A CIA hacker’s revenge
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
If he actually did get caught with what they say he did, then sure he deserves to go down but it's weird how hyper focused they are on painting this guy as the devil in his personal life. It seems like it's because their isn't any real evidence present to nail this guy. It's all circumstantial and worse, in ways that could very easily be planted/faked.
That said, it sounds like they caught him fair and square with actual evidence (the backdoor, the access logs, and the versioning of the leak) and the mistrial was the result of a confused jury.
Even ignoring his troubling sexual history and the chat logs, it sounds pretty legitimate.
As someone else noted, it seems statistically unlikely that so many people who the government brings national security cases against are pedophiles.
One of the following must be true: a surprising number of all government workers in intelligence are pedophiles, pedophilia and propensity to leak government secrets are highly correlated, or the government is planting evidence.
I'm not going to discount the mental health correlation possibility, because being crazy enough to work for the government and then ineptly leak classified materials... doesn't bode well for an individual's baseline mental stability.
Yeah, this was my question reading this piece as well. This article overwhelmingly reads like uncritical character assassination. I think whether the guy was a giant dick to coworkers should be tangential at best, if not outright irrelevant, but definitely not the centerpiece of the story, and yet it is.
The workplace hostility, the various office personas, the drudgery, humiliation and bureaucracy even the VM that's triple encrypted isn't unusual for even the most benign cybersecurity researcher. Ironically, the lapse in OPSEC isn't either. Time and time again, people who are doing bad things always seem to have a lapse in OPSEC that is routinely double underlined in these types of articles.
And of course, the last typical bit is the Child Sexual Abuse Material being found. Isn't it something that when the NSA/CIA/FBI wants to take someone down they always seem to find CSAM? I'd hazard that this approach is used when the state's most "powerful and prominent police agency" isn't able to decrypt/bypass what they're truly after. Consider the frustrations they encountered with DPR[1]. another commenter quipped, "sprinkle a little CP in there and call it a day". After all, doesn't this fit the MO of the FBI/CIA when you consider the Stonewall investigations[2]? Find something that is absolutely anathema to the public, charge the suspect with that. Not surprised.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-too...
It's not mentioned in the WP article but automated planting of the aforementioned material on a target computer was one of the capabilities they sold.
Just because they are focusing on his atypical and undesirable character attributes doesn't mean that it's not a credible work.
Ideological cases like Ellsberg, Snowden, and Manning are the exception.
Looking back at everything that transpired with Snowden boggles the mind. I still have no idea if he's an adversarial plant by some government (meant to sow distrust, etc) or if he was genuine from the get-go. It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things, and the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder.
He really does try to inform the People.
They say there is a lot less variety in stores, but life is really quite normal. Except, everybody really makes sure what to say (and what not), especially to strangers. They report difficulties - or impossibilities - with money transfers.
I have a friend with decades of business ties to Russia, he and his (Russian) wife live in Germany but he has a residency-type visa (whatever it's called) for Russia and even after the war flew there several times, via Turkey. There still are quite a few businesses present, smaller ones I think. I fully support Ukraine, but personally I'm content with those kinds of contacts remaining.
They - several interviewed people independently - reported that they did not experience any problems from normal Russian people or from the authorities but where treated normally.
I think if Snowden just removes himself from public view and does not talk about politics and the... special operation, he'll be just fine, as will all the other foreigners.
EDIT: Found it: "Westerners Who Stayed in Russia Find Home Transformed By War" (published yesterday) https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/06/05/westerners-who-sta...
Note that "Moscow Times" is not aligned with the Russian government, and is registered in Russia as "foreign agent"- Please don't let the name deceive you. As you can see from their articles, they freely report on the war and the impact of the sanctions and other stuff. There Russian language website has even more detailed articles about Russian internal things, quite unfiltered (Google Chrome can auto-translate, if necessary).
> None of the Westerners in Russia interviewed by The Moscow Times said they had feared for their physical safety since the start of the war. Nor did they report any instances of hostility from authorities or ordinary Russians.
> But the military campaign has undoubtedly cast a cloud over their relationships with others, making them more cautious when voicing opinions.
You are correct.
Understandably, the Russian authorities blamed the West for the drop in the ruble exchange rate, and depreciation for inflation. At the same time, they reacted by enforcing capital controls, restricting convertibility, offering more rubles to support bank liquidity and raising interest rates on ruble deposits.
Shortly afterward, they also announced that in the future Moscow would honor its euro- and dollar- denominated debts, but would ask “hostile countries” to pay for their energy imports in rubles. Some dubbed this policy the “ruble clause.”
The authorities can now boast that the ruble has stabilized. By the beginning of April, one euro bought 85 rubles, marking a slightly stronger exchange rate than before the war began. Western operators are perhaps not overly interested in Russian monetary policy. But what about the ruble clause? Is it little more than a flash in the pan with little practical relevance, or should we take it more seriously?
It doesn't mean much. If I remember it right, back in USSR time, the ruble rate was about 1.6 for a dollar. Yet people couldn't buy toilet paper whenever they needed it. There was a severe deficit of pretty much everything. It's not going to be like in the 90s - the economy is very different, but sugar shortages just three-four weeks into the war is not a good sign. It will get tough for Russians, which is not beneficial to anyone - not for them, nor for Europeans, Americans, or Chinese.
Yes, there will be a lot of money in hard currency from oil and gas, but without access to high-tech & parts (which not many countries would sell to Russia), it's gonna pull the entire country into stagnation.
Update... no wait, dollar was about 60 kopeeks, so for 1 dollar you'd get 1.6 soviet roubles, I was right, no?
Was what he disclosed true or not? In the end, that's all that matters.
We saw something similar recently with the leak of the SCOTUS Roe v Wade opinion. There was a huge push to move the discussion from how controversial the opinion was & what the fallout would be towards "leaks are bad & we have to find who did this".
Agreed; but…
In your example, it’s both. In that case, it’s a completely legal and expected part of the process for the justices to decide things, even if it’s things you don’t like.
In the case of Snowden or Manning or others, they were leaking something that the government says it does not do, should not do, and expressly illegal things.
So it’s not a great example. While we likely agree on abortion; Roe has always been on “shakey legal ground” (RBG’s words) and the 7 justices that decided it could not agree if it was because of the 9th or 14th amendments, and offered no explanation how one or both of these superseded the 10th in this scenario. If you haven’t, read the full opinion, do, it gives insight into what is going on… legally anyhow.
So as to your example, it wasn’t a whistleblower or shooting the messenger to find the scotus leaker - it’s literally protecting the sanctity of that institution’s process.
If you can’t imagine a scenario you would be upset a decision you agreed with was leaked in order to bully justices or influence a coming election, you aren’t thinking hard enough.
It was a hot mess in the media for a few months about how the reporters he fed stuff to was going to release it all. Then, once the story died down, you didn't hear anything and there were no more releases. At least none that were so groundbreaking, they hit the media. You could say the media was culpable and simply ignored subsequent releases though.
Is there somewhere you can go to see what's been released? I'm still under the impression the bulk of what he said he had has yet to be released.
Most of what he took he gave to reporters so it wouldn't be released, that's why he didn't release everything online.
The several organizations he gave information to continued to go through it for a couple of years, periodically releasing stories based on the disclosure. They all slowly stopped funding going through the documents, until only the Intercept was left.
They continued with a limited staff until 2019, and it's end is one of the reasons both Poitras and Greenwald have left the organization.
For what has been released, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
We assume an impartial news organization will investigate Coke and Pepsi equally, so if the org comes out with a bunch of stuff about Coke acting badly, we figure that Coke really is bad, otherwise the org would have gone after Pepsi too, or both. On the other hand if a less scrupulous news org one day receives a mysterious package with a ton of bad stuff about Coke and just verifies and prints it, then Pepsi could be good or bad or anything, but most people will think they're good because of all the bad stuff only coming out about Coke.
This isn't a competition between two corporations, this is about democracy and people's rights. What is this other side you would like to see presented more "impartially"?
PS: [a completely fictional scenario] if a leak disclosed that Coca-Cola was secretly implanting mind-controlling substances via their soft drinks, and that these substances made every consumer broadcast their most intimate thoughts to Coke marketing execs, you should publish this and damn Coke. Who cares about what Pepsi is doing? Their turn will come.
But in the context of the thread, the common thread is clear. Negative information, even if true, can be chosen selectively to attack an enemy.
I'm not even sure what "selectively attack an enemy" means in this context. What Snowden disclosed was unequivocally bad, who cares what his motives were? We are not comparing soft drinks.
That is part of the context. It might be one person's entire notion of the context. However, different people, all reasonable, may have different contexts.
Not realizing or recognizing this can contribute to thinking someone else is "off topic". But on what basis can one person claim that someone else is not on topic?
In these comments, myself (and others too) include information (and disinformation) tactics as part of the context here too.
I remember the trend on HN back when the Snowden leaks occurred. It wasn't palatable back then to express your views -- shooting the messenger, casting doubts on his motivations -- and most people were rightly appalled by the spying going on on Americans.
Thinking differently is a dangerous trend against whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are a good thing.
Unequivocally good. Yes, I used that word you dislike.
Your comments are mean-spirited. This is what you intended, right? To attack me?
Do you intend this as an insult directed at me?
Yes, I separate out different comments intentionally, because I think they warrant separate points.
Yes, shooting the messenger and casting doubts on his motivations were (and are) tactics used when a message reflects poorly on someone or some thing.
For what it is worth, in my comments around here, I'm not using these tactics as a way to deflect criticism away from institutions that Snowden criticizes. There was a huge breach of public trust in the NSA.
At the same time, it is interesting and important to understand Snowden's motivations.
It sounds like you are having cognitive dissonance. It seems to me that you have fixated on your definition of the context. In so doing, other perspectives aren't making sense to you. Having more flexibility might help you understand.
I interpret you as saying the act of disclosing this information was "unequivocally bad". Fair?
If so, no.
From the Apple dictionary, unequivocal means "leaving no doubt; unambiguous".
Please don't take this comment as "for" or "against" Snowden. Rather, please interpret this comment as "for" critical thinking and clear writing.
Students of philosophy and ethics, as well as many thoughtful people, know that weighing right and wrong is hardly simple. There are many schools of thought. Whatever one's views might be, it is clear that different people have different views of the ethics of Snowden's leaks.
For example, a utilitarian style philosophy could easily argue that Snowden's leaks resulted in more benefit than harm.
Your comment is sarcastic and unhelpful to any meaningful conversation.
I can see it doesn't matter to you about Snowden's motives.
However, many informed and reasonable people care about his motives. Perhaps this can be a motivation to think more and dig deeper.
In the real world voters are at the mercy of cognitive and other biases, tend to blame the current government no matter what, and a leak's importance depends as much on media attention and trivialities like how close the leak is to an election as it depends on actual merit.
So, even true leaks can be effective tools to remove a government you don't like.
Suppose some government opposes the U.S. in some important way. That government then gets voted out at the next election due to a leak. Would you care if that leak came from a CIA mole? I would. I doubt the CIA would investigate and reveal foreign corruption or illegal overreach purely out of the goodness of its heart.
However the actual political results were mostly favorable to Republicans. Trump himself popularized the term "deep state" and criticizing it was a key part of his administration's PR.
Russia benefited, not only by getting Republicans in power, but also by embarrassing and casting doubt on U.S. intelligence, a year before Russia's invasion of Crimea. Now in the current Ukraine war it's obvious how vital NATO intelligence is to resisting Russian aggression.
I don't think much actually changed at the NSA or any other agency. Trump didn't actually care about the ethics, he just thought it was some huge, personal injustice that he couldn't command everyone in the executive branch the way he could in his businesses. He didn't even pardon Snowden.
So overall the only changes were political and it all worked out great for Russia. Maybe Russia didn't plan it but they sure benefited from it, with the public and the media doing the heavy lifting. Something to keep in mind the next time some theoretically nonpartisan government scandal appears.
Yes, and it doesn't have to be that dramatic either. Even relatively small shifts in public opinion can matter when it comes to specific areas and/or legislation and/or funding.
They can claim "Snowden was a KGB mole!" but if they hadn't been doing such nasty things, there wouldn't have been something so damaging for the mole (or a disgruntled ex employee, whatever) to disclose. There will always be dirty laundry to disclose of course -- nobody is 100% clean -- but this was major.
This is classic "shooting the messenger".
> I honestly don't understand your reply, could you reword it please? Thanks.
I also find it confusing.
Here's my understanding: the commenter is asking something akin to this question: Why did Snowden's deem his disclosures to be necessary? Based on my understanding of Snowden, he deemed his disclosures necessary because he views these NSA programs as unjust and/or undemocratic and would continue (and probably get worse) if not revealed.
>> Everything else definitely never ought to be clear or you have a problem with arbitrary decision making agency out of hand.
I'm unclear on what this sentence as a whole means. First, I wonder if "never ought" was a typo and the commenter meant just "ought". Second, I'd guess that "arbitrary decision making agency out of hand" probably was meant to be "arbitrary agency decision making out of hand", suggesting that the NSA was overstepping its bounds.
Incorrect. One person -- or one group -- or one ideology -- doesn't get to decide all that matters for everyone.
Who "gets" to "decide" what in your reply? Please be specific.
>> Incorrect. One person -- or one group -- or one ideology -- doesn't get to decide all that matters for everyone.
> Your reply is worded so generally and vaguely I don't even understand what you mean.
I know the feeling. I've struggled to understand what you write as well.
Yes, I was making a general point. When you wrote "In the end, that's all that matters." you are claiming that the truth (or lack thereof) of what Snowden said is all that matters. This is an overly simplistic and narrow view. Such a view disregards the rest of the situation, including ethics, impacts over different time scales, disinformation, and geopolitics.
What are you a sock puppet? Everyone knows about deniable ops in the Special Forces world, assassinations are not something new, what makes you think Edward Snowden isnt telling the truth?
Personally I dont think he's exposed that much, but then he may not have been in the thick end of it.
Just read some of the stuff published by ex-military, and if you were a kid growing up around those sort of people, you probably got to hear about it.
The vast majority of the population, less than 1% are like Mother Theresa, which means _everyone_ _has_ _secrets_ and today, science can extract those secrets against your will without you even knowing.
AI detecting subconscious bias in judges https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/17/18186674/daniel-chen-mach... is just the tip of the iceberg.
> the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder
Even journalists & news organisations including state broadcasters dont realise, they are giving away secrets at the subconscious level. There will come a point when they want to shut up shop because of what they are implicated in.
AI is an arm's race that has no boundaries, and the winner takes it all!
> What are you a sock puppet?
In case you haven't seen the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
In addition to that, saying "It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things" is hardly a convincing argument that an account is a sock puppet, which I'm defining as "A pseudonymous online identity adopted to further the user's real-life interests or to agree with sentiments the user has already expressed online." (per Wordnik)
I have seen no credible evidence that he didn't do this for ideological reasons.
Too bad, really, he took one for the team and we failed to support him.
He was an Aaron Swartz type who just wanted information to be free. It is clear Snowden wasn't a mole. He just hated closed-doors spying on innocent people, & having their privacy invaded at every instance. His legacy will not be forgotten[0]
Ego includes appealing to someone’s desires for sex, positions of power, or revenge - this case fits well end truly here.
Plus, far more of Manning's leaks were about the wars than the diplomatic cables.
The only evidence that is mildly convincing is that he accessed the same archive as the one uploaded though just because the leak might have came from a credential he created as an administrator doesn't necessarily tie it to him. Still from this it's a wonder anyone with talent wants to work for government - get paid less and possibly prosecuted if you leave on bad terms.
Yeah, I scoffed at this part.
What are the chances someone working in OpSec would leave his personal devices so insecure? Either the CIA had much more access than what this article claims, or the article is missing details.
If a CIA employee infects a foreign finance minister's device with malware so US can obtain unfair advantages, he's an unsung hero.
If the CIA does something against another country it’s still illegal.. just not inside the US.
The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?
Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray.
I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about.
> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets.
Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.
Citation needed. What a ridiculous thing to say.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cybe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?
Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.
Are you kidding me?
Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.
Of course it was. Read Chomsky.
out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak.
At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !!
How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.
You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed.
Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.
Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
(To be fair, most countries have vague laws and corrupt courts so having a court in country X decide that someone should be executed is hardly any better, in practice, than having Barack Obama order the execution.)
Bullshit. Millions of people have directly lost their lives due to the actions of the American government and citizens. Where were the criminal proceedings and due process for "collateral" damage in dozens of countries worldwide?
Said employee enjoys immunity from prosecution in the United States.
The US prosecutes foreign hackers operating on behalf of other countries all the time. They're rarely apprehended for obvious reasons, but the US is playing a very dangerous game with the liberty of their own hackers.
All said, most of it is political posturing and I don't expect people to be eradicated or disappeared but that is a very real possibility in some countries.
When it becomes "fun" is when you're at Defcon and you see people that also recognize you, but both of you know you're on opposite sides.
So the US isn't playing any game that other countries aren't. Unless you work in the US govt. in one of these agencies doing this type of work, respectfully, you are looking at it from a tainted lens.
There shouldn't be any supranational entity. In a democracy, governments should be accountable for their doing.
As in the USA, certain acts that individuals do in China and Russia are prohibited in their respective regimes and yet practiced by their foreign intelligence agencies. We agree fully.
That is not the point you were originally making. You seemed, facetiously, to be confused that behavior prohibited to US citizens was permitted to the US intelligence apparatus.
State-state interactions are bound by different rules & norms than person-person or person-state interactions.
Just a recomendation for your reading list since I was thinking a similar pithy comment and figure you might also enjoy that book like I did.
Trying to take moral reasoning as it applies to individuals and apply it to states just doesn't work.
"But WikiLeaks had also shown, quite recently, a willingness to be a mouthpiece for foreign intelligence services: in 2016, the site had released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee which had been stolen by hackers working on behalf of the Kremlin."
The DNC leak was an inside job and not a result of a "hack".
https://nypost.com/2017/08/15/new-report-claims-dnc-hack-was...
That's just a front for a think-tank: https://web.archive.org/web/20200930134745/https://www.atlan...
And CrowdStrike is so deeply involved with the DNC that they ended up lying for them: https://mate.substack.com/p/indicted-clinton-lawyer-hired-cr...
I wonder if that would be an advantage. You are a clear separation between work and life. No one is allowed to call or message you at home about work when you are out of the office.
Just be warned that season one ends on a cliffhanger, and season two is a year away (or more). I didn’t know that and found it frustrating.
Mhmm. Pray tell what oversight should make me believe this is true?
> Snowden and Manning were not seeking to blow the whistle on any one particular policy, in the manner that Ellsberg was; theirs was a more generalized disaffection, and the troves of data that they exposed were indiscriminate
Both good whistleblowers who I do not care what ideological principles inspired them.
> Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower.
I guess you have to be a good person to be a whistleblower in the CIA. Maybe that's why they don't hire good people.
This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.
Perhaps the most news-making program in that leak was something called "Marble Framework", and as I recall NSA whistleblower Bill Binney talked quite a bit about it in relation to Russiagate. I don't care about Russiagate, so let's search Google with 'verbatim' (under tools) on.
binney "marble framework" CIA -russiagate
So, here we get a lot of interesting results and a description of Marble Framework. Here's one source for example, not sure I agree with their characterization of Binney, who was at least trying to be responsible and follow the laws that banned mass domestic warrantless collection, and who seems like a decent person (plus B-tree tutorial) but at least this source discusses the central matter:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2017/04/14/why-cia-and-n...
> "Description: The Marble Framework is designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation when developing tools. When signaturing tools, string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop. This framework is intended to help us (AED) to improve upon our current process for string/data obfuscation in our tools. The framework utilizes pre and post-build execution steps to apply obfuscation to the tool. [CIA Marble Framework docs]"
This is a tool allowing for things like 'false flag' cyberattacks, such as planting malware that looks like it came from whoever - North Korea, Iran, etc. - but which reports back to CIA. Rather tellingly, this article doesn't even mention it. Nor does it dig into the issue of economic espionage, something the US government claims it never does. See the above source's discussion of something called 'Longhorn' for the counterexample.
The issue is this makes all the US government claims about 'detecting the signature of foreign hackers' in all manner of news reports completely suspect. How do we know they didn't put those signatures there themselves? Now they have a massive credibility problem (see also lies about WMDs in Iraq, etc.) - and that's something the New Yorker apparently doesn't want to dig into. Kind of pathetic really.
That is certainly one perspective you can have.
Another perspective is that if the DNC hadn't engaged in corrupt practices then foreign intelligence services wouldn't have anything to leak.
The purpose of the 2016 political email "leaks" was entirely embarrassment and to create the aura that the emails were proof of corruption.
"The 2016 Democratic primary wasn’t rigged by the DNC, and it certainly wasn’t rigged against Sanders."
so, i guess it was rigged
For example, the 45th President of the United States never won the popular vote, yet was elected. Was the election "rigged?" Well, no; the laws of the US do not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the post popular votes and they never have. Or, yes, because the laws of the US are stacked against the demonstrated will of the people via the vote.
It's the same with the DNC. The DNC leadership did some things that can be considered subjectively unsavory. But they broke no laws, nor party rules. The rules themselves do not favor a candidate like Sanders (the Democratic party tilts heavily towards something like seniority, especially relative to their peer major party; Sanders was an outlier who ran an outlier campaign).
The above article mentions leaked emails that bashed Sen. Sanders.
That is not an example of corruption.
There are many ways to rig an election without altering any of the votes cast. The clearest example is elections in one party states, where your only choice is to vote for the approved candidate. But there are much less overt ways too
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donna-brazile-wikilea...
Ethically weak? Sure.
No need to question anyone’s sincerity.
The reality is the emails were hacked and released in order to damage the Clinton campaign by a foreign power that wanted her to lose (or win but severely weakened). This is much more serious than some unseemly infighting within the DNC. Nothing in the Clinton emails was a crime, right?
>Brazile, on two separate instances, tipped off the Clinton campaign ahead of time on questions that might come her way at CNN events
It's pretty wild that you don't consider this corruption.
To me, when I first saw this news story, I felt it was one of the most shockingly corrupt things I had ever seen. The fact that you could see this news and find that it "would hardly qualify as corruption"... this gives me hope that philosophers can gleefully debate reality forever without messing things up by accidentally tripping over the truth. No sarcasm implied!
I struggle to think of a situation as public as this that could be more corrupt.
This also resulted in the DNC apologizing to Bernie. [1]
And did it not result in the DNC chair CEO, CFO, and Communication Director resigning? [2]
With actual email proof, public apology, and resignations it seems to me that there was more than just an aura of corruption. Or do you still disagree?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/he...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-dnc-statemen...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/dnc-ceo-resigns-...
Party leadership is allowed to have preferences; the party isn't the public, it's a party. The primary election's purpose is to show the party who the public favors (because it is, ostensibly, politically-suicidal to run an unpopular candidate).
And in the end, the actual votes favored Clinton over Sanders. These votes may have been influenced by the party leadership suggesting to the rank-and-file that Clinton was a better candidate, but as it's not a general election that's well within their purview to do.
(Whether state machinery should be used to run elections for what is essentially a private political club is a great question that I think people should be asking about the way elections are structured in each state).
EDIT: punctuation correction.
If people think it means the party doesn't reflect the will of the voters... Not exactly. That's always been the structure of the Democratic party. Popular will is tempered by party leadership. That's baked into the structure of the Democratic party itself. The party that lacks that kind of tempering is the GOP, and as a result it tends to run populists who may or may not actually have any government qualification (one won the Presidency in 2016; a couple have won state governorship over the years).
The resulting apologies and resignations were an attempt to reconcile with voters who, fundamentally, did not understand how the party they support actually works. No shame in that; it's a big and complex machine. But it's never been a machine that just reflects the unmodified will of the people who toss ballots into the box with a 'D' next to their name in the primaries. That's one source of signal the party uses to decide who it will run.
To give another example: in 2008, in response to the Florida party leadership running their primary earlier than the national committee authorized them to run it, the committee stripped all the Florida delegates of their vote in the national convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Florida_Democratic_presid...). Then, it compromised (at its discretion) by seating them but only counting half of each of their votes. That is the nature of the power the democratic party national leadership has to wield at its discretion, without oversight, as per its charter.
People just don't know this because people don't know the parties.
This would have been fine the DNC came out and said that this is what they are doing. But the DNC has explicitly stated that is unbiased in action (in the [0] of my earlier post) and then they go and do the opposite. This is just plain corruption.
If the contents of the food product you just bought are not the same as the label of the product then fines are levied against the company that sold it.
If anything the party always staying out of primaries would be a much larger issue.
Being truthful isn’t the goal, achieving the parities political goals is. Gerrymandering for example is a perversion of the core idea of democracy, but failing to use it when your opposition does is a problem. Politics exists in the real world and what should be often takes a back seat to what is.
"Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’..."
The DNC can say it's unbiased, but the rules-as-written allow broad, sweeping bias in how the Democratic party conducts its affairs. It's a party. They're biased by default. The whole point of parties is, basically, as you put it, "The peasants don't know what is good for them." There's a reason so many politicians throughout history have been anti-party. Unfortunately, they stick around and grow in power because they tend to work; focused political alignment beats unfocused noise consistently.
What happened with the Sanders campaign is a whole bunch of voters crashed headlong into a system that works other than the way they assume it does.
Which seems to fit the description of the events and my arguments. You argue that because court rules this as political promises (regularly broken and legal to do) then it was not corruption as the court saw it.
This then seems that politics can be legally corrupt (deceitful). You don't have to agree with me but I vote out candidates that lie even if they fit under my political umbrella. In my opinion this machevellian behavior will end up more painful down the line and it is better to lose one election than to have a broken political system long term.
Party leadership could very well prefer candidate X personally, but promote candidate Y strategically. Politics goes beyond the election into actually implementing the candidates proposals, which adds yet another dimension here.
It's a club and you ain't in it, isn't really going to get the young people to the polls.
https://libraries.wm.edu/exhibits/irrepressible-conflict-or-...
But sure, continue snarkily throwing away your vote, continue whining about disastrous elections. Who cares if you have to live in the society you threw away your vote in, as long as those snooty leadership preferred candidates suffer it's all worth it.
Every alleged slight the DNC made against Sanders would not have excluded him from the party nomination if voters had voted for him in the primary. But at the end of the day, the numbers didn't manifest.
It is also not uncommon, as we've seen, for leadership to resign after large hacks occur. The infiltration and subsequent resignation of corporate leadership after data leaks does not indicate that there was any corruption. It may indicate some level of incompetence, but not corruption.
If the party claimed that they are in-fact biased against Bernie, as the evidence mostly shows, then this would have been fine. However, if the party claimed it was neutral but yet secretly worked against Bernie then this seems to me like it is corruption.
Or do you disagree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#Party_affiliati...
The key thing is that conservatives don't care about corruption itself, just the opportunity to smear their opponents.
I'd be more than fine with even more sunshine exposing the workings of the DNC and addressing what was found. Can you say the same about the GOP?
Edit: I'd like to be proven wrong, so tell me what I missed.
I read no such implication.
Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
> Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
Yes, most formally unaffiliated voters are still close to single ticket voters.
That is not my belief nor the point of my post. I am only stating that the way the NewYorker looks at this is not the same how some other people look at it.
Also I'm not from the US nor do I really care about US politics, I do love pointing out obvious things like these :).
There was no leakage of GOP emails, therefore there was nothing to leak, i.e., no corruption of concern.
If I misread your intent I apologize, it can be challenging in the most benign situations and it's more so tricky when its a subject of disagreement.
But my claim still unfortunately holds. The DNC leak was a political hit job that only intended to smear the opposing party. A better example is Hunter Biden -- his employment really was with corrupt intents and if there really was evidence that corruption was rewarded it should be prosecuted.
But if that very concern is legitimate, then it should be applied to all. There's plenty of evidence of that a certain son-in-law engaged in far more egregious affairs and there is not a peep about that.
So I couldn't help but read your comment as yet another "gotcha" that fuels this false narrative.
'You have nothing to hide so what's wrong with everyone checking out what's there in your search history and what's on your hard drives.'
You sound like the same people that want to make encryption illegal: politically naive and maliciously, selectively ignorant.
Next you'll be arguing for less oversight for the 3 letter agencies because they should have strong privacy rights!
Is there a stronger argument to be used in place of that one?
Quotes like this go completely unchallenged:
> Karen, the O.S.B. supervisor, later recalled. “That information getting out into a forum like that can hurt people and impact our mission. It’s a huge loss to the organization.”
What about the people who could be hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
How exactly was someone "hurt" because of said spyware?
>How did they reach this conclusion
The CIA (or any TLA) does not comment on ways & means of investigations. That's just silly to think they would as it would expose those ways & means.
I'm all for being critical of anything spoken out of which ever side of the mouth the CIA PR people are speaking, but I'm not sure you're arguments are really effective here.
What do you think the information gleaned from the targets is used for, if not to harm the targets or others? This is beyond the fact that you don't think the mere act of having spyware installed on your devices is hurtful?
Having spyware sucks, and I do the best of my ability to not let it get installed. However, random internet thiefs vs nation state operatives are not the same and I do not humor myself to think I am adequetely equipped to prevent it. If the CIA plants stuff on my, a US citizen's computer, then that is absolutely something to be pissed off about and they need to be punished for this behavior. However, I know in my personal life there is nothing they will find of value and it is ultimately an absolute waste of their time and resources. If some random internet thief also can make use of the US Gov't agency's spyware in a way that is harmful to me (stealing money, etc), then it's even worse as they TLA probably think "secret" backdoors are safe.
Correct. Leaked operational secrets, like say via spyware installed on devices, = people killed. Which brings me back to my original question:
> What about the people who could be hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
So why is the fact that this leak could also save lives not pointed out?
Did everyone who signs up for The New Yorker newsletter get this one, or was this another "targeted" "share"? ;-)
is this true? i don't think there has never been a definitive evidence or proof about this. just "journalistic evidence" (= news outlets repeating the same info without any real evidence).
See another commenters article from Ars above.
Try a little thought experiment: substitute "China" for "USA" and ask yourself, would you believe claims by Chinese espionage agency official, repeated by numerous Chinese outlets? Even if he wasn't known for committing crimes, like James Clapper is?
No, the "evidence" was never released. If I'm mistaken, I'd be grateful if you provided a link. If you make an assertion and claim you have secret evidence that you can't show it is exactly the same as making as assertion with no evidence.
You’d very rarely want to release this as it would compromise sources and methods. Due to the extreme public interest we do actually know the info came from the Dutch intelligence agency, who among other things were tapping the GRU’s security cameras.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/04/why-was-gru-using-open...
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/03/28/what-was-the-relations...
I do not know why it is, but the second anyone uses quotation marks like this, my trust in what they're saying instantly goes down by an order of magnitude
I don't see this as a personal problem
You may recall Clapper from his previous film, titled "I perjured myself before Congress and lied to the American public, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that damn Snowden kid." So take anything he says with an entire truckload of salt.
Edit: Source regarding his perjury - https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73...
Russiagate is QAnon for liberals.
Drone pilots don't destroy villages in Afghanistan, what is this nonsense.