Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that Drake and Binney were "leakers as insiders", I do not agree that this impacts the narrative of the article. Snowden wasn't an NSA outsider because he didn't want to be an insider. He was an NSA outsider because he was an NSA outsider --- his attempts to be an insider failed.

Moreover, there's more to the point Gladwell is making than that Snowden wasn't an insider. The core point of the piece is that Ellsberg's insider status enabled him to leak carefully, and to redact strategically. Snowden demonstrably did not do this: not only did things get published that weren't in the American public interest, but other things that were (for instance: traces of the Juniper/Netscreen backdoor, or implants in other VPN products) were never published.

It's not just that Snowden wasn't an insider, but that he lacked the ability to leak carefully and strategically --- and so the public outcome was inferior to the Pentagon Papers.

View on HN

> It's not just that Snowden wasn't an insider, but that he lacked the ability to leak carefully and strategically --- and so the public outcome was inferior to the Pentagon Papers.

This is hard to believe. I find it much more likely that Snowden had a broad agenda he wanted to cover, and simply decided to delegate the work of sifting through documents relevant to the public interest to journalists. How successful this strategy was is another issue entirely.

Also, the direct comparison between the material Ellsberg had to work with and what Snowden had is misleading. Ellsberg leaked a study from RAND literally designed to assess and document the history of the Vietnam War, including past failures. It's easy to look at that and go, "Wow, this is a careful, strategic disclosure." But Ellsberg couldn't have had an easier choice about what to leak!

In contrast, Snowden had access to a much more disparate set of documents that required lots of interpretation and technical parsing on journalists' part. There wasn't a single PowerPoint presentation that summed up NSA's abuses so conveniently.

That doesn't necessarily justify scraping as much as possible and passing it over to journos, but we have to keep the two men's access to material in context.

Can you be more specific about what exactly it is you find hard to believe, what you believe instead, and what evidence could be presented to you to change your belief?

The notion that he "lacked the ability to leak carefully and strategically" because he was an outsider. I'm fairly sure he was more than capable of selecting only documents related to domestic surveillance if he wanted to -- that just wasn't his broader goal. However, I would definitely appreciate the argument that his status as an outsider rendered him opposed to the idea of leaking selectively. I think the author hinted at this when he contrasted "hackers" and "leakers", but it's still quite different from what you're saying.

I think the biggest reason the Pentagon Papers leak was so much more impactful was that there was already a much larger fraction of the citizenry sensitized to the issue and inclined to act on what was revealed.

Someone else made the point that Ellsberg was also lucky in that the information he wanted to leak was already collected into a document. It's hardly Snowden's fault that he didn't have this luxury.

Anyway, for the record, I don't disagree with the argument that a highly placed insider could have leaked better-selected material and overall been more effective -- albeit at a level of personal risk that can only be described as extreme (and much greater than what Ellsberg faced). In the event, however, no such person chose to leak the most important material that Snowden leaked.

The thrust of your argument seems to be that Snowden should have said to himself, "I'm just an IT lackey; what do I know?" and not attempted to rise to this occasion. That would be where we disagree. Yes, in some hypothetical alternate world, there might have been a better-placed leaker who would have made better choices and been more careful. But Snowden had no way to know that any such person would ever appear, and neither do you.

The article seems to use the labels 'insider' and 'hacker' to contrast the intent of the two, when the labels should be just used to define their circumstances.

Both Snowden and Ellsberg appear to have done a good job at informing the public given those circumstances, Snowden's being inferior because his circumstances constrained him, not his intentions.

Did Snowden steal more data than he needs to because he's a hacker and he can't help himself? Or because he thought its better to take more than less, and then have the journalists figure out what's appropriate?

It seems to me that the Snowden approach of leaving the decision of what should be published to journalists (such as the New York Times) is the better approach.

We don't really want anybody to leak anything they personally find interesting, but we do want (good) journalists to be able to discover important stories.

As I said elsewhere, the end result of this appears to have been demonstrably suboptimal --- again, stipulating that this is regarding the American public interest:

* Some stuff got published that was important and vital (though its impact on public policy was ultimately minimal).

* Some stuff got published that simply shouldn't have been leaked --- for instance, details of technical implants useful only in narrowly targeted espionage.

* Some stuff didn't get published that should have been --- for instance, in light of what we later discovered about Juniper/Netscreen, had everyone to do this earlier, a list of vendors impacted by VPN implants would have been helpful, and could have been doable.

* Some stuff got published that were simple false, such as the notion of a "PRISM" system that gave NSA direct access to Google's systems.

A more carefully curated, competently explained process of leaking could have improved all these outcomes, and that's exactly what Gladwell is suggesting Ellsberg accomplished that Snowden didn't.

One could just as easily argue that if Ellsberg had focused on making documents public more quickly, more lives could have been saved during the Vietnam War.

Both were imperfect people in unique situations, but Gladwell's distinction seems to boil down to "Harvard, game theory, & Nobel prize winning PhD advisor" in the case of Ellsberg vs. "community-college dropout" in the case of Snowden, followed by Gladwell falling over himself to redefine "insider" right after spelling it out in detail with the language of class, prestige, and societal privilege.

I don't think Gladwell understands enough about either person - or "leaks" in general - to draw meaningful conclusions.

Well, first of all, thank you for putting it this succinctly; I honestly hadn't understood where the "elitism" claims were coming from, but, sure, that makes sense.

Here's the thing, though: Gladwell is probably not wrong about this. Ellsberg was far better read in to the program he leaked about that Snowden is to the topics of his leaks. As you can imagine, most of my industry friends and acquaintances are broadly pro-Snowden, and an argument that I've seen from literally none of them is that Edward Snowden had the technical expertise to either vet his documents himself, or to build a process whereby they would be effectively vetted. Which you can see by the shitshow that was the original PRISM disclosures.

I wouldn't disagree with your friends and acquaintances on that point, but would suspect that they reached their conclusions differently from Gladwell.

Another potentially self-serving issue that Gladwell conveniently glosses over in this piece: We could also make the argument that Ellsberg also had a much more effective and courageous press and educated population behind him. But it's easier to smear community college drop-outs and discuss a hypothetical "Edward Snowberg" than a hypothetical New Yorker with more reporters like Jane Mayer than commentators like Gladwell.

I think it's a mistake to assume:

1. That the Juniper Netscreen backdoor was the work of NSA. Even Bruce Schneier doesn't conjecture that it was NSA in his blog post on the topic.

2. That Edward Snowden had access to all documents of public interest, such as the Dual_EC vulnerability injection or malware specifics. Edward Snowden said that he worked with journalists to leak the documents with the most public interest.

1. I didn't say that the Netscreen backdoor was NSA (I don't think it was).

2. I believe you are wrong about Dual_EC's representation in the Snowden document cache, and believe that because of some particularly trustworthy secondhand sources that told me so. However: that's actually not the complaint I have; rather: putting more attention on VPN concentrators as implant targets would have been beneficial no matter what the technical details were.

I still assert that it's likely that Snowden didn't have that information. I do not have access to the original Snowden documents so I can't verify whether they are included in the document cache or not.

I'm confused as to why you brought up the Netscreen backdooring as an omission, then admit that you don't think it was NSA. Are you saying that the Netscreen backdoor was known by the NSA as an adversarial nation's work? Please clarify.

I don't think anyone thinks Snowden knew he had that information --- that's part of the problem. But I know people who are in position to know who assert directly that his leaks included that material.

Ok, I didn't fully understand your point. You disagree with the "dump all docs on Greenwald and hope for the best" method of leaking, as does the author of the article (and I do).

Thanks for responding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com