John Raines, 84, Who Evaded Capture in an FBI Break-In, Dies
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"According to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the military without government permission." The remainder concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft."
They still celebrate their proven criminality.
How about renaming it the "John Raines" building to show they don't think being criminal was or is a good idea? How about just having the building nameless rather than celebrating their own evil?
Edit/clarification: non native english speaker here…
* This war was deeply unpopular. Many people protested these in groups
* The head of the FBI at the time, J Edgar Hoover, was immensely powerful. He decided to crush the dissident groups by ordering FBI agents to infiltrate them. According to the article, he is the bad guy (I personally agree with this)
* John Raines and a few friends (the good guys) broke into the FBI office, stole the documents and sent it to newspapers.
* A serious investigation into the FBI's practices was the result of this publication.
* The good guys were never caught.
The burglars then went over their files, and found what seem to me to be pretty silly things, like FBI agents being instructed to create the perception that the organizations they were investigating had many FBI informers and agents in them.
They passed on the files to a reporter anonymously. Reporters and later investigations by Congress revealed more details about the FBI's cointelpro project, wherein the FBI committed illegal sabotage against groups they were investigating.
Who are the good and bad people? Well, the FBI is bad for committing illegal sabotage. The burglars are good for getting important information, but bad for doing it by stealing random boxes of files - which might've hindered legitimate investigations. The reporter is good for publishing her story. Congress is good for investigating further but bad for doing nothing effective to curtail abuses by American federal intelligence agencies.
Who gets to go take a shower while FBI agents wait for you downstairs!?
I do hope that this debate is considered thoroughly settled in favour of the whistle-blowers by now?
Which is fine by me, as I think both Raines and Snowden should be viewed closer to the "heroic whistle-blowers" end of the spectrum. But I suspect there are many who see both Raines and Snowden as traitors.
I'd be very interested in hearing the reasoning of someone who had different opinions on the two.
Snowden exposed a mass surveillance program, some of which appears to have been illegal. Raines did likewise, but also exposed a serious campaign of harassment against activists - one prosecuted by an FBI director who was apparently viewed as beyond the control of even the President.
I think some of the more technocratic types I know might say Snowden's leaks were about "agencies doing what they should", while Raines' was a necessary reaction to an out-of-control administrator.
If there are people who support Snowden but oppose Raines, I'd be fascinated to hear what rationale that uses - nothing comes to mind.
The important difference was if you agree with the administrations goals when they abuse power.
So if Obama spies on all American's private conversations, only to stop only totally evil child pornographers... that's ok.
But if future President Jeb Bush spies on all American's private conversations, in order to find Russian spies and retaliate against their countries interference in our election... that would be wrong.
https://sharylattkisson.com/2017/09/24/obama-era-surveillanc...
I see this sort of comment every time Snowden comes up on HN. Someone alludes to secret knowledge about him, then makes a dramatic statement that doesn't have any actually-testable component. It's true, the extent of the damage Snowden caused may never be known - even if there wasn't any!
Could you perhaps clarify any of this?
I'm particularly interested by "the Honolulu hackerspace that he later used for his politics". To my knowledge, the only involvement he ever had was to throw a single crypto party there, which none of the attendees have described as being especially political or unusual. Hosting crypto parties at hackerspaces is a pretty standard practice from what I've seen.
Did Snowden do something else political or detrimental at HiCapacity? And does that somehow tie into knowing "a thing or two" about him, given that no one at HiCapacity (or anywhere) seems to have known about the leaks until they were national news?
edit: Seeing as the parent was deleted, I should say that there wasn't anything interesting there. A weird allusion to Snowden screwing up a hackerspace, but no actual substance to justify the mystery.
I truly believe that the only reason more people are not be outraged by the IC's actions is by not understanding their capabilities. I'm a graduate student in CS and am still amazed at what they could do. There's no way in heck I expect my mother to appreciate the gravity of the danger of such a surveillance state because she can't even begin to comprehend what is possible.
EDIT: why delete your comments? You should stand by your views even if others disagree. Well, not to the point of being stubborn, but in this case I don't get it.
It too advanced a weird suggestion that the Hi Capacity makerspace was somehow deeply tied into politics and the intelligence community, and was disrupted by Snowden. (And, of course, offered no support for that claim.)
In light of the responses, I re-considered whether it was best to keep such information here, but you've simply made things more difficult for me with a false representation of a removed post, that I cannot remove and to which I do not wish to respond.
It was my mistake for deciding to share what was posted here, but it would have been common courtesy to let it go (and not revive the comment in interpretive form), since it was removed by me. You could have contacted me privately to discuss further, as a courtesy to me.
As I understood matters, he avoided leaking to WL specifically because he didn't trust their approach to disclosure. He's had some vague contact Wikileaks since, but those connections (e.g. introduced on telepresence by Appelbaum) didn't seem to involve any kind of actual collaboration.
Is there some kind of deeper collaboration between the two? If not, why would Snowden and Greenwald have any more reason to feel connected to Wikileaks than any other high-profile privacy advocate?
Compare what happened to Saddam Hussein (put on trial and executed when republicans were in control) versus Gaddafi (sodomized and butchered in the street by US backed rebels when democrats were in control).
Plus, there's the whole "drain the swamp" thing that Trump promised, as an outsider, to execute. So I don't think its so much that Wikileaks decided to become pro-R, just that Trump very definitely had/has the opportunity to shake up the incumbents and alter the status quo, and this is also in alignment with Wikileaks' stated goals. So, there's that.
Your question comes down to a nuanced "how to Snowden & Greenwald feel about WikiLeaks, given how the latter has changed so much," which is not criticising anyone, and valid since their opinions on the matter probably would give insight into what is really going at the moment.
Yet you have been downvoted for asking this. What's more confusing: you don't seem to actually criticise or praise anyone. You might appear to criticise Wikileaks, but even then "seem to be" should make it clear that this your impression, and that you are open for changing your view if you get more information.
People really have strong feelings about this topic.
"“Hey Don. We have an unusual idea,” WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. “Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.” WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump’s tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time “through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC).”"
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
> It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”
> Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.
"improve the perception of our impartiality" sounds as if "we're not impartial, and the world is figuring that out. If you have nothing to lose otherwise, please make it seem as if we were impartial."
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-atlantic-commits-malp...
I'll be honest, that doesn't really change my interpretation of the sentence, they already had "pro-Trump" and "pro-Russia" in quotes, which made it clear to me they didn't believe them to be as such.
It's not the semantics of the sentence that bother me, it's that they went to great lengths to get DNC and Clinton emails but just go ahead and ask the Trump campaign for information. Clearly they are treating the Trump campaign with softer gloves than the Clinton campaign.
Edit: Why the downvotes?
It doesn't seem to fully reverse my opinion of WikiLeaks although I wonder if I can really be objective now.
Snowden collected gigabytes classified documents the vast majority of which had nothing to do with anything questionable. The program he revealed was not obviously illegal and, however distasteful, compared to NSA programs that came to light just a few years before that, small potatoes. His trove then ended up in the hands of unfriendly intelligence services.
It doesn't take mental contortions to view them quite differently.
And it's not like anyone really asked the Congress either, is it?
http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com/
>ended up in the hands of unfriendly intelligence services
Sucks to be the NSA, I guess?
I suspect as a branch of the US Government, the Congress of the US doesn't care much what you think about the extent of its powers either. I'm not sure how Snowden has helped you resolve this monumental impasse at all.
I'll applaud anyone who takes a stand against mass surveillance.
Yes, that's what makes Snowden and Manning interesting, they're a new kind of hero - heroes for people who don't read the news (or perhaps much at all). There was very little in their revelations that was new and things dramatically worse were reported previously without gigantic data dumps of completely unfiltered and unrelated data. None of these things set the internet ablaze, despite being far more serious.
I don't wish either of them ill, don't think they're traitors or anything overwrought like that, have no trouble believing they were motivated by idealism, however naive and misguided. I'm happy Chelsea Manning got her sentence commuted. But heroes? Not really seeing it.
> There was very little in their revelations that was new and things dramatically worse were reported previously without gigantic data dumps of completely unfiltered and unrelated data. None of these things set the internet ablaze, despite being far more serious.
Even when accepting the premise that Snowden and Manning are mostly heroes to "people who don't read the news," that begs the question why they don't read the news. If the answer is (implicit) assumption that they are just ignorant, this reveals more about our own biases and ignorance.
First of all: it was not just "the internet that was set ablaze". Even if there were reports on these and other larger issues before, the amount of attention the media gave to the things (re-)revealed in the leaks is far larger.
There are many stories that journalists or papers don't dare to break, because of the risk to their reputation if the claims get disputed. There is a reason the panama and paradise papers take so long to unveil. Now the data was out there anyway, so they could safely comment on what was in it. There was no media doing information gatekeeping, and the question of whether the media was holding things back was also verifiable.
Which leads to my next point: the fact that it was unfiltered (and as a side-effect, often unrelated) was undoubtedly part of why it grabbed the attention of the public. It was seen as the untampered "truth", which made it more believable in the eye of the public. Another comment mentions that Snowden released "gigabytes classified documents the vast majority of which had nothing to do with anything questionable", which may be true, but we would not have known this otherwise. And again: this matters to the public perception.
Sure, this could be seen as a disservice to good investigative journalism in a way, except for the aforementioned gatekeeping problem being bypassed.
The full transparency aspect of these leaks makes the way it was perceived and handled fundamentally different. Whether you agree with the results is a different question, but to ignore all of that is doing the discussion a disservice.
I'm not sure I follow this. Ignorant people are the fault of... ignorant people? We're not talking about something on the 17th page reported between lines here. These were massive , widely covered stories in their own right. NSA was engaged in post-9/11 wiretapping (vs metadata collection) - this was found illegal by courts, nearly led to a mass resignation of the leadership of the DoJ. Abu Ghraib, black extradition sites, torture, the very incident 'collateral murder' describes: all covered extensively before that one video. You literally have to have not read the news to have been unaware of these things.
Blindly assuming people are not reading the news because they are unaware of something reveals how you are not interested in wondering why they might not read the news.
And that assumption is built on an assumption that people who find value in Snowden's revelations (while you don't) can only be doing so because they are unaware of previous revelations.
This says more about your willingness to assume things about people you don't know. In short: your assumptions about others reveal more about your own biases and ignorance.
So your argument is basically this: Snowden revealed nothing new, therefore the people who think they did the right thing must have not known about these issues before, therefore those people must not read the news "or much at all".
The claim that nothing new was revealed is already wrong, and it only takes a quick visit to WikiPedia to figure that out[0][1][2]. Pretending you claim holds about Snowden barely revealing anything new, see my previous post about why unfiltered data from a whistle-blower matters to public perception.
And your conclusion, again, just reveals more about you: "I don't see what is so special about what Snowden did, therefore the people who do must be ignorant."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#R...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
It's pretty clear from more recent history that whistleblowers are not treated well.
I think the answer is "it depends". I mean, you could leak information that gets people killed but as long as you invent a reason the metaphorical whistle needed to be blown, you are automatically a hero?
There's responsible whistleblowing, irresponsible whistleblowing, and straight-up treason. Sometimes I feel like we pretend the second two never happen and it's always the first one happening.