Edward Snowden Reconsidered
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
Wikipedia: Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy...
The conspiracy that he was flipped by Russia after he got there is at least not contradicted by the obvious facts, but a claim that he was a Russian agent all along is asinine.
On the other hand there are what I call the "instant experts" who are quick to take sides on something they were ignorant of yesterday, just because they read something about it in the news.
Without evidence, I lean towards assuming Snowden's motives are what he says they are. But after all, none of us (I assume) actually know him. He's a person in the news.
Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.
Also the claim of "alignment" comes from preference runoffs, because wikileaks put them ahead of the greens. Seems like a lot of bias packed just in this one sentence.
Are you Australian? The shard in your username makes me think you might be.* Regardless, down here the handful of people who would be considered as proponents of gun rights would also most likely align with the far right (One Nation, Shooters and Fishers, etc).
* Don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia "shards" is a slang term for ice/crystal meth.
>Snowden’s tweets and lectures have real-world impact. After his disclosures, Tor’s usership shot up from a million to six million. He repeatedly tweeted to his followers that they should use Tor and Signal. Tor’s default search engine DuckDuckGo, which claims to protect privacy by refraining from the profiling that other browsers do in order to provide personalized searches, saw a 600 percent increase in traffic over just a few months. One of DuckDuckGo’s partners is Yandex, Russia’s government-controlled search engine, although the company says it does not allow the collection or sharing of user data by its partners. Certification by the Snowden brand may well be the chief reason that so much faith is now placed uncritically in these platforms.
Really?
So the author spent all this time writing this article couldn't even bother to confirm how many documents were leaked and seemed to be under the assumption that DDG is data mining it's users?
This article just feels like it was written by a 3 letter agency and dropped on someone's desk.
Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?
Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows? That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them characterized... but, this is fine.
So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad because it ran with an incorrect count.
I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off.
"They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.
In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't create the lasting change they hope for.
This is not only incredibly childish and destructive - it's inaccurate. Politics and the rule of law have have provided protections for racial, sexual, religious minority populations in dozens of countries around the globe, have destroyed institutional slavery, and have created the largest sustained creation of broad-based wealth in human history. It's provided universal health care for millions of people across Europe and the Americas, defeated totalitarianism in two global conflicts, launched people into space, and created the technological revolution without which we wouldn't be having this debate today.
We're not perfect. Nobody claims we are. But politics and law are how we improve ourselves.
Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately ignored.
This security apparatus undermines the very fabric of law and government that you speak so highly of.
In case you've forgotten the 4th Amendment.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things
So what's your suggestion?
Silently put your head down and continue to breach the Constitutional rights of the American public?
Maybe you'd have kept fighting the man from within a system that clearly ignores one of the most fundamental pieces of our democracy, our Bill of Rights?
Sure, peoples rights are being trampled on but at least the youth wouldn't get any funny ideas.
Snowden gave up more for the USA than you, me, and many people on HN likely ever will by exposing an unconstitutional surveillance system so vast it'd give the Stasi a wet dream.
Edward Snowden is a patriot and I say that without reservation.
He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided 0 evidence to back it up. Considering he says that he only leaked information because internal methods had failed him, you'd figure he would have saved at least a single shred of proof that he tried to handle things internally, but he didn't.
He's already admitted during interviews that he applied for the job specifically to gather information to leak, and the majority of the information had nothing to do with the surveillance program in the USA. He's far from a patriot, and anyone who believes he leaked all of the sensitive information out of the goodness of his heart is just being naive.
Thanks to another one of the cornerstones of our democracy, Freedom of the Press, here is an article to refute your point.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden...
>Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden’s communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.
>The trove of more than 800 pages [see the pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the U.S. government’s long-running narrative about Snowden’s time at the NSA.
In short, it would seem that there is pretty ample evidence that some significant conversations took place between Snowden and the NSA.
You can even view the FOIA requests that revealed this information at the end of the above article.
Snowden was not the first who tried official channels.Seeing what happens to Thomas Drake, I think Snowdens reaction was warranted https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...
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That’s what Snowden did, with high costs to himself. Snowden taught a generation to have a moral compass.
This article adds no new insides. Instead it drifts off in conspiracy theories.
And then hid with the government that definitely wasn't adhering to the law.
I'd say it's not a good example of a moral compass.
Perhaps the strategies you're referring to under the term "politics and the rule of law" are more effective at promoting some goals than they are at other goals?
It will take more than politics to fix things. Disobedience is key to fixing evil institutions. Communist states fell when soldiers refused to shoot civilians. Technically a departure from law but the law was meant to serve us not the other way around.
I’m not entirely convinced by the explanation, but it’s the best one I’ve seen so far, and a lot of these people’s actions make more sense if the author is right about what motivates them.
Still my question holds: when did Snowden defend Putin? (and can you get a source interview or statement directly from Snowden … not associations over actions of 3rd parties).