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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There is a real lesson here about just how cavalier the American government - and to some degree the public - is about civil liberties, but that isn't the biggest problem.

The problem here isn't even so much the government is being shady - that has happened before, it will happen again. I can understand people not feeling threatened by constant snooping even though I disagree.

To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate. The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about. Government officials are not reliable; this is far to much unaccountable power even if people involved were allowed to discuss what is happening.

Why aren't the not-technically-interesting parts of this wiretapping program legal for government agencies to talk about? If they need to be hidden, why not go straight to the logical conclusion and classify a bunch of other laws?

Democracies can't handle this level of secrecy. The whole thing is going to fall apart one way or another - the path America is going down isn't stable at all; something is going to have to change radically. Either the intelligence agencies will gain supremacy over the government, the government itself will go rogue or the secrecy will have to end.

EDIT I'm going to bed before I see the whole video, but around 1:46:00 - the bit with J. Clapper. Case in point that the whole system of checks and balances can't work.

EDIT2 And around 2:10:00. Barbaric stuff; it is like centuries of accumulated Common Law and parliamentary legal tradition never happened. People need to be able to occasionally talk about this stuff in formal setting.

View on HN

There is a big difference between Observation (which is what Snowden is doing) and Analysis (followed by Solutions). It's not healthy to confuse the two.

Snowden is pointing out an issue. And he has done it with courage that I massively respect. You hardly see it these days. And that makes it anxiety and fear inducing, as the solutions are unknown.

But think of it this way - tomorrow someone might hand you a diagnosis of cancer. You can freak out about it or you can find a Cancer specialist to see what options are available. Asking the technician who gave you the report what the odds are, doesn't make any sense. He knows only how to create the report.

In this case just look to history, to understand how these things play out. History is the Oncologist.

Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.

If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage. That history (in out current environment of over information/disinformation/misinformation) is what will always be a source of hope and faith.

The cancer metaphor is apt because noone knows how to cure it completely

“There is a big difference between Observation (which is what Snowden is doing) and Analysis (followed by Solutions). It's not healthy to confuse the two.”

Very true. For example I think Marx did a great analysis but his solutions lacked. Same happens often in medicine. People who observe something are asked to also explain it. But if they can’t explain the observation it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong.

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.” ― Baruch Spinoza

“the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.” ― Baruch Spinoza

That makes no sense. Perfect liberty and perfect security are mutually exclusive.

M8, Spinoza had some wild ontology to justify his claims

The freedom from worrying about hunger and basic needs and violence from others is security. It isn't referencing total physical security, it is referencing government vs. no government.

I tend to agree with your sentiments, and my political comments are typically pretty anarchistic, but I don't think we should let language become a barrier to communication instead of a bridge. I can understand how some conceptions of "liberty" are increased by certain security measures. If you can safely have a picnic in the park, you have the liberty of safely picnicing. If the park is full of bandits who consistently take baskets from picnicers, you've lost the liberty of safe picnics even if the official government isn't the one who took that liberty from you.

Again, I'm not arguing for increased security, just for understanding the way others use language.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/politics/edward-snowde...

The problem is how to be sure the line get not crossed ?

The difference here is that the oncologist doesn't just observe.

The oncologist deals with the consequences of the observation: communicate with the patient, gives advices on treatments, makes a therapy plan, deals with families, answer to their questions, takes the hit when the relatives think that the solution is not good enough or an Indian shaman could cure everything with snake's poison.

Snowden have done good, but escaped from the consequences of his actions.

A position that made everything he's done questionable

Had he faced a trial, even the most unfair of trials, would have put him in the position of being at least true to the values he was trying to protect.

Question the authority, suffer the consequences.

Question the authority, go to Russia is not what generally the public opinion accepts as "honest".

There is much to say also about who leaked the data but didn't protect the source.

The identity of deep throat has been made public after Nixon was already dead for years and Mark Felt was already an old man suffering from dementia.

I don't think there was ever a question about hiding his identity - the govt was after him before he'd even left Hong Kong or any leak had been published. At the time he said he didn't care what happened to him.

I find it interesting that you posit Deep Throat's approach as somehow more noble. If Snowden had anonymously leaked and kept on working would that have been less questionable or more honest?

> Question the authority, suffer the consequences.

I’m pretty sure questioning the authority without fear of retaliation is what the first amendment is supposed to be about. But that aside, your phrasing is a bit misleading. Snowden didn’t question the government. He exposed illegal activities by the government.

> Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.

This is a good point. In an ideal world their job would be less...complicated. So our job as intelligent, capable citizens is to make the system more ideal for them to do their duties.

Making a "captive workforce" out of AI tools and robots is, to me, the ideal solution. Either way it's inevitable. Since no one else will, I'm trying to get out ahead with thoughtful early planning. Communicating a common goal for the nation without fear is the way to get the technology into the hands of the right people. It's up to us, the intelligent and "good people" communicators, to push for it.

The intelligence agencies have proven to be vindictive, and also a back-channel arm for straight up partisan politics. It seems like it goes unnoticed when the outcome is something that aligns with a party's goals. I just can't tell if it's fallible people in positions of power, or a real concerted effort.

I think a lot of our problems stem from the undermining of our system of checks and balances, and whatever is up with the fourth estate. I'm digressing, but I recall a time when journalists would be roasting public officials over these issues.

Examples of partisan politics by IC?

I guess this isn't strictly "partisan," but it is highly political: the FBI tried to destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and even attempted to blackmail him with recordings they had taken.

Seriously, I'm amazed how many people are ignorant of this fact. They didn't just blackmail him, they clearly implied that he should commit suicide before recieving the Nobel if he didn't want the tapes released. ("There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.") They never released the tapes, of course, but he did die. Everyone also seems unaware that the King family was awarded $1 in damages from the federal government for the wrongful death of MLK; they contend that the US government assassinated him and used James Earl Ray as a patsy, and while they never got Ray's conviction overturned (despite trying) they did get a separate US court to agree that the government should pay them symbolic damages based on this interpretation of events.

Uh... examples from 50 years ago is not what I was picturing.

Really, "that time the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing suicide" is too far back to count as an example of TLA overreach? We only know about that whole escapade because radicals physically broke into an FBI office and stole evidence of it, this isn't the kind of thing the government willingly admits to us. The CIA destroyed most of the MK-ULTRA documents when they realised Congress was getting ready to ask for them, but we still know that they were drugging unconsenting US citizens with LSD and secretly recording them having sex with hookers (they called it "Operation Midnight Climax") just to see what would happen, but I guess that's old news, too, or maybe it just isn't politcial enough to care about. We probably won't know that they killed Michael Hastings for another couple decades, and then that will be old news, too, so who cares?

Peter Strzok, Lisa Page?

If it were partisan politics I don't think we would see the continuity that we did between Bush and Obama.

I think it was clear and overt during the Bush era that there were some dubious claims thrown around about "we need this to prevent another 9/11", with "this" being vague, broad, varying with the particular speaker. It was disappointing to many when Obama embraced some of these conclusions.

Yeah the idea that the intelligence community pushed these stories doesn't hold up.

If you look into the folks who were in the spotlight pushing "we need this to prevent another 9/11" they were mostly former military and some with intelligence connections... but the real connection was their political connections.

Many outright stated the information they were provided to go on TV with came from politically associated groups not some secretive internal policy. In fact intelligence groups internally pushed back on some of the claims and political appointees ignored them.

FBI Agent Robert Wright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vALc-oU3Hqg

> If it were partisan politics I don't think we would see the continuity that we did between Bush and Obama.

If it weren't partisan politics, you wouldn't be seeing roughly 15 senior officials from the NSA/CIA/FBI leaving the public sector to take jobs at CNN & MSNBC.

I'm curious why most people don't find this to be deeply disturbing.

CNN and NBC are not partisan entities, contrary to Republican smears. If they have any faults, it is in how desperately they bend over backwards to maintain the appearance of nonpartisanship amidst bad-faith attacks from the right, to the point that CNN just this week hired an alt-right conspiracy theorist as a full time contributor.

1) I'm a progressive and I'm saying this.

2) CNN and MSNBC absolutely are partisan entities, though CNN does try hard to appear less so. As long as MSNBC keeps employing Maddow and she keeps pushing debunked conspiracy theories, they will absolutely be seen as partisan. Her coverage as of late has been absolutely disgraceful and a huge stain on that network, IMO.

3) None of what you said addresses the very alarming fact that the heads of our intelligence agencies are taking senior posts in these media organizations.

I don't find it disturbing as Fox News and the other "conservative" media outlets were already full of ex-Bush era public sector employees. Both sides have an aggressively pro-intelligence agency bend, even if there are partisan differences.

There's a sizeable difference between judges and cabinet officials who have long been media pundits (though I do mostly agree that it's disturbing) and folks whose primary experience is in intelligence and counter-intelligence.

The era of rampant, selective intelligence leaks to the media started when these very same people were in administration.

Intelligence was always this leaky, there just wasn't social media and modern-day yellow journalism to twist it and spread it around. And we didn't have outrage culture, which provides a very blunt and dangerous mechanism for leakers to leverage.

The only real secret intelligence is tactical (military or otherwise), because we aren't quite that craven, exceptions notwithstanding. Everything else is intrinsically political and has a very short half-life as a secret. Work for a few years inside the Beltway, especially with or near people who are connected (e.g. lobbyists, think tank scholars, appointees, Pentagon staffers, international orgs, etc), and this becomes obvious immediately. Secrets are social currency more important than money and maybe even title. Everybody shares secrets, albeit usually in an obnoxious, obfuscated, pretentious way; even the interns.

As the other poster notes, selective intelligence leaking has been going on forever. And if there is a lack of Ex-Bush intelligence community members in the press, it is because the whole torture thing made then step away from the public eye.

I find I want to reply, but I don't know how to do that without getting wrapped up in a discussion that's too easy to be misinterpreted or dismissed here as political.

I think you are conflating a few issues.

On the one hand there is the bipartisan surveillance issue that Snowden shined a light on.

More recently we have a bunch of Trump and anti-Trump narratives and sometimes conspiracy theories.

I suspect some people on the thread have squished those into one. But the intelligence community is likely complicated, motivations multi-faceted, people holding diverse opinions. I don't think these things are the same, or you can dismiss or endorse one cause for the other.

The continuity was in foreign policy. Obama, like GW Bush and Clinton, deferred to the 'Deep State' on foreign policy, military and security matters. He started out idealistic, but was quickly subsumed. Trump has bucked the System, and that is why the bipartisan knives are out for him.

You should probably tell the blob that because to this day they have nothing but complaints about Obama's foreign policy.

The blob will always be dissatisfied because there is always one more country to invade and one more way to escalate a conflict, and eventually any U.S. politician has to stop giving the blob what it desires if they want to get reelected.

Relative to what Hillary Clinton's or Marco Rubio's foreign policy would have been, sure, Obama was a model of probity, but this is damning with faint praise.

The partisans aren't, "Democrats" and "Republicans" when it comes to intelligence agencies. The partisans are those who support global US hegemony and those who don't. The intelligence agencies do, and they have an "ends justifies the means" mentality. They don't see transgressions against civil liberties or Constitutional violations as troubling or an impediment as long as they perceive themselves as working towards a "greater good". This is not how a lawful, Constitutional society is supposed to (or can) work. Democracy dies behind closed doors and every day more and more doors are being slammed shut in our face by unaccountable government agents who are increasingly seizing the levers of power in government, media, business and every other facet of our lives.

Obama presented himself as the anti-Bush when it came to a lot of things to do with the military and intelligence operations. I suspected that once he took office his stance on some of these things would shift closer to Bush’s, and I was right.

I based this on my theory that there are things that the general public does not know, and will never know, that influence the decisions POTUS makes. Until you are privy to that information, it’s easy to take a contrarian viewpoint. Once you have the information, and the responsibility for making decisions that might save American lives, it’s a lot harder.

I’m not saying that any of these policies are right or wrong, or that the general public should be kept in the dark about whatever it is we’re being kept in the dark about. It’s just a theory I have about how the world works. I have no way of proving or disproving it, but I think the evidence supports it.

Interesting. I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized. Instead, there are various pathologies that infect various organs or agencies at various time, often at time seemly mutually exclusive but they coexist nonetheless.

The government isn't given the trust needed to regulate or otherwise do its job efficiently. See various civil engineering projects, explosive cost growth whenever contractors compete for bids. People justify that as evidence that governments as inherently inefficient.

Government is abusing civil liberties through spying on everyday Americans. Relatively nobody cares.

The government is being corrupt, privileging senators' pet projects or program over the good of the nation. See the Senate Launch System. Nobody cares except space nerds. At the same time, NASA also supported the various effort to commercialize space, which is a major win.

> Relatively nobody cares.

If nobody cared, the only illegal domestic data collection program in the Snowden docs wouldn't have been shut down. It has been.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-...

If nobody cared, Google wouldn't have encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic. It has.

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...

How do you know?

I posted links. If you don't think Google has encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic, you can try to access it yourself. If you don't think the NSA has stopped collecting all phone metadata, why would there be records of the NSA collecting a subset of metadata afterward?

Every corrupt organization keeps two sets of books.

There remains no evidence that the NSA is deliberately flouting the law. If there were, Snowden would have leaked that instead of lists of hacked Chinese computer systems.

I don't understand the timeline you're implying. Snowden did blow the whistle on this program, in 2013. Your link was from 2015, and now it's 2019, if I'm not mistaken. Snowden has lost the access he had before his whistleblowing. It will take another whistleblower to reveal the scale of current unsupervised malfeasance.

You're not following the point. The point was that people did care about the leaks and took appropriate action.

Secondarily, you're not understanding the leaked documents. The leaked documents showed that the NSA believed that the phone metadata program was legal. Once there is a court ruling that it is illegal, its lawyers cannot justify the program.

Thirdly, your phrase "another whistleblower" shows that you do not know what a whistleblower is. Leaking thousands of programs where just one of them happens to be illegal but not obviously so (to the point where Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing.

As discussed in the podcast, not even a few of the people at NSA believed anything of the sort. WaPo hasn't taken down this gem yet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/lawye...

As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court (in which DoJ faces no opposing counsel) in order to jury-rig a fig leaf for the ongoing destruction of personal liberties. I'm made my peace with the fact that the authoritarians to whose whims we are subject will occasionally overstep their bounds in public. When they do so, the public may protest and eventually conditions might improve somewhat. When the unsupervised services harm us, their putative employers, we have no recourse.

Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower". You guys make a great team!

> As discussed in the podcast, not even a few of the people at NSA believed anything of the sort.

Snowden's documents themselves showed the legal justification for the phone metadata program. It nakes sense that Snowden would claim otherwise in the podcast because he is barely literate and hasn't actually read most of the documents he leaked.

> As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court

You don't "lobby" a court. You have lawyers justify a position.

> Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower".

You're the one making a bizarre definition of "whistleblower." Is it whistleblowing to leak all of your company's documents if you don't know they are doing anything illegal so long as somebody can later find one thing that is illegal? Obviously not.

> Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing

The public outrage was due to various top officials denying that anything like PRISM was going on, when in fact it was.

So either the program was illegal, the false statements made by officials about them, or the classification of the process that prevented democratic oversight. One of the three had to be illegal, it's not really relevant to split hairs over which was one actually was.

> I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized.

What do you propose as the magical "proper" incentivisation?

Why do you think I presume to know a 'magical' one-size fit all solutions?

The simplest explanation for lots of confusing events is that the intelligence agencies have enjoyed supremacy over the government for some time already. They run the media as well: just look at the glowing plaudits for their fake "whistleblower" as contrasted with the ongoing disdain for actual whistleblowers.

That's not nearly as simple as the explanation that the public doesn't actually care about whether domestic agencies are spying on everyone. I think most Americans are in the "I have nothing to hide" line of thinking.

The media won't carry a story that their numbers tell them doesn't have legs with the audience.

Forget the public, why don't elected officials themselves act more in simple self-interest? Not all of them are bankrolled by the military-industrial complex, yet not a one ever utters a peep about the trillions we spend on evil security-theater bullshit. No, killing lots of people in the Middle East does not make us safer, which anyone on any of the relevant Congressional committees could tell you. Most of them would be happy to spend those trillions on other priorities. None of them, with the partial exception of e.g. Rep. Gabbard, ever say a thing about this.

Why is that?

I would guess that people in general are fearful of reprecussions when the antagonists are 'better connected', 'higher ranked' or 'richer'. Often the scariest threats are those implied.

In a moment of accidental candor on Maddow's show, Senator Schumer lets you know who he thinks really runs DC...

"Let me tell you: You take on the intellegence community and they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QbADuhhu7w

The possibility of a secret police state scares me more than any bombs or shootings ever could. It is absolutely an existential threat to freedom, because as part of its nature, it is able to quell dissent, and largely control the flow of information "in the name of freedom".

Hypothetically, of course.

There are plenty that do. They end up making waves in the libertarian and conspiracy communities and are generally blacklisted by the mainstream press.

The two communities above are receptive to messages about government overreach and corruption, the general public seems not to care much.

I suspect this is largely because libertarians and conspiracy theorists (which do overlap to some extent) are already skeptical of government "goodness" and anything that feeds that skepticism is easily accepted. The general public places government on a higher moral plane of existence and any challenge to that is met with skepticism and excuses.

The end result is that those that speak out/expose the government are sidelined and punished through smears or government action. See: Attacks on Gabbard, Ron Paul, Snowden, Bill Binney, Assange, etc.

It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures. There is literally no question that those emails are real and unaltered.

> It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures

Because there was nothing in them that painted Clinton in a bad light. They were normal boring emails that were sensationalized in conspiracy blogs but recognized as normal boring emails by professional journalists.

There were multiple emails from journalists at supposedly neutral reputable outlets asking the campaign to check and edit their articles before publishing. Also in an email Donna Brazile of CNN agreed to forward the debate questions to the campaign before the debate.

If the act of leaking emails about media collusion is a "bad" thing that influenced the election in one way, so can the media collusion itself be a "bad" thing that influenced the election the other way.

Was there ever any evidence that having the questions is actually dirty pool, or was that more an instance of "ask and ye shall receive, and nobody else asked?"

> There were multiple emails from journalists at supposedly neutral reputable outlets asking the campaign to check and edit their articles before publishing

Despite what the conspiracy bloggers would have you believe, this is standard fact checking. If the conspiracy bloggers did that, they wouldn't have anything to report.

> Also in an email Donna Brazile of CNN agreed to forward the debate questions to the campaign before the debate.

This was heavily covered mainstream news and resulted in CNN firing Brazile. Brazile also assisted the Sanders campaign as the Sanders campaign has admitted, but we don't have the Sanders campaign emails to see how much.

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/3038...

Conservatives are not offered the opportunity to review or edit articles about them beforehand by these same outlets. The standard is to reach out for comment, not for permission or editorial review.

> Conservatives are not offered the opportunity to review or edit articles about them beforehand by these same outlets.

Clinton's team was not offered the opportunity to edit or review the articles either. They were sent articles about the costs of policy proposals to respond with their own numbers. If you think this is out of the ordinary or that conservatives don't get the same consideration, what do you think " did not immediately respond to requests for comment" means at the end of news articles?

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37543

I don't get it. What's the issue with this email?

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/10037

This email does not clarify the significance of either email.

I think that's the point. The leaked emails were boring and normal except to conspiracy theorists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003606

That claim is easily refuted with a minute of Googling, just like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_...

With a few more seconds one could CTRL-F 1035-960.

Hah, the difference being some people still believe in conspiracy theories. Nobody believes in Pizzagate.

The person posting Podesta emails in this thread believes in Pizzagate.

That can't be. Nobody still believes in Pizzagate. That building didn't even have a basement.

Clearly they're part of a conspiracy to make us believe, against all possible odds, that anyone still believes in Pizzagate.

Yes they must feel like fools, believing that multiple national politicians would associate with an organized pedophilia ring, for instance even flying on a private plane that had been nicknamed "The Lolita Express".

I mean, they should probably feel like fools believing there was child sex trafficking going on in the basement of a building that has no basement, even if some other conspiracies turn out to be real. It's a textbook case of mob mentality that so many people believed the lies and nobody did even basic legwork.

(And let's note: it's not like 4chan broke open Epstein's crimes. Old fashioned FBI legwork did. And the guy had a history of sex trafficking already, which nobody in Pizzagate did. As fun as it is to pretend to be an armchair sleuth, it sure isn't a pass-time that's got a good batting average over professional investigation).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175011

And some are so sure of their worldview that they believe in a wholly-manufactured conspiracy theory long after the reasonable evidence has discredited it, including physical evidence like the fact a building has no basement. It's a big world with a wide variety of people.

Not jakeogh though. like I said, he's part of a conspiracy to make us believe people still believe Pizzagate. The purpose of which is to undermine confidence in average human reasoning skills, which undermines faith in democracy. This is important for the next step of the Triluminati's plan.

Pointing to a specific claim that was not made as if it was. Anyone can find something to point to that is false. It's an effective way to avoid specific things that were brought up.

Since you've brought up nothing but a couple of links to emails with the word "pizza" in them somewhere and a couple of links to your own posts in the past (without any context to explain why those posts are relevant to the topic), I think I've avoided nothing specific you've claimed because you've claimed nothing specific.

Does it even count as "JAQing off [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions]" if one party in the conversation doesn't even bother asking questions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17181228

My question stands unanswered and further communication in this topic is likely fruitless.

jakeogh, I wish I could say I wished you the best, but I'm not a fan of conspiracy theorists and I'm not a fan of this game you're playing trying to convince people that anyone still believes in Pizzagate. Reality is already complex enough as it is.

May the Triluminati treat you gently for doing their bidding, whether or not you know you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17180321

Old fashioned FBI legwork...

You're wrong about... everything.

FBI washed their hands of this when the rest of DoJ did, in 2008. Two things caused national attention to return to Epstein: Alexander Acosta's nomination to Labor, and Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald refusing to forget about Epstein's victims even after the rest of the media had. FBI had fuck-all to do with any of this; they don't like to investigate people who can afford to hire lawyers.

Intelligence agencies "run the media"?

How so?

Nothing totally proven but you might find this interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

"Run the media" in this context doesn't mean there's some CIA commissar approving every article or broadcast. What it means generally is that access to "leaks", scoops, "anonymous government sources", "high level intelligence officials", etc is predicated on uncritically toeing the "intelligence community" line. Failing to do so means no more access, and you will be replaced by someone else.

Take the lessons of Manufacturing Consent and apply them to the contemporary political context instead of Vietnam and East Timor, even if the elite media seems to be aligned with your own political beliefs.

Any leaker is going to have their POV and motivations.

But I don't see any reason to belive that it constitutes 'controlling the media'.

How could you be a member of any standing in the elite media if you don't have access to "leaks"? If something leaks that wasn't actually approved by the agencies, what do you think is going to happen to the leaker?

I don't know what you mean by the first question.

As for the second I'm not sure what you feel the answer is there either, more what it means.

There is a whole history of folks leaking things for you to look at.

My point is that any time an "anonymous government official" or "high level intelligence official" or whatever leaks something to the prestige press - meaning, the article says "according to anonymous government sources..." - AND the leaker is not jailed / prosecuted, THEN you have to assume that the leak was deliberate (approved at a high level) and in service of the intelligence agency's own ends.

“Fake” whistleblower? This is a hop and a skip away from Q-anon territory, and shouldn’t be on hn.

Real whistleblowers: Snowden, Kiriakou, Binney, Drake, Manning, Winner. Notice a theme of career loss, prison, total life upheaval, and a press that DGAF.

Fake whistleblower: still works for CIA, whistleblowing has purely political rather than administrative effects, and ongoing adulation in the press.

If you don't want to see this on HN, then downvote and move on.

Well we could strive for a base level of critical thinking, something clearly missing from your statement.

A whistleblower that is heavily covered in the media because he or she aligns with the orginization's goals (sell headlines) is not 'fake'.

A whistleblower blowing the whistle on a hierarchy unable to directly fire him will also, not surprisingly, not lose his job.

...heavily covered in the media because he or she aligns with the orginization's goals (sell headlines) is not 'fake'.

"Heavily covered in the media", that's an interesting criterion for "whistleblower", and I'm sure it would serve someone's interests if it got any traction. Also "critical thinking" is now defined as "believing what the war media tell us"? This would be Orwellian, if it weren't so silly.

You are misrepresenting what was said. "Heavily covered in the media" wasn’t cited as a criterion for a whistleblower. Actually to be more precise, it was cited as a criterion—by you—when you claimed that as a hallmark of “fake” whistleblowers.

Parent claimed that media coverage was a sufficient criterion; I disagree. You've interpreted the discussion as concerned with a necessary criterion. That abuse of the idiom will come later, after the war media has moved the Overton window a bit further.

You need to re-read what I wrote.

My claim is that media coverage cannot say anything meaningful about the authenticity of a whistleblower.

To say otherwise is a terrible argument -- Snowden himself had widespread media coverage, both positive and negative.

Snowden's revelations are massive. They should be cited anytime every time an intelligence reptile anonymously leaks something to the press, which is every day. Instead, the only time Snowden makes the news is when they want to announce some new persecution like this recent lawsuit over his memoir. Here is on Joe f@#$ing Rogan for goodness sakes! That is not widespread coverage.

Again, that is not what we're talking about.

Media coverage tells you nothing about the authenticity of a whistleblower. You have not demonstrated any useful criterion for identifying 'fake' whistleblowers other than "I do not agree with his/her goals."

You're right, media coverage tells us far more about the media than about the people they cover. That was actually the point I made at the top of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334185

I don't understand the point of repeatedly misrepresenting what was said, since it's right here in this thread.

So rather than fake it’s more legally protected versus not legally protected?

I have a whistleblower hotline available to me at work... If I see something and call that number, my identity will be protected. That is the way my company would prefer I handle ethical issues and I will keep my job. If I gather up evidence and release it to the press, I will lose my job. That is the difference between, say Snowden and this whistleblower. But that does not negate the validity of the complaint.

That's great. Very few people in the unsupervised services imagine that they are so well protected. Thomas Drake and John Crane might have thought using the established procedure would protect them... and we've heard of them.

tfandango says> "If I see something and call that number, my identity will be protected. That is the way my company would prefer I handle ethical issues and I will keep my job. If I gather up evidence and release it to the press, I will lose my job."

Do NOT believe that!

The reality is probably quite different. Many organizations (both private and civil) make such promises but, in truth, the complaint phone line/box/e-mail is a direct line to either higher-ups in the company or to someone in another agency who will, very quickly, pass identifying information to higher-ups. The whistleblower will be tracked down mercilessly and driven out always. Those for whom the whistle blows will, not infrequently, be rewarded.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in many public and private endeavors and, in every case, so-called whistleblower phone lines, complaint boards or monitoring companies have proven to be ineffectual and/or downright deadly to the career of anyone who contacts them. They are usually honeytraps for those poor individuals who believe their complaints will be fairly judged.

With reasonable care the press can be relied upon to vent complaints to the public w/o identifying the complainant.

I will remember your comments should I ever feel the need to call it.

Care to name a couple examples? As it is, it sounds like a classic No True Scotsman to me.

No True Whistleblower gets "glowing plaudits" and "ongoing adulation".

What you refer to as "fake whistleblower" still has their job because they followed the legal procedure for reporting abuse and therefore enjoy whistleblower protection.

The others sited didn't follow the legal procedure which would have allowed them to also enjoy whistleblower protection.

Thomas Drake followed procedure, and he got burned. John Crane was one of the bureaucrats involved with that procedure, and he didn't think the burning was proper. So he followed procedure in order to blow the whistle on the burning, so then he got burned.

Unsurprisingly, no one stepped forward for Crane.

Drake got burned because in addition to following the procedure he leaked information to the press which is not part of the procedure.

After he got burned, the press found out. Why does your story keep changing?

That doesn't match the Wikipedia summary. Press leak, then the Bush administration hunted for the source of the leak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project#Whistleblo...

Ignore this guy, he's leaking from /r/politics

I've been to Reddit a couple of times, and never to that section. Unlike you I post under my own name. Anyway, the time for that valuable advice would have been before that comment spawned a big subthread and got upvoted into double digits...

OK, he/she is not fake. So:

What is their name? IDK. What exactly did they hear? IDK. From who did they hear it from? IDK.

People here seem awfully sure about something they know nothing about.

Bollocks. As Matt Taibbi correctly noted, a CIA whistleblower would only be a whistleblower if he were to expose malfeasance within CIA activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Is there really anything simple about “running the media”?

> To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate.

Well you are on a technical discussion board. There are many people here who are in the position Snowden described there. You can bring your brick to this discussion without having to become a hero as he said. This would push a public debate if you'd kept it up.

Why isn't it happening?

Maybe the government doesn't have to do anything at all and it's still not happening.

"You can't awaken somebody who pretends to be asleep" goes for all sides.

I would argue that the JFK assassination marked the moment that the intelligence agencies officially gained supremacy over the government. That pt is long gone, our goal now should be to make their job of subverting our democracy as difficult as possible.

I don't think this passes even the sniff test. The shifting policies of the US seem to be driven by politicians, not some "intelligence agencies" boogeymen.

"No permanent allies; only permanent interests." A pithy summation of realpolitik.

I don't know what that means as far as what I was saying goes.

Y'know, re-reading the thread, neither do I. Sorry for the noise.

>The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about

Can't any member of congress simply use the speech and debate clause to make what they know a matter of congressional record?

Sure. But then they won’t be given any further classified information.

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