Not everyone thinks exactly the same way you do. Believe it or not, outside message boards like this, there are a lot of people that don't care about NSA surveillance of US Internet traffic at all, and care a lot more about Islamic terrorism (to be clear: I am not one of those people).
John Oliver made a humorous analogy during his brief interview with Snowden.
When John Oliver framed the government domestic surveillance program as having the capability to intercept, store, and review your nude images (being sent to your partner, for example), it really made people upset.
However, when he framed it as being able to siphon all communications en masse, people essentially got the glazed-over look and stopped caring.
When presented with the fact that all that "nude image grabbery" and violations of personal privacy and freedoms has only resulted in a single "terrorist plot" being thwarted (that guy who gave money to a terrorist group and was promptly arrested)... people get very upset because the result certainly does not justify the cost.
It comes down to an understanding issue (or lack-thereof). Technical details bore most people, which makes them not care.
Another good analogy is the German Secret Police steaming open all letters, reviewing the contents, then re-sealing them and putting back into the mail stream. People think that's egregious, and that it would never happen in the US. But it clearly is...
These are certainly issues that majority of Americans are going to deeply care about - the trouble we have is how to communicate it in such a way as-to boil down and condense years of technical understanding in just a few words.
Care to elaborate? Or just make snide comments without any factual content.
By definition, Snowden is a Whistle-Blower.[1][2][3][4]
Fact checks of Snowden's claims have largely been found to be very accurate.[5][6]
[1] http://whistleblower.org/what-whistleblower
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower
[3] http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Enforcement/whistleblowers.htm
[4] http://www.whistleblowers.gov/
[5] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/09/...
[6] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...
Yes, US foreign relations were damaged as part of the release - but how can anyone claim it's OK to subvert US companies efforts to do business in good faith with foreign customers? Or to wire-tap our closest allies? What about the fallout in pursuit of Snowden where US government officials technically invaded the sovereign nation of Bolivia (the Bolivian President's plane)?
Bringing it home, how is it OK to wire-tap our own elected officials? Or the entire city of Salt Lake? Parallel construction which put people in prison without a fair trail? Purposefully weakening or subverting security protections for every citizen?
Yes, it stung. However it was necessary, and absolutely in the public's best interest. These surveillance programs are very much out of control and scope. There is no sane argument to the contrary.
You are making the argument that Snowden should have done nothing, when in fact that is the least moral thing to do in that situation.
The US is not some how "weaker" because of Snowden - it's weaker because of it's flagrant disrespect to all other nations in the world, especially our allies.
I never made such an argument. In fact, I have repeatedly stated what I think he should have done - reveal information about some obviously unconstitutional domestic surveillance - there's obviously no shortage of choices there.
Whether the US is weaker or stronger does not have anything to do with the question of whether Snowden broke the law. It might affect the judgment about whether he was justified in breaking the law, but that's something for the judge to decide during sentencing, or the president to decide when pardoning him. It's not an excuse for refusing to stand trial.
He has stated many times he will come back and stand trial, so long as it's a fair public trial in civilian courts (because he was/is a civilian).
The US Gov't is unwilling to provide this more fair trial.
And the issue isn't that some evidence is classified, but that all evidence Snowden would want to present is classified. Even his motivation is based on works that are claimed to be classified.
If Snowden can't present a single piece of evidence in his defense that isn't classified, I don't think he's got much of a case. Last I checked, the constitution isn't classified.
You can't have a fair trial where 99% of the evidence is not allowed to be submitted.
The US has Whistle-Blower laws for a reason, yet the US Government is not allowing them to cover his case.
Until a guarantee of a free trial, he has stated he'll remain where he's at. And that's entirely reasonable.
Which the US Government is not allowing. We've looped back to the beginning here... and you still don't understand, don't accept, or don't know the entire narrative.
Snowden did not have the option of leaking one or two things, then poring over data and leaking a few more. He had one shot to grab as much evidence as possible and flee the country. Given those constraints, I think his behavior was appropriate.
What is really to blame here is a system that made Snowden's method of revealing this data the best choice if you want to minimize your own chances of being tortured. Everyone who worked to ensure that complaints and dissatisfaction with mass surveillance were treated as traitors even before the Snowden leaks.
"Sure, I support valid whistle-blowers, but what Snowden did ..."
It's a simple way to show that to be hypocritical authoritarianism rather than valid criticism when they don't make the connection.
EDIT: It's victim blaming.
Then blame your (government's) employees who left Snowden with no choice but to leak.
They essentially entangled classified data (their job) with unclassified data (the facts of their fraud).
Is breaking an unethical law ethical? I believe so. The same reason a solider is taught/told (although they usually do not in reality) to disobey an illegal order.
Snowden could have just been a whistleblower. But in addition to revealing all the info about the NSA's spying tactics, he traded additional info to various nation-states in order to secure his personal safe passage. Thereby putting USA operatives abroad at risk in order to protect himself.
The stupid part is that I don't know if that is actually the case, but I wasn't able to counter this argument when I heard it.
"The home of Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the NSA, was searched, his passport was cancelled and he lived under the threat of 35 years imprisonment for four years, prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He lost his job, his pension and spent everything he owned on his defense lawyer. Today he works at an Apple store in Maryland and has been able to establish that the only person, who was investigated and prosecuted, after trying to talk to his superiors about the mass surveillance, was himself."
The whistleblower laws in place a) wouldn't have applied to him, since he was a contractor, and b) are a trap anyway, since whistleblowers end up getting prosecuted, regardless of the laws. Snowden's only other possible course of action was to do nothing.
Also, if we did put his back to a wall it'd be our fault.
The deal is, give up your freedom, in exchange for having masters. Still a reasonable deal for most people.
Except this is a theoretical argument that doesn't hold much weight to normal people in the real world. How does mass surveillance today harm Joe Six Pack who lives a modest middle class life in Cleveland, Ohio? It doesn't.
Even the directors cut is only part of the picture and even if you are privy to the fact that there is a story book on which the movie is based, you'll find that it is out of print and the TPPA has prevented it from being published for another 125 years.
Like what?
If the journalists released "intelligence secrets that had nothing directly to do with the surveillance of Americans" (it's not clear to me that they did, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief here) isn't that on them, not Snowden?
1) Do you expect a single person to go through 1000's of documents with their rudimentary understandings and interpretations of the law? Would you and why would you trust him if so?
2) Should he have a lawyer go through the documents with him?
3) Should he get second opinions on whether or not something is breaking the law?
4) Should he trust a team of respected journalists and their team of lawyers to go through the documents on his behalf?
The journalists he released the documents to have trust that they've established for years. That makes them hard to dismiss as looney bins. Snowden does not have that trust and would have been easy to dismiss by himself.
But - yes, he chose to release that material. If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people, that's still part of a chain of events that leads to him and his decision.
I'm glad he did what he did, and so far things seem to have gone ok, and I can't imagine the stress and pressure he's under.
You either blow the whistle or remain silent. Choosing to not release the material would mean he's compliant, and not a whistle blower. Which - given the details that have come to light - I judge the compliance of the individuals impeding on my rights to privacy far harsher than I judge Snowden as a whistle blower.
>If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people
Do you think Snowden or the journalist team are more or less likely to release something irresponsibly that would lead to the deaths of people? My bets are on Snowden; had he acted alone.
Simply because as an individual he is less capable of citing/knowing which laws what is breaking, what should be released and shouldn't be released (he would have to make that call himself, rather than discussing it among others), how details may be interpreted by the public, dangers of releasing certain information, etc. I believe it would be inevitable for him to fuck up had he acted alone.
Your argument boils down to "he shouldn't have blown the whistle" and I cannot agree with that. At all.
You're simplifying it too much. I think he did the right thing, but took some big risks of varying kinds, too. That's part of what makes someone a 'hero' isn't it? Pressing forward in the face of uncertainty and danger.
I was just arguing with the "it's all on the journalists if something goes awry" line.
Blowing the whistle comes with inherent risk. He did everything within his power to minimize that risk and act responsibly.
E:
I see I'm arguing a statement ever-so-slightly out of your original context (read your edit). So disregard this as a tangent discussion. :) Cheers.
If he had taken steps to minimize the leak but missed stuff, there would be a reasonable argument here. But he leaked things that pretty clearly didn't document misconduct, but was damaging to the NSA, and a casual skim of that stuff could have ruled out its publication.
Sometimes you leak with the situation you have, not the situation you'd want or wish to have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.
By pretty much everyone's admission, Snowden relied on Greenwald and others to minimize the leak, and that's what they've done: only a fraction of the documents he took have been published. At first blush, that sounds admirable, but when you think about this for a second, the implication is that people like Greenwald are now in possession of a huge collection of documents that aren't in the public interest (if they were, Greenwald's obligation would be to publish them!).
To the extent he amassed and shared with journalists the type of information you're talking about, Snowden has previously stated that he felt he needed to prove to journalists that he was an authentic source.
Your claim certainly still applies in the form of "he didn't need to do that" or "he didn't need that much material to establish bona fides" or even "he's lying" but to my knowledge, he didn't release damaging information himself.
Snowden did leak information to journalists who then decided to report on it, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that Snowden should have assumed journalists would be inclined to report on damaging information that didn't reflect misconduct. Snowden may also have made different assumptions than you do about what constitutes misconduct.
By every account of the people who know, Snowden read and understood every single document he leaked.
Personally, guns bother me a lot more than SIGINT implants.
1) reduces the value of US hardware on the international market, as businesses want to use equipment without backdoors installed by foreign intelligence services
2) pits the intelligence community against large portions of the tech sector, who because of market pressure will be forced to consider such activity a security threat
3) obliderates any moral high ground from which to stand on to condemn foreign intelligence services for doing the exact same thing, e.g.the State department's hypocritical efforts to condemn the Chinese for various forms of espionage in which the NSA apparently routinely engages
I don't see what's so complicated about that.
> Read everything
Well...
That's false.
>immense value for society of it
The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant. You could argue that he did more good than bad, and I might even agree; but doing more good than bad doesn't make someone a hero.
the data-mining program that slurps up e-mail and phone data of American citizens
>Even if some published documents were harmful to US government, it is not Snowden who published them.
He gave them to journalists that published them. How is it not his fault?
"The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant."
The article, as some groups do, tries to turn people from thinking and talking about the important things such as the big brother surveillance and questioning government to various irrelevant issues, such as "isn't he a traitor". They try to mislead your attention astray. Don't let them; think for yourself.
You said "slandering". That generally implies untruth, but the only thing you've really pointed to is non proportionality, which is kind of weird (does every article need to include every single fact at all relevant to the case? Presumably not, but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?)
"but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?" I call the article disproportionate, misleading and low-quality based on reading it and remembering other accounts of things.
I'm much more ambivalent about the wikileaks cables leak, because that truly was a massive data dump, much of which was not exposing any wrongdoing, just private conversations.
Perhaps you meant something different, but that's not how your comment reads.
The issues that upset Americans is going to be the domestic surveillance programs.
I'm not demanding that you agree with me, but I would push back on the idea that my argument is unreasonable.
I have conservative friends and I have an-cap friends and friends at many points in between. The an-caps oppose all espionage by any state anywhere; the conservatives think disclosure of any spying by the USG is treason. Not everyone agrees about this stuff.
This thread is rooted in a comment that expresses surprise that there are Americans that oppose what Snowden did. Well, there are a lot of Americans who oppose it, for a bunch of different reasons. So: be less surprised.
Neoconservatives, anyway. Conservatives as classical liberals, as well as paleocons, would largely align with the anti-surveillance side.
I didn't mean to imply that you had the "wrong" political view or even one that I disagreed with. It just struck me as internally inconsistent given the (apparently wrong) assumptions I'd made about your perspective from other comments on the topic over the past few years.
And of course I'm not surprised that there are lots of Americans who oppose what Snowden did, but as someone who tends to pay attention to your comments, I was surprised by one of the reasons you seemed to.
These threads tend to get batty very quickly. Let me lay this out a bit:
* I think NSA (and, to a much greater extent, GCHQ) are culpable for a huge amount of misconduct, much of it revealed by Snowden.
* I'm glad the Snowden documents that illuminated clear misconduct, such as GCHQ cable tapping of Google in the UK, or US collection of cell phone metadata, were published.
* I do not generally believe that people in the NSA randomly listen to foreign communications for kicks, nor do I believe for a second that they do things like surveil presidential candidates, despite what Snowden has implied. Not because people in the NSA are good or righteous or principled, but simply because nobody has the time to do that
* I believe NSA foreign collection generally happens for reasons that most people in the US support - tracking terrorist networks and counterproliferation.
* I believe the balance of NSA foreign collections operations happen for reasons that I don't like, but that are pro-forma "legitimate" and part of the competition that occurs between all countries. For instance: to the extent that NSA is monitoring the state depts/foreign offices of other countries: I'm not a fan of that, but I'm not outraged by it.
* I believe NSA cuts a whole lot of corners in pursuing those goals, especially post-9/11.
* I do have a problem with corner-cutting, and I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was listening to, say, German telephone communications for sport, or, like France, monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry, leaks illustrating that would be in the public interest.
Given this rough sketch of my worldview, it does not seem reasonable to me for the public to have a line-item veto over all the foreign SIGINT conducted by the USG. That notion seems equivalent to simply not doing SIGINT at all, which to me does not seem realistic or productive.
Your comment left the why part of my question a little ambiguous, but I'm assuming from your response that it's a combination of because everyone else is doing it, the US sort of has to in order to remain competitive because everyone else is doing it, because it's not prohibited, and because it's not in the public interest (assuming you mean US public's interest here).
I wanted to apologize for mincing your words a bit upthread - this comment makes more clear the distinctions you draw around misconduct, "legitimate" / de facto practices, and what's in the public interest.
Thanks again!
> I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was [...] monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry
Then this might interest you:
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...
Snowden watched what happened to Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and knew that the suggested whistleblowing path was a trap. Journalists were the second to last resort (the last being the wikileaks approach). The outcomes are evident. He was right. There is/was a problem and courts and commentators worldwide acknowledge that. Hell, even Obama acknowledged there were problems.
And on your last point: it turns out non-Americans have human rights too, something that Snowden would have no-doubt recognized after living in Switzerland. American exceptionalism bullshit is no excuse for crimes against humanity (i.e. mass surveillance).
These are uncharacteristically dumb comments from you.
[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/13/snowden-nsa-syr...
>In an interview with Wired magazine, Snowden said the elite NSA hacking unit, called Tailored Access Operations, accidentally cut off Syria’s internet while attempting to infiltrate it.
This [1] appears to be the interview the article is referencing.
Either way, Snowden is 100% responsible for everything that is revealed regardless of whether it was revealed by himself directly or a journalist with which he shared the information. You can't just pipe secret information through a journalist to absolve yourself of leaking that info.
I'm European so I'm happy, but this wasn't in the best interests of US. Unless we're talking about freedom of speech.
In the short term. In the longer term it is in everybody's interests, including the US.
And as a taxpayer, I want to know how we're fucking up so I can try to correct some of it. Certainly it wasn't driving itself in a useful direction.
Also, if the fallout of having our actions revealed is horrible, maybe we should have done better things? Hmm. Because secrets do leak.
Because such people have largely been lied to.
Islamic terrorism since its inception is less dangerous than preventable medical errors. Ffs.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/medica...
> The new research followed up on a landmark study, To Err is Human, conducted by the Institute of Medicine 15 years ago, when researchers reported that as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year due to preventable medical errors. Experts now say that figure was too low and hospitals have been too slow to make improvements.
Where is the outrage? The money?