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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> In September 2019, the United States filed a lawsuit against Snowden, who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA. The lawsuit alleged that Snowden published his book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review, in violation of his express obligations under the agreements he signed.

> The United States’ lawsuit did not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record. Rather, ... the government sought to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden ...

Even if you ignore all context regarding Snowden, how does this make any sense? The crime is to make classified information available to the public. Therefore, the government ... does not actually care to retract that information but will instead take your money.

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I think that is explained toward the end:

> This lawsuit is separate from the criminal charges brought against Snowden for his alleged disclosures of classified information. This lawsuit is a civil action, and based solely on Snowden’s failure to comply with the clear pre-publication review obligations included in his signed non-disclosure agreements.

This might provide some context on the non-disclosure agreements:

https://gizmodo.com/the-cia-has-to-approve-every-script-for-...

"The Americans was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA agent. And since he knows all kinds of stuff that the CIA would like to keep secret, they've reserved the right to censor anything they don't like on the show."

For anyone curious, the NDA signed prior to being given access to classified information is publicly available (link below).

Paragraph 5 spells the forfeiture of royalties pretty clearly, among other things.

SF-312: https://www.gsa.gov/cdnstatic/SF312-13.pdf?forceDownload=1

This might be the strongest argument for torrenting a book that I have ever come across.

This might be the strongest argument for monitoring all online traffic that governments have ever come across.

The 'crime' in this case is violation of the non-disclosure without submitting for pre-publication review.

The book may or not contain sensitive information.

It probably does not, otherwise, the government would be pushing to suppress it.

It could simply be a legal decision, in that, they may not actually have the ability or right to block it unless it does contain sensitive information, so this is all they can do. Or it could be possible the CIA/NSA for whatever reason actually want the book to be published. Or perhaps there is some kind of unknown policy that specifically forbids those from doing such things from profiting in such a manner and the policy is just being carried out. Nobody at the CIA is going to care about the money involved.

It is odd though.

> It probably does not, otherwise, the government would be pushing to suppress it.

The information is already released. Pushing to suppress it would be ineffectual while confirming that the book contains sensitive information.

"The information is already released."

We don't know that though. Snowden spent a lot of time doing what he did, and still has a ton of insider information.

Anything he talks about in terms of his experience as a contract is probably subject to the agreement.

If you work for Apple, and then write a book talking about all of the meetings, transactions, decision inputs, criteria for projects, talk about projects that never came to light etc. - they probably would probably sue and try to stop publication.

So it's hard to say exactly what is going on.

No, we know that the book has been published and the information in it has been released. That can't be stopped anymore, because the people who are interested in it already have it. What we don't know is whether the information that was released is valuable or not.

The only thing that trying to stop publication does is confirm to everyone that the information was valuable, giving credibility to it when before we didn't know how credible it was.

1. This isn't about classified vs. not classified, it's an NDA, just like you probably have with your employer

2. They can't prosecute Snowden because he's not in the US, but they can prevent him from profiting from the NDA violation in the US.

Perhaps they don't want to say in the court that Snowden was right. This might matter if things turn around in the future and the key people involved in the surveillance will be tried in a court for "crimes against humanity".

I would guess (hope) non-disclosure does not apply to criminal acts. Right?

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