The Intercept Shuts Down Access to Snowden Trove

After Snowden, we now know with greater certainty that the surveillance is truly far reaching and more multi-faceted than we could've imagined.

The problem was not solved in a political way so as as result it is being solved in a technical way instead. Much more progress needs to be made but progress is occurring.

Signal was created and enjoys popularity as a high security messenger thats easy for average users to adopt. Google upped their certificate sizes in response to snowdens releases. less trust was placed in NIST/NSA partnerships with technology and several weaker ciphers were outright rejected from the kernel for lack of transparency. Hell, theres an entire laptop manufacturer that sprung up due to it. https://puri.sm/

TLS adoption on websites also increased markedly and the HTTP2 spec made it mandatory. TLS1.3 PFS was also much more voraciously fought for, one could argue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect#Technology_indu...

I strongly disagree. For one thing, it's changed Silicon Valley's view on advertising based business models. It's also made the public much more aware of how their data is being used, which has changed and will further change the stock price of many companies.

I can also see him indirectly helping bring about the GPRD

I think things did change, but for the worse. Every time something like this is exposed, it's a decision point. If nothing is done by the public or those elected by the public, the perpetrators learn a valuable lesson, namely that they can probably increase the intensity of their surveillance without much worry and needing to hide. In a way it's relief for them.

Sure some programs were burned and exposed but they can just go and rename them and continue on.

For me, it isn't specifically that the articles are bias (they are). What really turns me off is that the writers can't seem to get the hell out of the way of the story. Every article is just steeped in the writer's personal opinions to the point where it feels more like ranting than news.

There are occasionally good pieces on important topics, but I'm no longer willing to slog through the long line of headlines that repeat some variation of "[Politician] did [something you should hate him/her for]" in order to read them.

I'm with you on the bias. I want information, and I'll make my own decisions. However, maybe it is better when news outlets are overt with their biases. It's a little more disturbing to me to think of someone reading something they believe is unbiased when it's simply subtly biased.

Ironically, I think you may dislike it because it's exposed you to an uncomfortable truth, which is that some political agendas are rooted in facts and others are not.

I certainly recognize what you mean, they could fulfill both their journalistic and political agendas with half the editorializing and bias. I honestly can't tell whether it's a conscious choice to draw readers with a non-traditional style or just a side-effect of operating outside the usual structures of journalism, but either way it does their writing no favors. Picking up staff like Sam Biddle suggests it's the latter, and these are simply people without much capacity to restrain themselves.

But what's even more damning to me is seeing The Intercept's record on due diligence and source protection. I was sympathetic on this for a long time, since critics like Lawfare were so quick to make speculative (and technologically ludicrous) accusations. But across Juan Thompson's stories, the Reality Winner debacle, and Kiriakou and Hickman's exposure, it's become increasingly hard to understand the The Intercept as a competent player in these leagues.

I'm glad it's out there, and it's still doing some good work on investigative stories like AT&T data tapping, but I can't shake the sense that operating genuinely outside the establishment tends to bring inescapable flaws along with the good stuff.

Now, they can lay back and say "look, it's all legal now" (even if much may still be unconstitutional).

They run negative coverage 24/7 on a single person, even for positive events, instead of real journalism about things that are actually destroying our democracy, like increased surveillance.