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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I suppose on his mind this might fit with some sort of fight with the "deep state".

Beyond that I would just chalk it up to some inherent capriciousness... bordering on concerning instability.

You've addressed the President's possible motivations. But, do you think Snowden should be pardoned? Just curious. (It's a tough call. I've not decided my own position on the matter.)

Yes, he should be pardoned. Just because toddlers can't distinguish the nuance between the following the law and discretionary breaking of it, it doesn't mean the rest of us with developed prefrontal cortex have to put up with spending taxpayer dollars on a trial just to show consistency.

People are more concerned about other people showing us shady things intelligence community does, than what Edward Snowden did. When intelligence community shouldn't be doing things Congress doesn't know about, which it does.

Thank you and the others for giving forthright answers!

Depends, how bad was Prism exactly?

Not very. https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...

Uhh, six years after that article, the justice system found PRISM had been commonly used unconstitutionally.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi...

I'd say that's pretty bad.

My article says that PRISM isn't what Snowden claimed it to be. Your article also does not dispute it. The issue that your article discusses is searches about Americans conducted on data collected from non-Americans outside the US (via Section 702). This is not mass surveillance on Americans.

Edit: We're having this conversation in two places. Consolidated in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175476

It is giving recorded information on most Americans to the FBI who then used it unconstitutionally against Americans.

It was never the NSA who was going to arrest you; this is what mass surveillance on Americans looks like.

What the NSA is doing is wrong and edward should be pardoned, but he has said himself he is fine with a fair trial in court (fair is the key word here). So even if you are undecided on the pardoning you have to agree he should be given trial in the US unless for some weird reason you love the NSA that much.

He can never get a fair trial in the current state of our government, he better just stay where he's at and hopefully Trump or a future government will pardon him and welcome him back like the hero he is.

I think it's debatable whether he should be pardoned for leaking the domestic spying information (I don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first), but he leaked information that had nothing to do with that. For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to. My personal theory is that he just gathered as much information as he could get his hands on to give to China, then went back and looked through the data to try and retroactively justify what he did.

>For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to.

When did he give them what information exactly?

>don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first

The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels.

Besides, the fact that the NSA was operating surveillance programs at that scale implies that the brass had some awareness of what was going on, so I am not sure what the "proper channels" would even look like for Snowden.

I can't comment on the parent, but here are some disclosures of international capability that Snowden could have kept to himself:

- RAMPART-A

- Anything collected and shared by Five Eyes would have originated overseas. There's quite a bit of GCHQ material, such as Karma Police

- NSA ability to cross airgaps in China

- NSA Core (undercover human agents tapping China, South Korea and Germany) and TAREX (target exploitation running that out of embassies)

- NSA MonsterMind

All of these are only deployed overseas and there are many more such documents. Some have unredacted names of regular people who run these programs, and pieces of info that're miscellany to you and me, but gold to state intelligence services. Both Wikipedia and Lawfare distinguish between Snowden's disclosures of perhaps-unconstitutional domestic surveillance and probably-consitutional international surveillance:

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

https://www.lawfareblog.com/snowden-revelations

First, Snowden did not have much of a chance to selectively leak documents. He gave basically everything he had to journalists and they've sorted it out.

Second, while many of those actions may be constitutional, citizens should know what their government is capable of and deploying against people. And arguing whether a certain program was constitutional seems pointless when they never get punished.

He never gave any information to any foreign government, what he has let go was directly released to American and European magazines/newspapers. Anything else is conspiracy theory garbage.

> When did he give them what information exactly?

He gave them the information when he got to China.

> The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels.

I think if he had, he'd have a single shred of evidence that he had actually tried. I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to.

>He gave them the information when he got to China

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

>I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to.

Any such email would be classified information, and he destroyed his copies of all that information before leaving Hong Kong

Snowden is charged with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person, under the 1917 Espionage Act. His unauthorized disclosures of classified information caused grave damage to the national security of the United States and allowed enemies of the United States to better conceal their communications and activities.

I do not think Snowden deserves a pardon. Edward Snowden should be extradited to the United States to receive a trial and an appropriate sentence.

Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden. On the balance maybe he still deserves prison, but denying the positives of what Snowden did is disingenuous.

I'm uncertain here, but my gut tells me that potential positive and negative effects of whistleblowing are so hard to predict and fully attribute (they tend to be at a global geopolitical scale where lots of other cofounding factors are involved), that we should judge whistleblowers on their underlying motivations instead. Was the whistleblower/leaker motivated purely by a desire to improve the welfare of their nation's citizens? If so, the person should be praised as a selfless patriot. If there were other motivations, like personal gain, they're potentially a traitor.

Why I'm not certain about this:

- What kind of other actions does this philosophy of "the motivation justifies the ends" lead to? Assassinating political leaders suddenly seems on the table...

- What if the whistleblower is motivated by the welfare of the citizens of the world, rather than just of their own nation? I guess you can be a traitor to your country and a hero to humanity (see Nazi Germany etc etc)

Does it really matter? He revealed unconstitutional information to the press, all very forgiveable by the 1st amendment rights of every citizen. However, since the patriot act we live in only a semblence of a democracy, closer to that than an authoritarian government but unlimited surveillance is certainly on the list of things that is very very very good for when the government has started to get some momentum towards a dictatorship. the same despotic government our current administration seems to be trying to drag us kicking and screaming towards

The principle is pretty simple: any person that has evidence that the U.S. government is violating the U.S. Constitution should report it to the American people. If there is an official channel for reporting it, they should try that first (as Snowden did), but that is totally optional.

Any damage that results is the fault of the people that chose to violate the Constitution, and not the fault of the whistleblower. The violators should be imprisoned in almost every case, and probably even have their citizenship revoked.

Snowden should have be granted a pardon, become a universally respected American hero, and receive a medal.

Snowden's exile in Russia proves that Americans are too ignorant of their own constitution and the principles behind it to do the right thing for him. But he played his part flawlessly and history will grant him the title of American hero.

1. There's nothing about this whistleblower principle that would lead anyone to believe that assassination is fair game. Revealing constitutional violations = whistleblowing; that's it.

2. If there is no violation of the U.S. Constitution, then there is no whistleblowing to be done. Spying on foreign citizens is not a violation of the U.S. Constitution, for example, and so it should not be protected in the same way.

(Whether Americans should support a constitutional amendment that protects foreign people from American spying is another matter.)

Hard cases make bad law and all that. There's no easy way to construct a good general rule here.

Yeah very fair point, though (and?) ideally you'd want to be able to provide some heuristic for citizens to use to predict how their actions will be judged, to help them decide whether leaking is the right move or not.

Easy to forget this. Before Snowden, any claims I made to my family and non tech friends of government surveillance were met with incredulousness and had me branded as a conspiracy theorist.

Snowden vastly changed the conversation for everyday people. He's a hero.

I don't think so. Wasn't it common knowledge that the Government had access to emails via ISPs and shredder well before Snowden's revelations? What was revealing, I guess was some of the technical details of how it was being done.

It was "common knowledge" in the right circles, but that's not enough for a court to find that you have standing to bring suit when the government gets to claim national security against discovery requests.

In fact the lawsuit around Room 641A fizzled because the accuser didn't 'really know' what was happening in the NSA room that had split off copies of backbone fiber trunks running into it and the government didn't have to provide an explanation. So unable to prove standing.

Snowden's revelations lead to actual case law saying that quite a few of the actions of the NSA were unconstitutional, given actual documentation from the government describing their actions.

He jumped to a conclusion, not realizing that the NSA had plenty of perfectly legal reasons to have split off copies of backbone fiber trunks.

A great example is point #4, "Some beautiful misdirection", in https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everythin... discussed 3 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828

That's some ingenious stuff that is 100% legal.

Plus, it's not as if foreign data doesn't cross the USA. The USA is the best path from China to France.

Maybe they'd really prefer to take the public relations hit of everybody thinking that they spy on Americans.

Pre-Snowden nobody took the people pointing the risk out seriously. Snowden was what took the conversation from Conspiracy Theory to "Conspiracy Well Known Facts".

Not really. There were murmurs, talk of a secret room with fiberoptic splitters at an AT&T datacenter in San Francisco, lots of rumors but most of it was never confirmed

The existence of this facility (as well as others) was confirmed.

https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-klein/ (NSA Leak Vindicates AT&T Whistleblower)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A (Room 641A)

> Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.

That's what they want you to think. :-)

There's also point #4, "Some beautiful misdirection", in https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everythin... discussed 3 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828

Maybe they'd really prefer to take the public relations hit of everybody thinking that they spy on Americans.

Part of why Google decided to speed up their timeline on encrypting traffic across their internal network is because they learned the NSA tapped into it.

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch within a month" or something like that.

Snowden's powerpoint decks clearly implied that NSA had tapped Google's transatlantic fibers. But it also seems to suggest that they weren't getting access to Google data from Google, because if they were, they wouldn't need to grep for some guy's email address in a packet capture and display it as a hex dump. Some NSA guy thought it was a big enough accomplishment to document in a presentation that they had managed to grep for gmail.com and surface one pretty useless RPC body, which tells me that their access to and understanding of the data was very poor.

FYI the slide in question appears here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...

Why were they pissed at the NSA? I thought Google cooperated with the NSA to provide access. Or did I misunderstand the situation?

There is nothing in Snowden's leaks to support this conclusion, much to suggest that it is false, and Google flatly denies cooperating with the NSA in clear, non-weasel-word terms.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

Well there you go. I guess it was my own assumption based on one of the PRISM slides that show when surveillance for each company started.[1] I assumed it involved cooperation.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

Well, that's court-ordered production of data based on given search terms. Being ordered by a court to do something is not the opposite of "cooperation" but it's not the same thing either.

What Googlers were angry about was the stuff in the leaks that showed they were tapping undersea cables.

I see. So they were aware of some data collection, because the court forced them to, but there was other collection going on they weren't aware of.

Yeah, I was also there at that time. Again, to me the revelation was not that they were doing it but instead the specific details of how they were doing it.

To expand on this, it means conversations about surveillance get to actually happen instead of being instantly derailed with "well we don't know it's happening".

Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden.

The TSP was revealed in 2005, broader surveillance was broadly acknowledged publicly by the government in 2007, and a big, overt part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2009 was retroactive legalization of much of it. All of this well before Snowden.

Seriously? I've never met anyone inside the business (tech/internet) who didn't believe governments were engaging in mass surveillance. This is going back to the 80s fwiw.

Leaking classified data without authorization was reckless and unlawful. There are already stringent safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the intelligence community's surveillance powers. Oversight of US surveillance programs is exercised by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The purpose of these congressional committees is to oversee and make continuing studies of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to submit to Congress appropriate proposals for legislation and report to Congress concerning such intelligence activities and programs, to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States. In fact, there is no country in the world where surveillance activities are subject to more regulations and checks than the United States.

And yet all those safeguards still led to a program that the courts declared unconstitutional, and only with Snowden's leaked documents.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi...

If you were the real Henry Kissinger, I think your disapproval would be a great reason to pardon Snowden.

If this were youtube I could at least be certain that an account named "HenryKissinger" spouting authoritarian drivel was a novelty account. Here? I legitimately don't know.

In his profile

> about: Not related to the real Henry Kissinger.

It's pretty standard for novelty accounts to put disclaimers in their details, so I don't think that provides much information one way or another.

Oh, I interpreted the "not a novelty account" option to be "actually Henry Kissinger", which that disclaimer means it probably isn't.

Yeah, my post was underconstrained. I meant to consider possibilities 1 and 2:

    1. Parody role-play of Henry Kissinger ("novelty")
    2. Unironic tribute to Kissinger in the username
    3. Actually Henry Kissinger

Name checks out.

The national security of the United States was placed in jeopardy by the people who violated the Constitution. The Snowden Revelations should have resulted in half a dozen people being put to death for treason.

> <Person I despise> does something I like > No! It doesn't matter, his motives must have been terrible.

I will never understand this kind of reaction, when you get so emotional about something that all pragmatism goes out the window.

What a reductionist argument. OC’s argument is perfectly reasonable considering trump’s history and his previous actions. I’ll never understand why certain people feel the need to feign ignorance about reality and make false assertions that such criticism comes from disdain, and not from a simple observation of past behavior.

Broken clock and all that. Trump didn't even issue the pardon yet. He's despised for a reason and a few reasonable things he happened to say or do don't outweight all the horrible things he did.

It has a name now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome

> The use of the term has been called part of a broader GOP strategy to discredit criticisms of Trump's actions.

I agree, TDS is a pretty catchy term when you want to deflect from trumps corruption.

Are you a mind reader?

I am not.

It would be a great way to stick it to the intelligence community which has been doing some questionable things in their investigation of Russian collusion. E.g. fabricating evidence for FISA warrants (see recent guilty plea)[1]

Amazingly HN loves to crap all over FISA warrants, but when it's used against Trump, nothing but crickets.

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-clinesmith-fbi-lawyer-ple...

Clearly there is a deep state. Snowden is proof.

I don't think anything in the Snowden leaks really indicates any sort of hidden leadership.

The 'deep state' concept requires more than just secret acts that people don't like.

The context is a deep state out against Trump. Not a deep state that Trump and his allies are entrenched in...

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