly, if not stronger, by the people doing internet surveillance.

Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.

What???

The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.

Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.

Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.

He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.

Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.

I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.

Neither of those are theories. Both are well documented and have had public hearings and governmental disclosure.

What? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.

His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.

He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/461578-snowden-ultimate-go...

Snowden did not take refuge in Russia. He was trapped there when his passport was cancelled by the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...

Was that the first time a journalist was assassinated?

I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.

I like that terminology.

I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.

History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.

... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.

Very generous indeed.

far-right lunatic? do you have a source for this or an example

I read his substack, he seems to be critical of the US security state and not inline with alt-right principles at all

It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.

But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:

* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.

* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.

https://masternotions.com

> I am still a citizen and so was he.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Wasn’t he departing from Hong Kong to Ecuador and was stuck in Russia because his passport was revoked in transit?

I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.

> If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.

"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"

Hence established! ^

> it changed absolutely nothing.

The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.

> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.

The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.

dont confuse 'anti right' with 'left'.

There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.

It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.

You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.

Or maybe he just realized that politics is just one big club and he ain't in it. And neither are the people.

His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.

You're clutching your pearls far too hard.

> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)

It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.

The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.

The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".

> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.

The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.

> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)

And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.

He wasn’t being abused.

I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.

He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.

A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.

The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.

I mean about the historiography, and your personal verdict on whether those systems were active, based on the evidence Snowden provided.

A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.

Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."

Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.

He could have returned to the US. His citizenship wasn’t revoked.

You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.

> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections

Have you seen the midterms polling?

> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.

People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.

here's a bogeyman for you, accepting money in a representative democracy for political action is maybe mere nanometers from the definition of bribery.

Perhaps a bit ahistorical, but I'm put in mind of the quote "Not even Masada began as a suicide attempt."

Interesting times indeed.

The Intercept later also leaked Reality Winner's identity, so that sounds plausible.

Greenwald was probably blackmailed with something worse than the foot video he posted.

I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.

> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.

The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.

> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.

Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.

Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.

Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.

Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.

>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.

The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.

Hanlon's Razor is the domain of fiction authors. It sounds sophisticated but has no basis in reality.

> "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?

He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.

You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.

I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.

The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.

If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..

.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...

So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.

NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.

Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.

As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...

> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request

Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.

> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?

Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.

The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.

If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.

Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?

At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?

Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.

Here is him ranting about how destructive "peak wokeness" is because apparently we need to save black people from each other, not from white people or the cops: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...

Conservative enough for you?

Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.

By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.

I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments with force.' That certainly doesn't seem to be the case with RFK, to say the least.

Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]

The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.

[1] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm

[2] - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....

Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.

Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

> It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.

I wholeheartedly disagree :)

If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...

                 Don't be there
     I am here → Don't be seen
                 Don't be acquired
  You are here → Don't be hit
                 Don't be penetrated
                 Don't be killed

One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lol

if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?

and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?

i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.

  - you visited Wikipedia
  - you edited Wikipedia
  - what you wrote on Wikipedia

  - you visited Wikipedia

Doesn't encrypted DNS make a lot of that metadata moot ?

And of course the additional options available

> He could have used whistleblower routes

Against... the NSA. Do you genuinely believe that anyone could leak that amount of NSA data anonymously?

RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.

Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.

He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.

Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.

RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.

Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).

>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.

You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.

> Your interpretation of his words is lacking.

I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/05/11/2013-edwa...

> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.

Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.

> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.

As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.

He's now spent years and is looking at spending the rest of his life in Russia.

It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...

I too ran Squid. It was more annoying than not (except for images, where I do think it was quite useful)

It seem you concede the point about survivability though?

Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.

> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.

And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.

I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.

Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness

Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.

He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.

He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.

It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.

Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be close, even though it shouldn't be.

The Overton window should be smashed to pieces.

The consistent through-line of Greenwald's journalism from the Bush era through to the Trump era is an anti-u.s pro Russia narrative.

  > I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.

The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.

Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.

It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.

That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.

> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.

Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.

Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016

The lesson in all this? Stay in school.

Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...

There isn’t one under the law so no.

Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.

He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow

I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For instance no less than Einstein rejected, to his death, a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

All of those famous quotes like 'God does not play dice' or 'Spooky action at a distance' were mocking and sardonic swipes at alternative views, alternative views which were overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and ones that eventually we came to hold as most correct. He simply believed that the universe must be deterministic and rational.

And I don't think he did anything wrong there. The quotes were sardonic, but he genuinely engaged in good faith against different views - even if it would probably have been impossible to sway him from his own. And that's okay - people can see the world in different ways. And while evidence must be weighted, it need not dictate one's views.

There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.

He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)

Mearsheimer is weird. His book "Israel lobby and US foreign policy" is outstanding. But when he speaks about many other things it feels like he's improvising all the time.

Well when Trump pardons him, he'll come back. Trump won't pardon him, because Trump supports deep state mass surveillance.

In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:

* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]

* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.

* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.

* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.

* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.

This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...

Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?

That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.

>the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.

To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.

For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.

He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question

Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left

Centrist Dems are more supportive, as are the (sizable) segment of socialists who understand history

Left libertarians are broadly supportive of free speech

As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."

Half of university graduates in India and China are women now. The percentage is higher in GCC nations.

Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.

If a person does an illegal thing, that cancels out the illegal things other people did.

It wasn't odd at all the list of places he could flee to was very limited because of his job.

It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.

What do you think about Palestine?

> he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report

He didn't, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782465

we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other

According to the other side.

the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th... 'What the United States Did in Indonesia', The Atlantic

>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges

He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy

> Assange didn't commit a crime

Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is

I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.

What about leaking secrets of the United States has anything to do with morals? He might as well been a foreign adversary

We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal

My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.

The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.

Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.

So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.

This is similar to how many on the left don’t believe that “hate speech” restrictions should apply to speech against whites. This is the problem with laws that apply to the realm of speech and ideas; it is a very small step towards abuse that undermines equal treatment under the law, the free exchange of information, and the democratic process.

Both major US factions like to use selective enforcement and/or targeted taxation or regulation to attack their political rivals, while wrapping their actions in flowery language. This is a longstanding tradition here. If you don’t see it, I urge you to take a closer look and shed your bias.

Edit: I’ll add that this selective application is probably what creates the illusion of a change in values. In reality, it’s two tribes jockeying for power using whatever tools happen to be in front of them; naturally, the available tools shift over time. The ideological justification for a particular position or action is created after the fact.

>Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.”

It seems like you are very close to getting it, so maybe spend some time brainstorming on possible reasons why Republican politicians say "terrible... awful things" much more frequently than Democratic politicians. There's probably some other explanation there outside one side simply enjoying subtlety more than the other for no particular reason.

Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.

It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.

Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.

Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.

It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.

A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.

There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.