Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely | Hacker News Reader

Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

covertactionmagazine.com

913 pointsonewheeltom466 comments

Whistleblowers act against power structures and that's the ultimate transgression as far as the power structure is concerned.

Transgressions in favor of the state are one thing, you'll get a slap on the wrist at most, even personal benefit and promotion in some cases, but transgressions against the state are what will provoke a real response. See, for example, the incredible vigor pursued against the people who released the collateral murder videos, and not the people in the video who violated the geneva conventions by murdering surrendering combatants. One transgressed in favor of the state, and one against. That's all that matters.

And of course the power structure has investigated itself and found no wrong-doing, something something "you can't surrender to a helicopter therefore we were fine to shoot them", or whatever. You can't get a hmmwv out to a site during a decade-long occupation to take them in, better shoot them I guess.

It is the same thing in corporations too: you can be incompetent or your project can fail, and that's fine as long as you don't rock the boat. It's actually probably worse to rock the boat and try to save a failing project, not only do you take it on yourself if it fails (which it likely will anyway, because they won't listen/the project is too far gone) but even if it succeeds you've stuck your head up and shown yourself to not be a yes-man. We want team players here, not someone who's going to kick up a fuss and argue with the boss or jump them on the ladder. Doesn’t matter if what you said was true or not, you don’t transgress the power structures.

That's exactly the problem. You know they are speaking an essential truth when you look at the feathers ruffled by Snowden, Assange and those who follow in their path.

They will get their due acclaim if we're lucky to have a more moral and free society in the future.

I am not a fan of the idea that "oh, the right people are mad, therefore it must have been a Good thing to do!" The same feathers would have been ruffled if Snowden had leaked our nuclear codes. The point is that he exposed wrongdoing, and the public agreed.

There are plenty of people who are punished by the state that the majority does not believe are "speaking an essential truth". For example: domestic terrorists.

> leaked our nuclear codes

You mean 00000000 ?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-...

This story is a bit convoluted, mostly true but incomplete as the Ars article tells it.

From what I can gather, the way the system was originally meant to work is that each Minuteman squadron had five Launch Command Centers (LLCs), each with two men in them who would have to simultaneously turn their keys. In order for the missiles to fly normally, at least two of the five LLCs would have to command a launch. The computers in the LLCs contained launch codes which would be sent to the missiles, and these codes were never set to 00000000.

Disconcertingly, there was a 'backup' system that was meant to enable if the LLC lost electrical power, a single-vote timer. The single-vote timer would allow a single LLC (two men) to launch the missiles after a delay of at least one hour (during which time the order could be countermanded by one of the four other LLCs.) Sounds okay, except according to John H. Rubel these timers could be set to zero. So if the main power went out and the LLCs were running on backup power, a single LLC could have commanded the launch, and if the single-vote timer were set to zero, there would be no countermanding it.

To supplement the above systems, McNamara commanded the installation of another system (perhaps erroneously) called PAL, which would be required to arm the missiles but was itself insufficient to launch the missiles. According to Dr. Bruce Blair, it was this 'PAL' system for which the codes were set to 00000000, rendering it effectively moot.

LCC*

Dammit, how did I fuck that up?

Freudian slip exposing the military-industrial complex.

If you hit the right targets, you will get pushback. Not everyone who is shooting at the target has the same intentions. Exposing the state's nature to the populace and maiming the populace aren't the same intentions.

A similarly blunt application of your position is that everyone punished by the state deserves it. Neither of us should rush to such extremes.

> A similarly blunt application of your position is that everyone punished by the state deserves it.

No, it doesn't. My position is that you have to address each on a case-by-case basis and there is no blanket way to say "ah X people are mad, therefore it was Good/Bad".

There's a difference between releasing everything, and only releasing stuff Russia wants you to release, like Assange was doing.

The proof that this argument is not the true reason why he was targeted, is that he was targeted for rape. When there is such a great discrepancy between means and meaning, it’s when motives are dishonest, couldn’t be admitted in public, and wouldn’t pass a common man’s test.

And the fact that three different women brought credible allegations and he avoided extradition on them until time ran out to prosecute him.

He's gross. He's also a journalist and a hacker, not a whistleblower.

You should watch collateral murder and a million other thing released that #1 show atrocities, and what you take is a red scare cry? Nothing to see here because Russia?

That's not true. Wikileaks was releasing all sorts of documents. I think the stuff about western governments just got a lot more attention because it broke through carefully crafted narratives and beliefs that people had about those governments. If some info about Russian corruption was released on Wikileaks, most Russians would be like "I already know most of these government people are corrupt, what is the news?"

I'm talking about Russia being all in on Trump in 2016, not about Russian corruption. Russia hacked the DNC and RNC. Only passed along the DNC to Assange, who released it. https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russi...

So it's basically Assange working as a political agent of Russia and knowing it.

Snowden actually got a lot of support. I remember that even some high profile corporate executives expressed support... Though a cynical take on that would be that it was just to cover their own asses because they wanted to make themselves (and their companies/platforms) look like victims of government surveillance as opposed to facilitators.

Do you have sources to those executives expressing support?

The support was indirect but it helped to divert attention away from the 'criminal' aspect of Snowden's actions... Which is more than Assange ever got.

For example, I remember Marissa Mayer saying something about it at a critical time after the story broke. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/davos-2014-...

I think that's why a lot of Americans perceive Snowden much more favorably than Assange even though Assange technically never broke any laws.

I don't really think this is true. I view him unfavorably because he avoided extradition on rape, sexual assault, molestation, and sexual coercion charges until time ran out.

I sympathize with him for cracking the admin password to help Manning get documents anonymously, but it doesn't overshadow that he'll never have a day in court for the women who brought credible criminal allegations against him.

I think this is true of other whistleblowers too. The "good" ones that break no laws and do everything by the book... but in the end, no one wants to hire them.

What makes it worse is, whistleblowers are trouble makers often. They are difficult people, at best like Snowden, they lay low. It makes it easier to dismiss them. Why? Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character. To whistleblow against a very powerful organisation, like the NSA, you have to be a pain in the ass. I don't mean that in a bad way. Normal sociable people just don't do that.

So when a whistleblower breaks out, and they get chastised there almost is never support from within the organization for them.

> whistleblowers are trouble makers often ... Why? Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character.

Most "troublemakers", as you call them, that I have known are people deeply moral and worried about their peers and society. I have seen two types, thou. Some have such a strong moral compass that will fight for what is right even knowing that it will have consequences. And the naive ones that think that, as they are morally right, the structures of power will recognize their sins and correct the situation. None of them were anti-social.

But that is just my personal experience.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

At times it's justified to be unreasonable

It’s rarely the comfortable choice however.

>Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character. To whistleblow against a very powerful organisation, like the NSA, you have to be a pain in the ass. I don't mean that in a bad way. Normal sociable people just don't do that.

You're making way too simplistic a generalization here. Some sociable people can be sociable and friendly with a group until that group changes and they decide that it no longer fits their morality. They can still be contrarians, and then make waves anyhow. You absolutely don't have to be an introverted, hard nosed loner to end up being a whistleblower or contrarian troublemaker. This sounds a bit more like wishful fantasy for people who are socially inept trying to paint it as more noble.

If anything, a sociable, open person is more likely to have the kind of self assured personality that makes them decide it's not a problem to disagree among their peer group whenever it becomes necessary. Read more history, it's full of troublemakers who were also sociable.

A very social person is probably less likely to speak out against their peers because they have become friends with them and their power somewhat lies in those people liking them.

I also think it's part of their character to be agreeable, not just that they are friends.

Good mention. Recently I was saying a gal I know's friends are "all yes men" when they discuss personal issues w/ each other. I was suggested a better term is that they are "supportive". Same thing, but yeah, they just agree with the person. Critical thinking takes a back seat to making the other person feel validated.

Are they really? And frankly, I have seen enough amoral contrarians, contrarians just for the sake of having fun to understand why they are dismissed.

And actual real world lite "whistle-blower" I have Deen was not like that.

> Why? Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character.

Where does this line of thinking come from? It isn't true because e.g. MLK, Malcolm X

It sounds like you're trying to psychologize whistleblowing or activism

Where did you learn this from? Did you grow up in an authoritarian regime or something?

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit?

You broke the rules pretty badly here, and also in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35766457. We're trying to avoid flamewars to the extent possible. You can make your substantive points without doing that.

> Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character. To whistleblow against a very powerful organisation... you have to be a pain in the ass.

I am confused - people who are good and social have no principles and value? They have no backbone to stand up for them?

This is like the worst definition of social - like amoral sociopaths desperate to fit in.

If Nazi Germany produced anything of value at all, one can hope it was clear evidence that a large portion of the population does indeed meet that definition. Certainly enough to run a state, prosecute a world war, and run a massive economy rivaling other world powers.

> Because people who are good and social with the group do not have a contrarian character

That’s an interesting observation, and in my experience working in small businesses and large enterprise organizations, it’s entirely and totally wrong. Some of the worst people I’ve ever known in the workplace kiss up to the boss and to people in power while running the company into the ground. These are not good people. It’s actually a kind of evil in a way, as they present a likable "go along to get along" persona and facade while doing a terrible job. I would much rather be surrounded by humble yet candid truth tellers, who tell it like it is with empathy and compassion and care.

I agree. I think GP meant "good" like you'd use it to describe a dog. obedient.

I think parent comment meant good with the group as in "follows the social rules without questioning them and does what is expected of them", not as in morally good.

The narrative weirdly lacks, why his leak was "against power structures".

The spin of the story has it, it was all about "spying against illegal activity". While really all that spying is just part of the objective to actively influence states. Not only passively observing your neighbors under the shower. Particularly civil societies. Of "allies" at first, but conveniently, you have five eyes, looking at each other.

You don't in all seriousness spy on foreign leaders to "uncover child trafficking" or manipulate YT to "counter terrorism". Foiled plots are few and far between. Mass media manipulation and economic exploitation persist and are commonplace.

A democratic society not subject to tight control seemingly is a very scary thing. Even more so when it is your own.

>The spin of the story has it, it was all about "spying against illegal activity".

Doing anything against the current government is illegal in every country and always has been. The US rebelling against British rule was also illegal at the time.

>A democratic society not subject to tight control seemingly is a very scary thing. Even more so when it is your own.

Again, the "who watches the watchmen" question. Most of our western democracies are lacking checks and bounds. We can only vote who represents us, but we can't vote for what they do when in power. If we disagree with them we have to wait ~4 more years before we can vote them out. In that time they can do an insane amount of irreversible damage and there's no consequences for them.

> If we disagree with them we have to wait ~4 more years before we can vote them out

Presidential elections are one among many elections. And elections are one component of democracy. The NRA is a potent example of grassroots power enforcing its policy views effectively and continuously.

If there is an issue you care about, find like-minded people and see how they organise. If they don’t, organise them.

Supporting whistleblower is very expensive too. Since big structures have means beyond any small group.. every attempt is paid in full by the source.

We tried once on a subreddit, but even after 2 rounds of donation, this poor guy's life was burned to the ground 90%. (joblesness, lawyer fees, potential lawsuits, social anger from people supporting big corps, wife leaving him, no roof at time.. brutal)

If they are to be helped, it has to be done with fine strategies and not a full frontal fight.

Yeah, and it's why I think it's fundamentally impossible to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers. Organizations act in favor of self-preservation, like any living thing. Whistleblowers by definition act against them, so an organization will always benefit by removing them. Failure to do so will prolong the damage and encourage further transgressions.

Although, silencing whistleblowers is as weak a strategy as security through obscurity.

I disagree, it is an extremely strong strategy. You shut them up, they cannot inflict any more damage. The public can speculate what other secrets exist, but they can't know as they would if the whistleblower was kept around. The short-term negative publicity is tiny compared to the fallout if more information was leaked. This is why organizations basically always move to silence: It works.

It also dissuades other potential whistleblowers.

“As weak as” means “as strong as.” But in your scenario, weakness includes failing to adequately limit political or moral liability internally.

Yes exactly. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Unfortunately, it can take a very long time for the organisation in question to be exposed and then reformed. Just look at the child-abuse within pretty much every organisation that had access to children. However, that doesn’t make the fight fruitless; organisations can be reformed and it’s worth it for society as a whole.

We just need much much stronger whistleblower protections.

Security through obscurity is how pretty much all cybersecurity security works on practice. There are a few publicly known primitives but organizations trusted with implementing actual security systems will go to great lengths to prevent anyone finding out which of them are used and in what way.

This is a naive view of cybersecurity.

What's a better and non-naive view? Bonus points if you can explain why it's impossible to develop and sell a link encryptor running OS software.

Will any explanation do? Sounds like you are limiting your scope to super narrow boundaries.

I honestly don't know what you mean. My question was about your view of how cybersecurity works in practice and what role security by obscurity plays in it.

This is why I don't operate in these power structures. From 1995 to 2005 I worked for corporations and seeing it was harmful to my well being, I decide to provide computer services directly to the public. Now I set my own rules, and I work very hard to set my own ethical spaces where people are forced to do the right thing if they want to operate in my world. I have found that people want to do the right things, but that they need people around them for encouragement. Treat everyone, even the most hardened criminals like they have it with in them to change and all the need is people to believe in them.

For me, the dead world of the labor force takes on a symbolic meaning. Words are like super powers, the have resonance and meaning. Look at the etymology of words and the source meaning will always give you the correct answer to what you are energetically putting your life force into.

corporation (n.)

> mid-15c., corporacioun, "persons united in a body for some purpose," from such use in Anglo-Latin, from Late Latin corporationem (nominative corporatio) "assumption of a body" (used of the incarnation of Christ),

> noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin corporare "embody, make or fashion into a body," from corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body," also "a whole composed of united parts, a structure, system,community, corporation, political body, a guild" (from PIE root *kwrep- "body, form, appearance").

Corporations are dead things. Start small and make choices that slowly shifts your energy to people and things that actual have living essence like small business and endeavors that benefit the common good. We can't do in every part of our life, but just a slight shift can be like a cascade effect over time.

Any large group of people organized together for enough time forms a body - the body of tradition and regulation.

A large body of text is also known as a corpus.

Both the large groups and the large texts are dead in the sense that they do not change of their own power. They are static and closed to new information.

Both text and groups must be re-animated by the individual.

While you may be less subject to corporate power structures the way you are operating now, you are still subject to all kinds of other power structures. As the GP has submitted, try working against the power structure of the country you are living in and you most likely will suffer greatly. The same even happens on lower levels (state, municipality, family?).

And even regarding corporate power structures you are only avoiding a certain kind of their possible influences. For example, if a corporation buys up all water supply in your living area you can feel that influence, even if you are not working for them.

Agreed. You don't even have to work against them, if your ideas are seen as a threat, you will suffer. The worst part is that most of the people who will make your life difficult don't even understand what they're doing. They're just doing their job.

Your ideas could be potentially highly beneficial to society, they might benefit everyone including those in power but if it's against their beliefs, you will be punished from all sides.

I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment and your behavior. I'm grateful for everyone of us out there working with strong moral boundaries. Thank you!

I also disagree with your perspective on corporations. To me they seem very much alive - in a less recognisable form, more complex than we can grasp with human minds.

I argue mainly because I'd like to keep the term as something free of judgment. A group of people that comes together as a larger body or organism can be quite beautiful too.

> A group of people that comes together as a larger body or organism can be quite beautiful too.

Sure, but that doesn't have to be a corporation. There are all kinds of terms that describe that, and they don't come with the clear emotional and interpretational baggage that "corporation" does.

The term honestly isn't free of judgement, it carries with it a _lot_ of associations, and you can't just ignore them and pretend they're not there. Well, I mean you can, but you can't expect others to do the same. They're likely to interpret what you're saying as something else entirely.

For example, try talking about "a corporation of churchgoers" and see what kinds of reactions you get. =)

If they're a group of people working toward some common purpose within an organizational structure that's legally recognized, that's a corporation. Just because it's become a bad word in certain sectors doesn't mean the concept is inherently corrupted.

>For example, try talking about "a corporation of churchgoers" and see what kinds of reactions you get.

I would point out that most churches are 501(c)(3) corporations ;)

What are your thoughts on big vs small govt?

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You can go over my comment history to see how it started. I have put in a lot of effort putting in good comments on solid topics and then I see comments like polluting this space and go unchecked:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35923149

At this point, if I can export my contributions and not have my data locked up here, I will be happy to quit this site.

How do you do this? How do you make money to survive?

There is nothing inherently good or bad about a group of people working toward some common purpose. In principle, given the right value system, incentives, and organizational structure, you could create a corporation that does an extraordinary amount of good in the world.

The problem is bad power structures, not power structures per se. Just because corporations as they exist today have problems doesn't mean that we should give up on organizations of people entirely. It means we need to do the necessary work in philosophy, psychology, economics, business administration, etc. that will enable the creation of more effective and ethical power structures.

>There is nothing inherently good or bad about a group of people working toward some common purpose.

There's something inherently bad about "limited liability" corporations, by their very nature. Because to some degree they free the people in them from "natural justice"; people are able to get away unpunished with bad things that they as individuals couldn't due to shifting liability to the corporation.

Surely LLCs don’t protect against criminal actions though?

I’d go one step further. Corporation are literally the undead.

They live forever, devour our work product and consider themselves persons.

> It is the same thing in corporations too [...]

We have to be really careful with this sort of relativisation. Killing people in a foreign country is not the same thing as selling bad products or dealing with information in an inappropriate way, at home.

> It's actually probably worse to rock the boat and try to save a failing project, not only do you take it on yourself if it fails (which it likely will anyway, because they won't listen/the project is too far gone) but even if it succeeds you've stuck your head up and shown yourself to not be a yes-man.

This is really bad career advice. There are certain situations where it makes sense to rock the boat, situations where it doesn't matter, and situations where it'll fuck you over

This rule that you've come up with seems really overgeneralized. If I disagree with someone or someone disagrees with me, we reach consensus. If someone disagrees with me instead of just nodding at everything, it makes it easier to form a mental picture of what that person actually knows. Someone who just agrees with everything has something to hide

This type of attitude is self perpetuating and creates an unproductive and political work culture

I rocked the boat to save a failing project and then I had to bust my ass working 24 hour stints for several months to make sure it succeeded while I watched incompetent people go on vacations.

His advice is legit.

> This is really bad career advice.

Depends entirely on where you work. In any place with 4+ layers of management it sounds like a reasonably good idea.

You want to be seen as doing your best for the project, but not sticking your head out more than is reasonable.

The project will fail, but you’ll be remembered as the one that almost made it succeed, and you’ll have more political capital to make the changes you desire going forward.

Conversely, if you keep hammering at something when it is clear everyone doesn’t believe you or doesn’t share the same values, you are just making everyone hate you. Even if the project does somehow succeed.

> Transgressions in favor of the state are one thing, you'll get a slap on the wrist at most, even personal benefit and promotion in some cases

Simply wistleblowing to report legal breaches by your employer can sometimes ruin your career.

It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.

He probably could have attempted to only leak the domestic surveillance, or at least screen out as much of the foreign intelligence methods as much as possible.

Half of it was whistleblowing (domestic surveillance) but half of it was pseudo-treasonous (foreign surveillance).

It gets a bit complicated with the whole 5-eyes mutual back scratching thing though.

Exactly. The existence of, and participation in, FVEY is treason against the people of the United States.

There is no such thing as an “allied intelligence agency”, by their very nature all non-US intelligence agencies are hostile to American citizens.

Thus, our domestic agencies conspiring with hostile foreign entities to defraud and undermine the citizens of the United States is treason.

You're wrong, it's not treason. This is meant to be a legalistic society where crimes are defined by laws, not by how the word for the crime is popularly perceived by laypeople. The US Constitution defines treason. In America, treason is when an American levies war against the United States, or adhering to the Enemies of the US, giving them aid and comfort.

To characterize the UK as an enemy of the US simply isn't true, the US and the UK are not at war; the UK government is not openly hostile to America. If an American gives classified information to the UK they could be convicted of espionage, but treason specifically would not stick. Not even close. Even attempting it would be a complete farce.

Treason charges couldn't even stick during the Cold War, when America and the Soviet Union were engaged in numerous proxy wars but weren't officially at war with each other. Many Americans sold secrets to the Soviet Union, got caught, and were convicted of espionage. But not treason. The Rosenbergs, who gave American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union? Convicted and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason. John Walker and his son, US Navy officers who helped the Soviets decrypt millions of messages? Convicted of espionage, but not treason. Jerry Whitworth, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen.. the list goes on. Convicted of espionage but not treason. The last treason convictions to ever happen in America were for acts committed during WW2.

In that case, would you agree if we modified the GP's statement to say:

"The existence of, and participation in, FVEY is espionage against the people of the United States."

If so, then presumably all the arguments against it are still valid, no? Assuming we can agree that "treason against the people of the United States" and "espionage against the people of the United States" are at least in the same ballpark of badness?

> "The existence of, and participation in, FVEY is espionage against the people of the United States." If so, then presumably all the arguments against it are still valid, no?

No, because again, these crimes have meanings defined by law which you can't simply replace with a meaning derived from the layperson understanding of the word. To argue that Five Eyes is the illegal kind of espionage, you'd have to argue that it actually violates the Espionage Act. Merely fitting it to the colloquial meaning of 'espionage' isn't sufficient.

FVEY is an intelligence cooperation agreement that is invaluable to the security of the world. I don't see how any reasonable person could view it as anything negative.

What exactly is the objection to classifying some information as SECRET//US,UK,CAN,AUS,NZ instead of SECRET//NOFORN ?

What mutual backscratching? No such program was in the Snowden leaks. If you're claiming that the US gets other countries to spy on its citizens, that would be utterly illegal.

You’re correct, it would be utterly illegal and they are in fact doing it via the five eyes program (FVEY)

Essentially what they’ve done is commit treason by colluding with hostile foreign powers to mutually spy on each others citizens, bypassing the pesky constitutional/charter limitations in the process.

In the right political climate we could Nuremberg trial 5 levels deep into the organizations responsible, I’m hopeful for that outcome.

Reminder: “I was just following orders/policy” wasn’t a defense then and it won’t be this time either.

> You’re correct, it would be utterly illegal and they are in fact doing it via the five eyes program (FVEY)

If they are doing it, where's your evidence? You don't have it because otherwise, Klayman would have filed a lawsuit.

> I don't understand why people who make this argument think it's OK for the US government to spy on the private communications of all Chinese citizens but not for it to spy on those of American citizens. Is it OK for China to spy on American citizen's private communications, then?

Because USA is good, so if they are the ones doing the spying, it's just for pretty legit reasons, while chinese people don't speak english so they clearly are up to no good /s

You're being sarcastic, but in a generalized sense that's exactly what it is: of course spying is ok/good when it's your country doing it to someone else! Obviously that spying will enrich your country, and might even make you safer.

But duh, of course it's bad when someone else spies on you! That can only make you less safe.

It's not about "ok", it's about winning the "war".

But I'm not in USA, I'm in sweden.

For me, USA is the more imminent danger, so I don't understand why people aren't equally appalled.

> so I don't understand why people aren't equally appalled

the answer here is the difference between "me" and "people"

"people in the same country as me, who are in the same set of risks as me". Don't pretend you didn't understand just to comment pointless nitpicking.

what makes you think they view things that way, rather than just you viewing things that way?

after all, humans have a tendency to think other people think the same way they do

You know the saying beggars can't be choosers? We are currently begging for transparency.

The filtering process by independent journalists is the only actual recourse I can think of to solve this. Exfiltrating confidential documents is usually not a process that gives you a lot of time to sort out what is worth it or not, furthermore the volume of data might very well also be a problem to handle on your own.

Consider the time it took a lot of journalists to find the pertinent documents in this specific case among about 200,000 leaked documents (of various lengths), when Snowden is thought to have exfiltrated 1.7 millions documents.

> We are currently begging for transparency.

Beware, transparency is a double-edged sword!

Modern nations are not small villages, where secrets can be shared within a community AND kept out of reach from foreign ears.

I am not advocating for total transparency, but exactions committed by the state cannot be classified as secrets.

So if a leak leads to revealing such crimes, the whistle-blower should not be prosecuted, unless you can prove they deliberately leaked information to harm innocent civilians.

I specifically say civilians because I consider that the military and officials who are part of the state know the responsibilities involved in their position... and if they do not generate any content worthy of leaking (crimes), they will not be exposed to this risk.

I don't understand why people who make this argument think it's OK for the US government to spy on the private communications of all Chinese citizens but not for it to spy on those of American citizens. Is it OK for China to spy on American citizen's private communications, then?

It becomes even more problematic within the Five Eyes cooperation context, because if the NSA is spying on British private citizen communications, and GCHQ is spying on American private citizen communications, and the NSA and GCHQ are exchanging data without any limits, well???

Universal standards of human behavior and the right to personal privacy are hardly limited to some arbitrary nation-state boundary line, are they?

As far as targeted spying on government authorities and military operations, well, that's justified. Indeed it's a good thing that different countries are paying attention to each other in this manner, it has a stabilizing influence and can help to avoid conflicts if everyone knows what everyone else is up to.

I don't think it's a matter of what's "ok" or not, it's a matter of winning.

If spying in general is ok, it's of course ok no matter who engages in it. But it's not about whether it's ok or not, it's about what citizens of a particular country want for their own interests. If spying on another nation's citizens makes you safer, you may feel good about that. But being spied on by other nations probably isn't great for you, so it's to be fought against.

I think spying in general is not ok, in the same vein that war is not ok. Unfortunately, neither of these things are avoidable in the world we live in, so obviously I will be more in favor of actions that protect me and mine, and against actions that might make me less safe.

(This is all without addressing the question of whether or not spying on another nation's non-government, non-military population makes anyone safer. I genuinely have no idea.)

> Universal standards of human behavior and the right to personal privacy are hardly limited to some arbitrary nation-state boundary line, are they?

That's a wonderfully idealistic view, and I absolutely agree with it. But that's not the world we live in. Some people are by default adversaries because of the accident of the location of their birth. It's dumb, but that's how it is.

> Is it OK for China to spy on American citizen's private communications, then?

if you are the Chinese government, your honest answer to this question would almost certainly be "yes, and that is why we are doing exactly that"

> half of it was pseudo-treasonous (foreign surveillance)

When Snowden was telling everyone we spy on our allies, that is absolutely not treason.

From the Constitution, Article III, Section 3:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

>He probably could have attempted to only leak the domestic surveillance,

This was the whole point of giving the docs to the guardian and wapo. Wapo then decided to publish the non-domestic stuff that he asked them not to, entirely their decision and it would not have been published otherwise. Then wapo decided to lobby against Snowden's pardon because non-domestic stuff was published. By them. Just wow. Likewise the Nyt who Snowden did not trust and deliberately excluded, managed to get the archive from the guardian and then went nuts, also blaming snowden for what they themselves published that he asked them not to.

So yeah if you were following along at home it was really hard not to have the reputations of the wapo and nyt take a really massive hit. I genuinely didn't think there were so craven but they are and everything is worse for them being so. It makes me entertain conspiracy theories about how many cia agents are on staff there and in senior editorial positions. Everyone will call that a conspiracy theory and treat it with contempt today and I guess that's fair, no evidence, only stench. Then if & when it comes out in the future, those same people will claim everyone always knew...

Do we think accepting Russian citizenship changes his story? I can’t decide.

What’s he supposed to do? Deny it and be ejected, potentially to a country that will extradite him?

He already released the documents; it’s up to the American people to do something about it, and we (well, the government) haven’t. Whether he’s in Russia or federal prison changes nothing about the fact that he already did his “part”.

Any port in a storm, as the saying goes. It's a US enemy or a US prison.

I was under the impression Snowden happened to be in Russia on route to another country when he was stuck for some reason.

IIRC his passport was revoked, but if I'm wrong I'd enjoy some readings that say otherwise. Its been a while since I followed the story.

He first went to Hong Kong, then like Korea (we’re not sure), then Russia.

It’s a little suspicious eh? I thought the american people deserved to know the things he released…

But it might have been less innocent than one guy being a whistleblower. Other peer powers accommodated him in their interests.

>He first went to Hong Kong, then like Korea (we’re not sure), then Russia.

What? He went to Hong Kong, then got a flight to Ecuador via Russia. He chose Russia as layover location because Hong Kong has a limited amount of flights and he ruled that the one least likely to arrest him en route. There was no "we're not sure."

I’m happy that you knew well enough to report my honest recollection.

I can understand that someone may have thought I was intentionally saying something wrong.

The truth is: I did not know/remember exactly, and thought we were having a conversation about a controversial issue. Facts are most appreciated.

Citizenship maybe not. But amplifying russian propaganda and lies changes it significantly.

I disagree that he did it in the least destructive way possible. He revealed far more secrets than were necessary to blow the whistle.

Just take a look at the list of secrets he revealed. Most of them are not about domestic spying at all:

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

If he wanted to blow the whistle on domestic spying, he could have shared documents with journalists about domestic spying.

The point of sharing it only with trusted established journalists was that their qualified to know what needs redacting.

Surely even the documents that primarily concern specifically unconstitutional domestic spying would still have stuff in them that is material to national security and not unconstitutional.

> he point of sharing it only with trusted established journalists was that their qualified to know what needs redacting

Really? I assumed it had more to do with Constitutional protections for journalists, so whatever they did publish would stay published.

IIRC, the US had already called Assange's journo creds into question by then, so Snowden sought out established outlets.

There is no special credential that makes one a journalist in the eyes of the United States Constitution, nor does the first amendment grant any special protections to journalists that do not otherwise apply to the general population.

He had to take a quick dump of whatever he could and filter through it later. It's not like he could leisurely spend weeks vetting the docs.

The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.

PRISM was both illegal and unconstitutional.

The leadership of these agencies and the congressmen that enabled them on the intel committee are traitors to the republic, plain and simple.

Note to mods: I understand HN isn’t for “waging ideological debate”, but this is an inherently political topic and the discussion is on-topic

Everything they're doing is "legal" because they get to decide what is and isn't legal.

That doesn't mean it's ethical or should be hidden from the American public.

> Everything they're doing is "legal" because they get to decide what is and isn't legal

No, phone metadata collection was ruled illegal. Ingesting court ordered FBI wiretaps on foreigners living outside the US who are of interest to national security has never been illegal in the US or in any other country.

> That doesn't mean it's ethical or should be hidden from the American public.

It isn't hidden from the American public. The documents describing the data ingested into PRISM have been declassified.

The USG can't put cameras in my house and promise not to look at the video unless I'm a foreigner. That's what this amounts to. Why anyone would defend this is beyond me.

It can't put cameras in your house without a warrant if you live in the US period. If you're a foreigner living outside the US, you're fair game to the US. This is true for any country, not just the US. How anybody could fail to understand this is beyond me.

Regardless of PRISM's legality, it's deeply unethical and immoral for a government to spy on their own citizens with nothing more than a permission slip stamped by a stamping body that approves 99.97% of the requests that cross their desk, which is exactly what the FISA court is.

PRISM doesn't involve data from US citizens' accounts. Please review what PRISM is before claiming it is illegal or unethical. It is neither.

If you are incapable of reading the documents yourself: if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order. No warrant is needed in the US legal system or that of any other country in the world to wiretap a foreigner who is outside of the country requesting the data. The fact that the US requires a court order is rare, and by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.

How can you verify whether an account belongs to a US citizen without possessing a single bit of data about it?

>if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order

Correction: the company can challenge the order. In case you've been living under a rock / off the grid and haven't seen the Twitter files recently, private companies not only aren't fighting back against government spying, censorship, etc - they're openly cooperating, going so far as to set up task forces to facilitate open cooperation. Why do you think Microsoft was feeding PRISM 5 years earlier than Apple? It's not like one organization had vastly more technical capability than the other - some private organizations are just openly complicit with the government regardless of the morality. IBM produced many of the systems used by the Germans to facilitate the holocaust - something being legal and profitable doesn't inherently make it morally acceptable.

>by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.

It is followed in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, by a court that rubber stamps 99.97% of requests. Besides, as I've argued above, immoral actions should not be tolerated simply because they are allowed by law. See also: slavery, usury, civil asset forfeiture, murder of unarmed civilian by cop ft. qualified immunity, drone bombing weddings overseas, overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other countries, plotting fake terror attacks against US citizens to justify foreign wars (operation Northwoods).

Evil is evil regardless of whether or not it's been "made legal" by a corrupt government with an extensive track record of violating international sovereignty, human rights, the geneva convention, and arms control charters, not to mention the only country to ever commit genocide of civilians with an atomic weapon. The US has zero moral authority.

> In case you've been living under a rock / off the grid and haven't seen the Twitter files recently, private companies not only aren't fighting back against government spying, censorship, etc - they're openly cooperating, going so far as to set up task forces to facilitate open cooperation. Why do you think Microsoft was feeding PRISM 5 years earlier than Apple?

There is so much you got wrong here, that it's hard to figure out where to begin.

1. Apple did not have any data to wiretap until people started using iCloud mail. Microsoft ran Hotmail since time immemorial. That's why they prioritized the integration of wiretap data from Microsoft first.

2. There are plenty of examples of companies challenging government orders that came from the Snowden leaks themselves. The Twitter thing is just that the government reported TOU violations to Twitter, and Twitter decided if they were violations and took action if so. The government did not have unilateral control over Twitter.

> It is followed in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, by a court that rubber stamps 99.97% of requests

What percent of warrants do you think are approved? You clearly have no idea how the world works. The government wouldn't waste its time asking for a court order unless it thinks the court order will be granted. If it wastes the judge's time by filing lots of requests that are illegal, the judge will punish the government for doing so.

I'm sorry, but you understand that if a tool necessitates a warrant to be used, it does not ensures that people can use the tool without a warrant?

"We've conducted an internal investigation proving no malfeaseance took place. We will not be releasing any data on our usage of the tool. Trust us."

That's the problem. They were bulk collecting all data going in/out of data centers, not specific named accounts. No way for a company to say "Hey, that account is an American citizen" when they are collecting all data indiscriminately.

> The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.

> That's the problem. They were bulk collecting all data going in/out of data centers, not specific named accounts

That's not what PRISM was. As Snowden's slides clearly explain, PRISM was a data integration project to ingest wiretap data from the FBI. That wiretap data came from court orders for specific accounts belonging to non-US citizens living outside the US.

I'm sorry but reading your posts here is just comical.

Can you explain why there are countless stories such as this:

NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

You keep writing they were not spying on US citizens, but clearly they were or NSA employees would not be using it to spy on friends/family would they?

Did they coin the term "LOVEINT" because this was a one-off situation?

It sounds to me like that user is arguing in bad faith. We know that intelligence agencies attempt to influence online discussions about their own activities; it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they're being paid to post here as part of a US gov disinformation campaign to sway public opinion in favor of NSA. That or they've received all of their education on the subject by the perpetrators.

Either way, it's clear they're not coming from a place of promoting transparency or a critical perspective of the government's actions. There's nothing wrong with being a patriot but this is a conversion about government misbehavior, not a loyalty contest.

It's probably best to just ignore them, which is what I'll be doing going forward.

If you bothered to read your article, you would notice it said that they spied on foreign lovers outside the US. https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/loveint-how-nsa-spies-s... goes into more detail. One of them searched for the email addresses of an American girlfriend, but that search would have come up empty unless it was mentioned in an email from a foreigner outside the US being wiretapped.

The fact that PRISM was legal is exactly the problem, and why leaking it was needed.

It wasn't illegal, therefore going through the proper channels wouldn't have exposed it.

It is only by going through alternative/leaking means that the program could have gotten exposed to the public.

The government spies on foreigners who are suspected to be of national security interest. News at 11.

This is the government's job. Why do you feel it needed to be exposed?

> Why do you feel it needed to be exposed?

Well because it is basically at scale warrantless wiretapping, of almost every major communication platform(technically its on the internet, and not the phone system, I know).

You can feel free not to care if the government has backdoor access, without a warrant, to every major US tech company, I guess.

But a lot of people did not know that the government had this, and thus why they are glad that it was exposed.

If you don't care about at scale warrentless wiretapping, feel free to just say so. Just say "I don't care if the government has a warrant or not, before they spy on every major communication platform".

Other people, though, actually care about warrants and privacy protections, from the government.

> You can feel free not to care if the government has backdoor access, without a warrant, to every major US tech company, I guess.

How many ways do people need to tell you that it doesn't? It can send wiretap requests for specific accounts to tech companies, which needs to approve each individual request.

> But a lot of people did not know that the government had this,

It doesn't.

> and thus why they are glad that it was exposed.

Where? Which document says they have backdoor access to the tech companies. I'll give you a hint: none of them do. Snowden and Greenwald were both too stupid to read the documents they had obtained and claimed otherwise, but all the rest of the tech media, like CNET and the NYT, reported it correctly.

> Other people, though, actually care about warrants and privacy protections, from the government.

This is something I care deeply about. That's why I'm glad Snowden's documents and the declassified documents both agree the law is being followed.

So then no warrants required for them to make these requests, got it.

> both agree the law is being followed.

Notice how I didn't say that anything was illegal. The fact that it was legal, is entirely the problem!

I think it is very important for the government to get a warrant, before making these requests.

You can feel free to not care about warrants for these types of requests, but I care about them.

> So then no warrants required for them to make these requests, got it.

Not for people who aren't US citizens who live outside the US, no. Is this really news to you? Do you know of any country in the world that requires its intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant for surveilling non-citizens outside its borders?

> no

Ok, well a lot of people care about warrants.

You can feel free to not care! But a lot of other people care about warrants.

Therefore, it is good that this stuff was exposed, according to the people who care about warrants.

> Ok, well a lot of people care about warrants.

Including me.

> Therefore, it is good that this stuff was exposed, according to the people who care about warrants.

Once again, no country in the world requires its intelligence agencies to get a warrant to surveil a foreigner outside its borders who has information relevant to national security. This is both legal and something we all expect, and we already knew this before Snowden's leaks. To reveal the code names of systems that ingest this data, Snowden also leaked compromised Chinese computer systems. Is that something we should celebrate?

Even Snowden (and probably 99.9% of all people) would disagree with your position. His statements show he thought he was revealing something other than what his documents actually said.

I don't really buy this. He couldn't search through the dump for the names of the projects that he was blowing the whistle on? Can't use grep?

Handling over a mountain of secrets to journalists and let them sort out the illegal from the rest of it, (and trusting them not to publish things that are newsworthy/salacious but legal) is completely irresponsible

That’s not how it works. Some random contractor doesn’t know all the code names to all relevant projects.

You should ask yourself more often “is there a reason they did it they way they did” before offering smug suggestions.

According to Greenwald there were millions of pages, largely because everything from parking spaces to nuclear weapons were frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats.

Snowden gave the pile to the Guardian (Greenwald and another journalist), who decided what to publish, which was a major task because of all the unimportant stuff.

How could Snowden have gone through that pile in a couple of days while on the run and possibly afraid for his life?

> frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats.

This is a real problem, but I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's no score card on number of classified documents one has access to.

Rather, it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level. No one is going to get in trouble for mistakenly over classifying something, but theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document, not to mention the real harm that could arise from such an error.

> it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level

This!

I once had the opportunity to work on a project with DoD folks to help them write software to speed up the declassification process.

I was astonished by the current manual process. Imagine a decision tree 50 pages long that you have to apply by hand to each sentence of a document to determine what can be unclassified or not.

These were such nice people and overwhelmed by the work and genuinely trying to make it better so more information could be declassified, faster.

I realized it was a hopeless task. The only real solution is to move toward a world where next to nothing needs to be classified. To do more in the open. That needs to be the vision. Laws need to be adjusted so that these crazy complicated rubrics don't need to be created at all.

[The end of the story is I opted not to join that project. LLMs provide at least some hope that they can make it somewhat better, lacking the changes at the legal and organizational level that I mentioned]

> I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power.

That's pretty naive.

> theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document

The whole system is designed to make declassification risky and expensive. And you think that has nothing to do with power?

Is it just a coincidence that criminal gangs have a similar code of life-long silence?

To play devil's advocate: things that sound minor like parking spaces are regularly the grist of intelligence operations. And the targets are rarely heads of state or other bigwigs — less-prominent people are easier to recruit, kill, harass, etc.

Yeah, even if just to know which car to break into.

weren't there some intelligence operations during the vietnam war where "benign" peanut butter orders predicted troop movements?

Hilarious and cromulent enough for me.

> Most of them are not about domestic spying at all:

Then he owed it to humanity and acted on it. Kudos to him.

I'm about 3/4 through the page and it's all related to spying to me.. are you specifically referring to something?

Spying is what the NSA is supposed to do

Domestic spying is the controversial/illegal activity he was blowing the whistle on.

Dumping info on legal NSA activities (like foreign surveillance), while fascinating to read, is not whistleblowing.

I think it's fair to say that the extent of the spying on global citizens being so absurdly extreme was also worth whistleblowing - it's not location of hidden bases and spies, it's that General Dynamics " collect the contents or metadata of all cell phone calls in the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. The Australian Signals Directorate has cooperated with NSA on the collection in the Philippines" and so on.

Being Canadian, I see him as a whistleblower as well, since the extent of canadian surveillance was also revealed.

I'd argue it's even better that he did the jobs of multiple whistleblowers by sharing the extent of domestic spying in other countries. No need to wait years for other people to put their lives in jeopardy.

> the controversial/illegal activity

I wasn't aware that it was only one controversial activity.

And I wasn't aware that one could only blow the whistle on illegal activity.

In a democracy almost everything should be public. Our weapons for sure, perhaps not where they are located, but what we pay for yes.

I don’t know why some people are downvoting this comment. What is wrong with transparency?

Perhaps many people in US would rather have a "strong government" than democracy.

Exactly right, you can't have democracy without information being available to everyone. But we all know this is just an illusion, all democratic states hide a great deal from their citizens.

I want to add- there is significant value at the world level, of keeping secrets.

Eveybody wants warfare to be asymmetric and biased towards them- why would we want to give a potential adversary perfect information about what weaponry we have as well as its exact capabilities? Unfortunately, when you want to keep a secret, you can't tell all of your citizens and trust that they won't tell anybody...

> why would we want to give a potential adversary perfect information about what weaponry we have as well as its exact capabilities

To be fair and let the best win? There is just no honor anymore.

> there is significant value at the world level, of keeping secrets.

There can be. But secrets can also be unimportant, or easily learnable through other public means. We need to analyze what we're keeping secret and optimize.

The democracy answer is omni-present. People can't really be said to support something they don't know about and if secrets encompass too much of their government it becomes, for practical purposes, illegitimate.

The cost of keeping the secret has to be weighed along with the cost of it leaking and the chance of that happening. It's not practical to keep everything a secret for reasons of censorship limiting other valid activity or just the increased bookkeeping in tracking secrets without revealing them.

And ultimately, not everything is all or nothing. You can have an undisclosed number of weapons for instance, but have a process where civilians can band together and form a special body, get some people vetted, and be granted access to otherwise secret information that they, because of their unique skills or interests, may have input on. This exists today in the form of aerospace companies, etc, who have access to many secrets to aid in the planning and construction of further tools.

I'd hope for more than just transparency.

Even public information about our military is not commonly known, so we don't have a well-informed citizenry.

How many Americans are aware of this, clearly public info because Al Jazeera has it?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

This looks good. The info is a bit outdated though. I hope that the USA will increase its military presence in Eastern Europe.

As a non-USAer I'm so glad he went beyond domestic spying. He showed the world how the USA spied on many of its supposed allies. The scope of the system of espionage they built is orwellian and just astonishing.

If there is one evil force conspiring for global domination that is the NSA and whichever institution they take order from. Thanks again, Snowden.

What I don't understand is the complete lack of response from countries like Italy and Germany once they found out being spied by an ally. Imagine what the USA would have done if the roles were reversed.

Maybe there was no response because it was expected. Probably all countries spy on all other countries. Especially during the Trump era, it wasn’t clear that USA was still an ally, so I hope other countries prepared for that by increasing their intelligence on the USA, just to avoid inconvenient surprises.

This has nothing to do with Trump per se, it's really a bipartisan issue, as the new pentagon leaks just confirmed.

I also doubt European countries have the capacity to intercept private calls between top level USA govt officials.

What makes you think that they don't?

They surely would keep that capability secret.

> They surely would keep that capability secret.

Like the USA itself couldn't? Strongly doubt, the amount of recent leaks we're just discussing proves me right. No nation could have such an espionage system in place without it ever leaking out in some way.

It's already well known that many EU nations have capabilities like this.

The French: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electro... The Germans: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-arrests-foreign...

Lets not forget that most of the EU is wrapped up in the Pegasus spy scandal: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-watergate-the-pegasus-spyware-scand...

Playing holier than thou with intelligence services is a losing game. There is no holy intelligence service and there is no nation without an intelligence function.

These are all examples of EU countries doing domestic, not foreign espionage (which is also despicable, by the way).

You can search all you want but there is no evidence or proof whatsoever of EU countries spying USA top government officials.

The question here is how can you call yourself an ally in good faith when you spy on your allies?

The fact that it has not been leaked is not proof of the negative. The US had been spying on Europe for 50+ years before Snowden and the US continues to spy on Europe right now without any further leaks -- by your logic that must mean that the US isn't currently spying on the EU, right, or there would be leaks?

There's plenty of evidence of the EU spying on allies. I can't tell if your implication is "Europe can't maintain smart enough computer scientists and engineers capable of spying on the US" or "Europe has the moral high ground and doesn't spy on allies".

Both are naive.

> You can search all you want but there is no evidence or proof whatsoever of EU countries spying USA top government officials.

Nonsense. https://www.france24.com/en/20131024-nsa-france-spying-squar... https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...

The first article is just a claim with no evidence provided.

The second is based on some yet unreleased documents that Der Spiegel claims to have reviewed years ago.

Still no evidence to be found, only claims.

It's a claim made by the head of the agency that did it. If you're not willing to take their word, I think you're being stubborn and obtuse and this will never be a productive discussion.

If you're willing to believe a US whistleblower -- whose evidence you can't personally verify -- you have to be open to believing the _former head of the agency_.

> The question here is how can you call yourself an ally in good faith when you spy on your allies?

Familiarize yourself with this concept https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

Thanks for being pointlessly condescending.

Realpolitik are the reason why I consider the USA and NATO a bunch of hypocrites, altho the USA surely championed the practice.

They fill their mouth with good intents, justice, peace and all that is good in public but act like criminals behind the scenes.

At the very least, countries like Russia and China seem to be much more open about their practicing Realpolitik.

Russia is literally claiming that the Ukraine is run by Nazis. Not that there are people there who see the Nazis as a lesser threat than the Reds, but run by Nazis today.

That's a lie so big it's visible from space.

The US has been the sole superpower for more than 3 decades now. Its relationship to its allies are more like relationships with vassals, see geopolitical interactions with European countries, Japan, South Korea.

I'd say at least since WWII. Admittedly we wouldn't be here without the US coming in and saving us from Germany.

Those relationships are mutually beneficial. Germany has been able to underspend on its military for decades because of US protection. Obviously the US is going to want to know what the German government is up to in regards to, say, Russia.

As a non-USAer, I strongly disagree. There are probably a handful of other countries watching you right now (in a broad, abstract sense) and the USA is the least of our concerns. There is a reason why nothing significant came out of it: every other country knows that this is happening (not exactly but roughly) and they know there are much worse problems to worry about, given other strong international players such as Russia and China. There is no ”surveillance free world” alternative. The USA is a very strong and stable democracy (maybe even the strongest) so I think it’s naive to think that removing them from the board would be a good thing.

This isn't about removing the USA from the board, this is about letting the truth out. That thing we claim to base our democracies upon.

Your argument boils down to giving up our supposedly better values in order to defeat the "evil guys".

I also refuse to accept that our future is under the hegemony of any single nation. So far the only country we have proof of going for hegemony is the USA. Russia and China are concerned with their borders and it's trivial to verify my assessment Is correct. Just compare military expenses and amount of military bases owned across the world.

> Russia and China are concerned with their borders and it's trivial to verify my assessment Is correct.

Russia is invading a neighboring country, and from talking to Lithuanians, the Russia people seem rather keen on returning to the "good old days" of the Soviet Empire.

As a person living in Sweden, it seems that my most immediate concern is USA. They are the ones that can ask the swedish government to make up some BS accusations to arrest me and eventually ship me to USA where I will be tortured.

Seems like your most immediate concern should be the Swedish government. They’re the ones required to actually agree & implement actions based on the BS accusation.

So we should focus on the goons and ignore the boss sending them? Makes total sense.

It's not either or. But in this situation the Swedish people have a better chance of influencing their own government than the one trying to get it to do what it wants. In this situation the boss is powerless over swedish people if the goons lose their power.

LOL because they'd call a vote for this right?

Except very extreme fringes, every big party will bend over to do whatever USA tells them to do, regardless of what their voting base thinks.

See how they are changing the laws so that it's legal to send kurds in turkey to die.

Kick the big party out of office. If a someone can't hurt you except by getting a someone else to do it, and that person only has the power you give it, deal with that person.

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying that the statement "my most immediate concern..." is incorrect. What's more likely: 1) demands from Swedish citizens to the USA actually stopping the USA from using Sweden in its geopolitics? Or 2) Demands from Swedish citizens to the government they empower?

If it's only the extreme fringes, then maybe most people in Sweden simply don't have much of a problem with it or don't care either way, or have more immediately pressing problems to deal with, or something else. Whatever the reason, if you don't like it then your most immediate problem is dealing with the roadblocks to getting your government to stop doing it.

EDIT: Maybe we're just talking past each other. The phrasing "most immediate concern" is something I equate to "the problem I have to deal with first". That's why I see that statement of problematics. If you were able to in some way deal with the USA first without changing Swedish politics at all then some other geopolitical power will quickly fill the power gap afterwards and play the same games.

"most immediate concern" was in regard USA spying foreign citizens vs china doing so. I was saying that FOR ME, a citizen of "the west", USA is more dangerous.

You might write all the long comments you like, and suggest me to vote (lol, i see that's working very well in USA as well), but the fact remains.

As a person living in Sweden, I think your (and my) immediate concern should be the Swedish government. It's a weak, spineless, and outdated institution that only worked for a few decades because it relied on the homogeneity of the population's opinions (and the unwillingness of those opposed to voice their opinions) to make decisions based on a fake idea of common sense.

Assange is just one example, merely an outlier. Random immigrants, perfectly productive and integrated into the country, including children, are being deported everyday for no special reason. Families are being separated, careers are being destroyed, just because they want to look "strong".

On the other hand, not a single criminal or terrorist is deported; why? Because they will make a fuss. Because there is a bunch of spoiled Swedish people who never experienced hardship with nothing better to do than to defend outdated ridiculous socialist/communist ideas, and they will kick and scream if a criminal is deported. And the coward government is afraid of having to deal with that.

Deport a working, honest immigrant, and they will not say anything. They comply, go out, and try again. If you're one of them, that is what you should be concerned with.

> And the coward government is afraid of having to deal with that.

Uuuh??? They are the ones talking about taking away citizenship from people (with dual citizenship I hope, otherwise it's against human rights), exactly to be able to deport even swedish citizens.

At this point becoming a citizen would become completely meaningless.

And they got voted in power, so I guess they have support from the majority of people.

Let me guess, you're not from South America or Africa or the middle east or southeast Asia?

The US government is the most destructive force in history

The US government prevents my country from being bombed by Russia. Without NATO we would suffer the same fate as Ukraine right now.

Broken clock right twice a day kinda deal. The US staged a coup in my country and supported a military dictatorship. Historically the US has done way more meddling than peacekeeping.

> stable democracy

Stable? We had an honest-to-god raid on the capitol just a few years ago.

At the very least I’d be a little bit nervous about the prospects of democracy if the organizer of that raid gets re-elected.

The raid was almost universally criticized and had 0 long term consequences. Yes it was stupid but a small amount of shaking does not bring down a solid structure. Take a look at what happened to some other countries around the world where similar raids happened: some of them have been stuck in violent meaningless dictatorships for decades.

Don't get me wrong; I'm center-left and democrat-aligned, but with all due respect, if you cannot see how your country has an incredible foundation, you are naive and has a shallow understanding of the world.

Meh, countries know they spy on each other. Sometimes they even use those processes to move information, just a different version of Nixon’s “For god’s sake, would someone leak this already?”

Ok, then why punish whistleblowers so harshly? Countries should consider it a useful public service.

Leaking sources and/or methods gets people killed. Good people often living in terrible places and circumstances, many of them. Maybe most. It also makes good information more difficult to come by for a long time.

Nations spying on nations (even allies) feels terrible but in practice is probably a net good for all. It reduces uncertainty, and uncertainty has historically been a major trigger for armed conflict as one side feared the other side was preparing to strike, so struck first to gain the initiative in case their fears were well-founded. History has shown that judgment to be inaccurate in some significant cases. Wars have also been avoided by good intel.

On the non-kinetic side, espionage better informs policymakers as international agreements are forged and followed. Uncertainty between nations is generally a bad thing for both nations.

We badly need to address nations spying on their own citizens, especially reciprocity arrangements to circumvent restrictions on such. But pending an unlikely utopia of humans all learning how to cooperate at scale for the first time in human history, nations spying on nations is probably a good thing for the planet.

> Leaking sources and/or methods gets people killed.

Is there any evidence of this being true or speculation?

yes, tons throughout history

here is 1 such example off the top of my head: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

The only instance of Hanssen causing deaths seem to be when he exposed "Martynov and Motorin" to be working for the FBI. They were arrested, tried, convicted and executed by the Soviet government.

Getting corrupt spies to be exposed doesn't really seem to be a great datum to back your argument. He might have actually saved more lives indirectly since he stopped them from leaking secret Soviet information to the US. Anything else?

the rejection of examples of what was requested is weak

labeling the victims as "corrupt" is also weak

saying 'ok you're right but maybe it's a good thing' is weak

none of the arguments really seem great against the evidence presented. anything else?

Right, as I supposed.

What's the strongest evidence you have? The example provided isn't very compelling in my view.

What's the strongest argument you have against the evidence presented? Your personal convincing isn't really pertinent to the fact that the example given fits the request: someone killed as a result of an intel leak.

> the example given fits the request: someone killed as a result of an intel leak

Two corrupt spies being regularly tried and executed is definitely not "tons troughout history". That was your claim, not "someone killed as a result of an intel leak", and if all you have is other spies dying then I don't have any problem with it.

What I would have a problem with is civilian deaths resulting from leaks, but for what I see generally leaks reveal more often unauthorized civilian killings than they cause them.

here is a list of things you think matter here,

but which do not actually matter here, because the example presented satisfied the condition of a person killed due to an intel leak:

- whether you agree with the killing

- whether it is 2 or 2 million

- what their profession is

- whether they are civilians

- whether you personally think they're corrupt

- what you personally have a problem with

literally none of your above views matter to the question here, because the question was whether an intel leak has ever gotten people killed (meaning >1), not "what do you, a random person on the internet, think about the fact that intel leaks have gotten people killed"

QED. anything else? Maybe the killings doesn't count because it's Tuesday, or some other new silly exclusionary criteria you made up?

The purpose of the comment section is to elucidate ideas. It's not for playing stupid one-upping games.

I'm asking for stronger evidence because the example provided is not very good given the obvious vocational risk with being a spy. Presumably there are stronger examples available.

Also, whistleblower policy has been a subject of presidential campaigns (Obama 2008). Fixating on a false choice is going to draw the ire of many who have written books and debating this topic at great depth and length.

as it turns out, no "stronger" evidence is needed of >1 people of any type being killed as a result of an intelligence leak, since very good examples were already presented

sorry you don't like the people in the examples (or maybe just don't like how they prove the claim right) but your opinion of them doesn't really matter, as my previous post says. The only thing that matters is that evidence was presented of >1 people being killed by an intelligence leak. QED.

any other stupid 1-upping games, to avoid the fact that the claim has been proven true?

Your claim being true (even tho your "tons of evidence" amounts to 1 weak case so far) or not, the opposite claim is a much stronger and compelling one.

Leaking civilian killings or military abuse in wars prevent more from happening, thus saving lives and many of them.

Sources?

Abu Grahib for one. How did that leak cause anyone to die? It has probably saved lives or prevented further abuse by causing accountability.

Assange's "US Army manual for Guantanamo prison camp" leak. Who knows how much further abuse that prevented from happening?

Assange's "Video of US helicopter fire killing civilians in Iraq"

And so on, and so on. You could actually say in this case that there are "tons of cases troughout history" and I'm presenting several to you that had a large impact. Where are your tons of cases with large impact? We're still waiting.

There's overwhelming evidence that leaks cause more good than they do harm. Prove otherwise if you can, but careful because if you attempt it you're also proving to me that you don't believe in truth.

Another question I have is, why are you more concerned by the potential deaths caused by a leak than by the deaths the leak is exposing?

> Leaking civilian killings or military abuse in wars prevent more from happening, thus saving lives and many of them.

maybe, maybe not, but completely irrelevant to the discussion, since we're evaluating one simple, objective, yes or no question you can find at the bottom of this post, not comparing anything

> There's overwhelming evidence that leaks cause more good than they do harm

same here as above: that's irrelevant to the below question

> the opposite claim is a much stronger and compelling one.

the opposite claim to >1 human in history being killed by an intelligence leak, is <=1 human in history being killed by an intelligence leak, which, again, my example proves false (and is a ridiculous claim to make)

the rest of your post repeats, for at least the third time, nothing but irrelevant, mostly emotional opinions, distracting from the topic at hand:

Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by an intelligence leak?

Yes. QED.

> maybe, maybe not, but completely irrelevant to the discussion, since we're evaluating one simple, objective, yes or no question you can find at the bottom of this post, not comparing anything

> the opposite claim to >1 human in history being killed by an intelligence leak, is <=1 human in history being killed by an intelligence leak

No.

I'm debating if leaks are a net positive overall, so my claim is that it doesn't matter if leaks sometimes cause deaths as leaks save more lives than they take, especially the lives of innocents. And by the way my claim is 100% clear in all of my comments. If you choose to engage me then accept to debate my claim or stop wasting time.

> Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by an intelligence leak?

This is a ridiculous thing to debate on, and you know it really well. Next thing we're going to debate idiotic stuff like "Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by drinking too much water?"

If all you cared about was "winning" the debate on a technicality, congratulations! Shame that it doesn't amount to anything in the real world.

If the point was to have a constructive discussion and gain some additional insight on the topic, then this was a complete waste of time, at least as long as you refuse to listen what other people have to say and fixate on a technicality.

> I'm debating if leaks are a net positive overall

No.

You're arguing with the claim that intelligence leaks have killed greater than 1 humans in history.

Everything else is a distraction from that question. If you can't agree on a common set of facts, like that one, you aren't ready to graduate to the next discussion, whether it be a comparative discussion of net benefits or anything else. And by the way that claim is 100% clear in all of my comments. If you choose to engage me then accept to discuss that claim or stop wasting time.

Your inability to acknowledge the simple truth of the claim we're discussing shows you to be the one treating this as a debate, and you're the one insisting on "winning" by refusing to acknowledge even a basic set of facts.

Until you can do that, you're not ready for the next topic, which, obviously, necessarily builds upon that shared set of facts. It's like trying to discuss the circumference of earth with someone who refuses to acknowledge it's round(ish).

"Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by drinking too much water?"

"Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by having too vigorous sex?"

"Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by getting into a heated discussion about a stupid topic?"

"Yes or No, have >1 people been killed by riding a bike?"

I rest my case, this is a complete waste of time and I give it up.

if the question of whether people have died as a result of intelligence leaks is a waste of time for you, then you should not have made your reply to the thread that asked this question and answered it ("yes"), in which you argued with that answer

by failing to acknowledge the answer (again: "yes"), you fail to graduate to the next discussion, which, obviously, necessarily builds upon a shared understanding of facts

otherwise, it'd be like discussing the circumference of earth with one who fails to even acknowledge its roundness: you simply don't get to discuss the implications of the facts while you're arguing with those very facts

your own post above illustrates how bizarre it is that you're unable to acknowledge something so obviously true: should we expect you next to similarly refuse to acknowledge people have ever died from sex or bicycling or drinking too much water?

See the successes of spycraft in South America. It has been truly a blessing to all people living there.

Sure. One can debate the Truman Doctrine, the way the Cold War was fought, the ethics of adopting a balance of power strategy, but those are all different discussions. Whether superpowers should use their intelligence apparatuses to implement their foreign political and military policies is another discussion.

Espionage, gathering secret intelligence, is arguably a net good for the planet.

I agree. If Putin had better intel on Ukraine and the west (and the true state of his own armed forces) then he, most likely, would not have started the war.

Weird how the West knew exactly what Russia was going to do beforehand, yet couldn't stop it. All that intel couldn't help preventing a war apparently.

Read up on jus ad bellum

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

This is extremely important in the context of India and Pakistan. The spy networks of each country in the other are part of the reason why the two have not been at it in a full blown war in recent years.

Because it goes against the personal interests of the people in power.

> What I don't understand is the complete lack of response from countries like Italy and Germany once they found out being spied by an ally.

Because they're all doing it too. Any attempts at retaliation what have been hypocritical and met with callouts.

EDIT: Since this is news to some people who seem to think that the entirety of Europe is on a moral high horse, here's some references. There's little morality in intelligence.

Europe spies on its own citizens: https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/europe-spyware-scandal-...

Germany helped the US spy on EU allies: https://www.dw.com/en/parliamentary-report-finds-spying-by-b...

France admits they spied on the US: https://www.france24.com/en/20131024-nsa-france-spying-squar...

Germany was found to be spying on the US: https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...

The Dutch helped the US spy on the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on...

There was in fact a small reaction[0][1] and it's naive to think that the espionage systems and efforts USA and European countries have are in any way comparable.

> Because they're all doing it too. Any attempts at retaliation what have been hypocritical and met with callouts.

Source? I can tell you already there is none. We have plenty of evidence that the USA is spying Europe and other allies, none of the opposite.

.0: https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2014-01-...

.1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/09/germany-arrest...

You mean like Europe's use of Pegasus?

https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/europe-spyware-scandal-...

> Multiple European governments are using advanced surveillance tools to spy on their own people

As I've already answered you on another comment and as the very first line of the article you shared points out, Pegasus has been used for domestic espionage. The issue at hand is foreign espionage.

Ah, you think that the EU spies on their own citizens but is above spying on allies? Allies not OK, citizens OK?

Like how Denmark helped the US spy on the EU?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped...

Yes, EU nations are somehow totally incapable of a thing every country is doing. That is naive.

> Ah, you think that the EU spies on their own citizens but is above spying on allies?

Provide evidence please, but we both know there is none.

> Like how Denmark helped the US spy on the EU?

Yet another case of the US spying on its allies.

Edit: You keep editing your comment so it's hard to properly answer.

> Allies not OK, citizens OK?

I've already wrote you here[0] that I find both cases despicable, but we're simply talking about US foreign espionage here.

.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35765353

> Yet another case of the US spying on its allies.

I'm not sure if you're being obtuse or just didn't bother reading.

Denmark was complicit in the US spying on Germany, Sweden and Norway.

https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on...

France and Germany both have admitted they have spied on the White House.

https://www.france24.com/en/20131024-nsa-france-spying-squar...

https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...

Germany has been found to helping the US spy on EU allies:

https://www.dw.com/en/parliamentary-report-finds-spying-by-b...

This is a childish and naïve stance.

Also, I'm not American. You can stop referring to me in the second person.

> Source? I can tell you already there is none. We have plenty of evidence that the USA is spying Europe and other allies, none of the opposite.

geopolitics 101? why would any country not have spies and passive surveillance of both enemies and allies that could one day threaten their power/economy?

You keep providing more and more evidence that the US is involved in spying most of its allies. Notice how almost all of these cases are about some 3rd country assisting the US in spying someone else?

You are just proving that the US is not behaving like a positive force for the world, which was entirely my point. I never said that European countries are saints. I just fear with good reason a US hegemony given their behavior.

> Notice how almost all of these cases are about some 3rd country assisting the US in spying someone else?

How is 2/5 "almost all"?

The US hegemony is rightfully feared, but only because on their relatively unchecked power, not because of any inherent ethical superiority.

You mean 2 of 5 and those 2 still involve the EU spying on it's allies, right? So all 5 examples of the EU spying on its allies a thing that you said there was "no proof whatsoever" of?

I never said that the US is or isn't a positive net on the world: I said that spying isn't evidence of your point. Because by your definition no country is positive net on the world.

> I never said that the US is or isn't a positive net on the world: I said that spying isn't evidence of your point. Because by your definition no country is positive net on the world.

Spoken like a true devil's advocate. Apparently you have no opinion, you just want to refute mine. The fervor with which you scrambled for evidence to only tangentially counter my argument suggests me otherwise, but oh well.

If all you want is evidence that the US is currently not a positive net for the world, you just need to look at the work CIA has done. You won't find anything comparable on any other country. And the fact that every nation has secret services means nothing. It's how powerful those services are and what they are used for.

By the way you realize that other countries being bad doesn't make the US any better? If nothing you're helping me prove that NATO altogether is a band of criminals, which I might have to thank you for, afterall.

> Apparently you have no opinion, you just want to refute mine.

I do have a point, you just don't like it. The point is thus: Europe spies on their allies and enemies just as much as the United States does.

> You won't find anything comparable on any other country. And the fact that every nation has secret services means nothing.

I think you may have forgotten that Russia exists.

> By the way you realize that other countries being bad doesn't make the US any better?

I never said it does. I said that spying on other countries isn't the deciding factor.

> Europe spies on their allies and enemies just as much as the United States does.

"Just as much" is simply false, as the extent and scope of USA espionage is unrivaled in Europe.

> I said that spying on other countries isn't the deciding factor.

Spying per se might be not, the intent behind it clearly does tho. You might spy to exert your power over or disrupt another country, or you might spy as a precautionary measure. We all know which country has the goal to make the world unipolar.

> I think you may have forgotten that Russia exists.

I obviously didn't, and I still believe Russia foreign interference isn't comparable with what the US has done.

The point is everybody is spying on everybody else. Every nation has spy agencies, and what they do is spying, it’s right there in the name. It’s just that the US operation is bigger and better funded, and has the biggest network of allies. This is not a shocking surprise to anyone in government anywhere, or anyone who knows almost anything at all about the history of intelligence work and espionage. The UK spied on the US throughout WW2. It’s how the world has always worked.

As for being a positive force in the world, that depends what they do with the information. It’s a different concern.

The last article seems to be about the Danish.

You make the big assumption that countries are surprised to be spied on. Granted, the head of French military intelligence was absurdly inadequate, but are generations of spies in those countries clueless? Probably not.

>What I don't understand is the complete lack of response from countries like Italy and Germany once they found out being spied by an ally.

They're basically vassal states. With no meaningful armies of their own, they rely on the US for their protection, so they're in no position to challenge it.

Exposing illegal government surveillance programs is far more important than "national security". His leak exposed US foreign operations; who cares? Maybe don't do stuff that is so illegal and immoral that your own citizens feel compelled to risk everything to expose it.

As a European I actually think Snowden's primary motivation was opposition to US foreign policy and control of the world. There is no other reason to contact Glenn Greenwald in late 2012. In 2008-2012 Glenn Greenwald was primarily known as one of the harshest opponents of US foreign policy and someone who didn't shy away from defending Russia, Iran and other geopolitical adversaries of the US.

If it was about anti-surveillance/pro-privacy activism there are so many other ways Snowden could have leaked it and so many other people and organizations he could have leaked to. Snowden would probably be living in Vienna by now and not in Moscow if he was just an anti-surveillance activist. However his primary motivation for the leaks was to lower US influence and control of the rest of the world.

Obviously for the rest of the world Snowden is a net positive that raised awareness about mass surveillance by US Big Tech. But I cringe whenever Americans declare him "an American hero". I am sure Snowden cringe even more at that term to be honest.

Snowden contacted Laura Poitras first, with this famous mail:

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitr...

"You ask why I picked you. I didn't. You did. The surveillance you've experienced means you've been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern sigint system works."

I wish everyone here would watch the movie Citizen Four to learn more about the backgrounds and the actual events. He was an anti-surveillance activist. Is it because of the Ukraine conflict that people are now trying to link him to anti-US foreign policy sentiments? Why wasn't this the topic in 2012?

>trying to link him to anti-US foreign policy sentiments

Being anti-US foreign policy is generally a good thing and the only reason you are going to leak to Glenn Greenwald of all people in late 2012.

Snowden also exposed that it was not Bashar al-Assad's legitimate democratically elected government that turned off the Internet in Syria in 2012. It was actually the NSA:

https://time.com/3107684/snowden-nsa-syria-cybersecurity/

No other "anti-surveillance activist" would have stood up Assad in 2012. Only Snowden dared to do that because he is a heroic world citizen opposed to US influence and control of the world.

What a bizarre tangent, with nothing to back it up besides “2012.”

Nothing wrong with Greenwald besides being a well-written PITA. He also saw the story though, at substantial risk to himself. A great choice to be included, even from hindsight.

I read GGs pieces on Salon about the Bush Admin in the early 00s and was impressed enough to remember his name later. At no time do I remember him being an “axis of evil” apologist.

> As a European I actually think Snowden's primary motivation was opposition to US foreign policy and control of the world. There is no other reason to contact Glenn Greenwald in late 2012. In 2008-2012 Glenn Greenwald was primarily known as one of the harshest opponents of US foreign policy and someone who didn't shy away from defending Russia, Iran and other geopolitical adversaries of the US.

This isn't why he went to Greenwald, he did so to avoid American outlets like the New York Times, since before the leak they censored the illegal wiretapping story (Room 641A) at the request of the Bush Administration.

Snowden found himself in a situation where both the Government and the Media were in cahoots to cover up criminal behavior. At that point I don't blame him, going to Glenn and then fleeing to Russia was exactly the right thing to do. If he didn't the story would have been covered up and he'd be sitting in a dark cell right now, with none of us none the wiser.

Perhaps if they weren't trampling on the law they wouldn't run the risk of legitimate secrets being let out from numerous malcontents.

Weren't there millions of pages or documents to review?

But even so, those demand him to be 100% ethical, why don't they also demand that from the NSA and the rest of the state?

He did it in a responsible way. Perhaps if there was better support for whistle-blower he could have done it even better.

Agreed. He worked with journalists to try the make the leak safe.

Let’s focus on impact- Now everyone is at least aware that digital activities are under surveillance including phone call metadata. We have made that trade off for some security. Thank you Snowden.

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the whole Snowden ordeal was not discovering hard proof we've been living in a borderline-Orwellian surveillance state, but the utter indifference of the American people at this revelation.

While foreign allies showed a lot of interest in his revelations. Notwithstanding his morally high intentions, it's debatable whether the USA as a whole got a positive outcome from his actions.

What do you mean it's debatable? The govt was literally spying on the whole country without any disclosure. The actual people who live and were being spied on have at least an idea of their true circumstances now.

At the same time, foreign allies had a formal proof they were being spied as well. Domestically, it was a win; internationally, it was a catastrophe.

Yeah, a “catastrophe” for innocent people everywhere.

"it's debatable whether the USA as a whole got a positive outcome from his actions."

I could make the case that while what Snowden did was heroic, and praiseworthy in a just and educated nation, the US is ultimately neither a just nor educated nation, and too little changed as a result of his whistleblowing. Go ask 100 truly random people what they think of Snowden's revelations and you may find yourself quite disappointed. John Oliver did an episode on this and it was more than a little depressing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M

Ohwellian: When you know you are living in a dystopia but couldn't be bothered to change anything.

Egowellian: When multitudes of people around you are suffering but you are profiting so you ensure that they continue to suffer.

Fauxwellian: When multitudes of people around you are suffering and you fabricate evidence as proof of it and then no one believes you because of the fraud

Look at literally any poll on this issue. Here [1] is one from late 2019 from Pew. 66% of Americans think the risks of government data collection outweigh the benefits, fewer than 25% think they benefit from such behavior. And almost nobody knows what the government is doing with all of this information they're collecting.

It's certainly not indifference, it's that our media and democracy aren't really functioning properly. I can go look at any news site and regardless of the site's political bias - there's a recurring theme. You'll see lots of pro war stuff and lots stuff on topics that makes people really dislike each other. But these sort of issues where people overwhelmingly feel one way, and the political establishment feels another? Yeah, those are all strangely absent.

And come next year? These same topics will receive about as much coverage as COBOL at a hot trends in computing conference. Instead we'll get two people each telling you to vote for them because the other guy's awful. The one bright side is we can safely say that they're both right.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...

> these sort of issues where people overwhelmingly feel one way, and the political establishment feels another? Yeah, those are all strangely absent.

I feel that Sanders' nomination campaigns epitomized this divide: He spoke for the people. Many more people donated for him than any other candidate, his supporters were diverse and enthusiastic. He was the number one most popular politician in the entire country.

Yet media - quite openly - gave him far less coverage, were 3x more negative in the coverage they did give, studiously ignored the attacks and cheating from the political establishment, systematically smeared his supporters, and then blamed him when Hilary (number one disliked Democrat in America) lost.

And smart people, rational people with functioning memories, apparently, seemed to just... not want to talk about it.

And then it happened again, with even more obvious collusion, four years later. And we talked about it even less, just relieved that we wouldn't have another 4 years of that.

Bringing it all up now feels like you're reopening someone else's closed scab. People are auto-rewriting their own version history to help themselves feel less abused, it seems. They don't want to hear it. And this is (many of) the people who were even clued in to it all in the first place.

Only Sanders wanted Snowden to be honored for his actions. Hilary wanted him to "face the music". It could all hardly be more obvious. And yet...

It really shows how much effect the media and the social and political environment it creates influence the thoughts and feelings of people, however highly educated and intelligent they are. If you think you are not influenced by media and propaganda, consider yourself very wrong, the best propaganda is when you don't even consider it propaganda, and the US probably has the most effective propaganda machine in the entire world.

We need to shift the dynamic in America from relying on these media conglomerates, to individuals doing their own research on things. Everyone knows the news media is rigged beyond saving, we need to let them die out, it's what they all deserve for betraying the trust of the people.

Media megacorporations won't die on their own.

As much money as they lose; they make enough returns for their owners in indirect ways to be worth the investment. Murdoch and Turner are many things, but poor isn't one of them.

Btw, did anyone else find it disturbing how "do your own research" became a trigger phrase that allows a rather large group of people to discount anything and everything you said? And at the same time, for an opposite but similar group of people, "trust the science" did the same thing?

trusting science / expertise has always been a turn-off for a certain portion of people with some sort of inferiority or persecution complex or oppositional defiant disorder

unfortunately some politicians seek to gain power by appealing to this

Sure, that's a hallowed tradition in America.

And at the same time, blindly trusting institutions and their dogma has long been a turn-on for people with a superiority complex, or those content with the status quo.

Each cheek of the political arse seeks to gain power by simplistically appealing to these groups, because it's more effective for raising funds and votes than it ought to be.

perhaps, perhaps not

one thing is for sure, though: falsely portraying trust in expertise and science as,

"blindly trusting institutions and their dogma"

"for people with a superiority complex, or those content with the status quo",

has been a trope of those same anti-science, anti-expertise politicians for even longer. As Asimov wrote:

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

You may want to read what I wrote again. I did not "falsely portray trust in expertise and science" etc, not in any way; nor would I. It's rather aggressively wrong to attach such to my point (which you missed).

You seem to have jumped from me saying that some put too much stock in dogma and institutions, to believing that this was an attempt to attack expertise and science. There was nothing in my comment, even implicit, that would lead someone fair to this conclusion.

This assumptive leap typifies the 'with us or against us' thinking I'm talking about; tribal thinking which short-circuits reason, and harms genuine scientific thinking.

Even if you didn't mean to imply this, what you wrote has that effect; consider re-reading your own comment if you don't see that.

You may want to read what I wrote again. I did not accuse you personally of falsely portraying trust in expertise and science, not in any way. It's rather aggressively wrong to take personal offense at such an accusation you imagined.

You seem to have jumped from me criticizing those who do (particularly those who are anti-science and anti-expertise), to an accusation that you personally did so. There was nothing in my comment, even implicit, that would lead someone fair to this conclusion. If you aren't doing it, the criticism doesn't apply to you.

This assumptive leap typifies the persecution complex I'm talking about: emotional thinking which short-circuits reason, and harms genuine scientific thinking. Consider re-reading your own comment if you don't see that.

You seem to want more democracy, but would you say that if Trumpers win again, become even stronger, and subvert democracy some more?

Oh man yeah. Individuals doing their own research. They'll just pour over minutes of committee meetings, develop contacts in government agencies, and explore a bunch of primary sources all in their spare time! It's so simple!

Unfortunately, regular folks have no idea how to do proper research. Not even academic level, but merely separating out low-quality obvious misinformation.

> Everyone knows the news media is rigged beyond saving

Is that true, though? Or do we, in our bubble, just believe that? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people think the news media -- at least the particular subset of the news media they choose to watch -- is more or less ok.

Here's [1] a survey from the end of 2022 asking this exact question. Across all adults, those who have at least "some" trust in the news they personally get from national news orgs has fallen from 76% to 61% in the past 6 years. While that's still a majority, and a sizable majority, it won't be for long on the current trajectory. And that's for when the bar is set to "some trust"!

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/27/u-s-adult...

> We need to shift the dynamic...

Ah, sweet flower child.

Much the same could be said about Ron Paul. I think that's worth a pitch because their policies are diametrically opposed, the results however were staggeringly similar.

How much of this do you think is media just not functioning properly as opposed to it deliberately being used as a tool to influence public opinion the way the intelligence community desires?

We know the CIA has commandeered domestic media organizations for the purpose of influencing the opinions of the American public before - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

And yet, it is not journalists that are privy to classified material, it is lawmakers, military staff, intelligence staff, and their contractors and consultants.

What makes a journalist a better place to whistle to than an elected politician on the intelligence committee or any one of a number of other options.

My basic position on this is that secret holders never have the full picture, but at least they have the trust of the state they serve. A journalist is not always just a journalist.

Now, before you disregard my opinion completely please add to your consideration the following facts:

- I dated and lived with a nationally renowned journalist and editor, so I know a bit about journalists.

- I worked for CSIS and currently work for the CIA as an NOC Agent. AKA a spy.

- I have been in situations where I deeply felt the right thing to do was not to list to the people above my command. What I did in one particular situation was contact a politician I deeply trust who has high level clearance and left a vague message for that politician.

- I think some good has come out of the Snowden leaks, even though I don't think he did it the right way. It's a nuanced discussion and the public doesn't know everything. This work is tough.

State employees are financially incentivized not to disobey, while journalists are, ideally.

You have not provided (and cannot provide) any proof to back those additional assertions, as such they do nothing to improve your argument.

> What makes a journalist a better place to whistle to than an elected politician on the intelligence committee or any one of a number of other options?

A history of actually doing their jobs in this regard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)

- I worked for CSIS and currently work for the CIA as an NOC Agent. AKA a spy.

Bro this is Reddit tier lying.

Let us guess, you are also fabulously wealthy? For some odd reason fictional spies seem to be very wealth as well.

If you worked for CSIS it is unlikely you would be posting that you worked there, same for the CIA. Did you somehow just transfer to the CIA and as a "foreign national" all the confidential material marked "NOFORN" was suddenly available to you, a foreigner?

Declaring yourself a "spy" in public.. Any chance you have yet to reach the age of majority?

> Now everyone is at least aware that digital activities are under surveillance including phone call metadata. We have made that trade off for some security. Thank you Snowden.

We've traded away privacy, but whether that increases security remains to be seen.

It certainly increases the money we spend on alleged security. And "creates jobs" or whatever other euphemism we have for pork barrel decision-making today.

Snowden is perhaps not the best of examples because of all the controversy. If we change the subject a little, what is your stance on, say, the Panama Papers?

1) Criminals infiltrate government. 2) Government makes it legal to avoid taxation by placing funds in offshore accounts. 3) Large sums of money are hidden in Panamanian accounts via Mossack Fonseca. 4) Someone leaks documentation of these accounts to journalists. 5) Criminals say it's not whistleblowing because no laws were broken, it's just snooping into private affairs.

Of course, ordinary citizens don't get such privileges. If they could, everyone could get out of student loan debt by setting up a Delaware shell corporation controlled by another family member or group of friends, transferring their loan debt to it, and then let the shell corporation go bankrupt. The only downside would be that nobody would be that likely to loan you more money, but you'd have no more debt to pay off.

Why hasn't he been pardoned by either party?

James Clapper needs to be cuffed and perp-walked in front of the TV cameras, for so many things besides this.

It's even worse than it appears... https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-10000-fbi-agents-ca...

Over 25 per cent (at the least) of FBI employees can access secret databases on people.

'In his investigation, Horowitz found that none of the 29 randomly chosen queries had been carried out properly or legally. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said from an earlier conversation with Horowitz that in 25 of the cases, “there was unsupported, uncorroborated, or inconsistent information.” The FBI couldn’t even produce the relevant investigative files in the other four.'

Any better sources than Zerohedge/Epoch Times?

The video of the hearing is available, https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1651588376196182016

Any query made by the FBI of this sort of data would at minimum be CJI exempt from most disclosure. For FISA stuff, even more controls would be in place

Who, exactly, is responsible for the FBI, CIA, NSA, et al. if they over-reach?

We tend to believe there's an implicit checks-and-balances system in place, but the most dramatic historical time time a government official wanted to defund a secret-holder of the government was JFK.

In other words, how is this not a quiet dictatorship by another name?

I'm not sure I believe much about what Snowden released. I see him as more of a psyop agent than a whistleblower. The govt could have orchestrated that whole ordeal to instill a chilling effect on the population, none of it had to be true for the population to react and self censor

Your usage of the word travesty is a tragedy (and ironically, also a travesty)

travesty:

something that is shocking, upsetting, or ridiculous because it is not what it is supposed to be

“It is a travesty and a tragedy that so many people would be denied the right to vote.”

“The investigation into the causes of the accident was a complete travesty. [=sham]”

“The trial was a travesty of justice.”

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/travesty

On to the differences between tragedy and travesty:

> A “tragedy” is of course a dreadful event or disaster that results in sadness, injury or destruction. While a “travesty” is more of a distorted or cheap imitation of something – often applied to the debasement of something held high, such as justice, rules, ideals and so on.

https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/qa-tragedy-vs-travesty...

> Despite the importance of their actions, named whistleblowers are often subjected to oppressive and stigmatized labels—like "snitch" or "leaker."

Modern societies are predicated on the notion that laws apply equally to all members of the society and transgressions are identified by authorities (the executive) and punished in a transparent manner by courts (the judicial), acting under the rule of laws set in place by government bodies (the legislative) that are responsive to the general population's interests.

There are those who are scoffing to themselves at this description, and their viewpoint has some historical merit. The "stationary bandit" theory of government is a common alternative view: criminal elements with no respect for the above concept of equal treatment under the law infiltrate and take over governments so that they can engage in criminal activity while being protected by the very powers of state authority that were intended to keep their activities in check.

These organized crime cartels then have the legislators rewrite the laws so that their criminal behavior is protected and not prosecuted (witness the failure of the US government to prosecute any of the major fraudsters involved in the 2008 economic collapse, or to prosecute the members of government who lied about WMDs in Iraq in 2002-2003, or to prosecute those involved in the illegal domestic mass surveillance operation, or to prosecute those pushing opiates on the population, etc.).

The more blatant organized crime cartels (mafia, drug cartels, etc.) are well-known for calling members of their organizations who testify against them in court names like 'rats', 'snitches', and so on. If this becomes widespread behavior (major US media figures calling Snowden a 'weasel' come to mind), then it becomes rather clear that the government and its major corporate affiliates have become a kleptocracy run by a group of stationary bandits. We could call this a 'public-private partnership', I suppose. For more:

https://broadstreet.blog/2021/04/05/the-rise-of-the-stationa...

I continue to maintain that Snowden was one of the greatest American patriots in decades.

There are many leakers that deliberately act with the intention to harm the state; That wasn't Snowden - he threw away his life to stage an intervention.

Why has he been left to rot in a dictatorship?

I'd say sign a pardon for the man, but unless he can get out of Russia there's a damned good chance that things would only get worse for him.

They would need a secret pardon agreement so he leaves at the same time he’s pardoned

I am 99% sure Snowden is cringing at the term "American patriots".

Snowden's primary motivation was most likely opposition to US foreign policy and control of the world. There is no other reason to contact Glenn Greenwald in late 2012. In 2008-2012 Glenn Greenwald was primarily known as one of the harshest opponents of US foreign policy and someone who didn't shy away from defending Russia, Iran and other geopolitical adversaries of the US.

Snowden is a world citizen who opposed what "American patriots" were doing to the rest of the world.

He has stated his primary reason was that he was pro-privacy and anti-surveillance. There is no reason to doubt this. He had a huge trove of info he could have sold to China or Russia and he didn't. He has given us no reason to not believe him, and if you're paying attention to Washington you'll see why he didn't go through those channels, especially in the era of shipping off people to be tortured in other countries and "water boarding" is just "coercive means".

> I am 99% sure Snowden is cringing at the term "American patriots".

Perhaps for the current perverse use of the term "patriot", which to many Americans seems to boil down to "yes-man for the state". But in its purest form, I do believe Snowden to be a patriot, even if he'd object to the term.

The article only mentions her as a picture (on purpose, I'm sure), but I'd like to take a second to address this:

Chelsea Manning is a very bad example of a whistleblower. First, she didn't reveal anything new. All the information that was produced was previously known. Second, she was releasing documents because she was angry that she was deployed. Third, she didn't even attempt to use the whistle blowing process in the military that is quite in tact (it was called request mast when I was in but goes by different names depending on the branch). How she was treated afterward was terrible, but to continue validating her story by labeling her a whistleblower is harmful imo. It's okay to say not all whistleblowers are cut from the same cloth while simultaneously promoting the system of request mast/whistleblowing in the government.

>First, she didn't reveal anything new. All the information that was produced was previously known

Just as a start, the Iraq War logs detailed fifteen thousand previously unknown civilian deaths.

While you can argue we knew our military was doing terrible stuff, without her leaks it wouldn't have been clear what terrible stuff they were doing.

>Second, she was releasing documents because she was angry that she was deployed

Source? While I'm not 100% clear what her motivations were, I've never heard that claim.

As for the third, it was clear what she released was being hidden. I can't imagine what the proper channel would be for something like the "collateral murder" video. "Hey you know that time you killed journalists and lied about it? Well there's evidence you lied about it."

> While you can argue we knew our military was doing terrible stuff, without her leaks it wouldn't have been clear what terrible stuff they were doing.

The Iraq war logs weren't even mostly about us. They were mostly about our partners. Her testimony aligns to what those databases were for. [1]

> Source? While I'm not 100% clear what her motivations were, I've never heard that claim.

I was trying to find the chat logs from IRC that make that situation a lot more emblematic. She was having relationship issues at the time and was demurred by long deployment times/work. (To her credit, I did a similar deployment for roughly a year and they are exhausting) In her testimony she glosses over much of what was in the chat logs, instead trying to explain her actions from a place of promoting "national discourse".

The helicopter gunship situation is accurate. If there's anything she released that was useful it was that.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-mannin...

On 1, she says

>The CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases contain reporting and analysis fields for multiple disciplines including Human Intelligence or HUMINT reports, Psychological Operations or PSYOP reports, Engagement reports, Counter Improvised Explosive Device or CIED reports, SigAct reports, Targeting reports, Social and Cultural reports, Civil Affairs reports, and Human Terrain reporting.

They're the reports we made and the actions we took. How is that not about us?

She seemed to be genuinely unhappy with life when she whistleblew, but to me it seemed more like "I'm unhappy so let's make a grand move" than "let's get revenge on the military for my unhappiness."

She says elsewhere in that testimony that the reports in which civilians were killed, raped, and sexual assaults mostly had to do with the police and military of the host countries (Iraq and Afghanistan). This lines up with my experience as well; we were repeatedly advised to stay out of the locals business, or how they run their judicial system is up to them. This same judicial system is how you have multi-time trigger men and bomb makers that somehow left Kabul unphased after leaving their courts.

> "I'm unhappy so let's make a grand move" than "let's get revenge on the military for my unhappiness."

I don't really see a difference between the two besides intent. Intent isn't really something that matters in today's world.

What I would've liked to have seen is if she joined the service members trying to whistleblow on ineffective and dangerous ROEs, the lies told by the Obama administration about the success of the Iraqi and Afghani police and military, etc... Instead, she released just enough vague and sensational stuff to spur conspiracy theories.

To be clear, I understand the frustration that inspired Chelsea to do what she did, but I think how you do these things both affords (or removes) protections, and matters a great deal more if you're actually trying to make a difference. That along side the content of what's released; in the case of Snowden there absolutely wasn't anyone to appeal to. In Chelsea's case there certainly was.

> I don't really see a difference between the two besides intent. Intent isn't really something that matters in today's world.

You can't have it both ways, though. In your original post, you said, "Second, she was releasing documents because she was angry that she was deployed." Clearly you believed her intent to be a big part of the reason why she shouldn't be considered a whistleblower.

And in this thread we've learned your "first" (she released nothing new) is also not really the case, and your "third" (she didn't try to use official whistleblowing channels first) is murky, in that she probably felt that the people behind the whistleblowing channels already knew about the things she was going to blow the whistle on, and had a vested interest in keeping them secret.

So I don't really see your objection here? It feels more along the lines of "if I were in her position I would have done things differently", which, fine, I think that's probably true of many people in many situations, but so what?

Evading official channels of whistleblowing, including using her Congressperson if she didn't want to request mast, is my main grievance there. I still argue that the information is not net-new. The helicopter gunship video was said to have disappeared, yet she released it. The facts around the situation didn't change materially though. The 15k civilians that died weren't added to the death toll as far as I've read, they just now had attribution. I don't think her intent had much to do with anything; she still evaded using official channels and released confidential information including informants and people operating under cover (HumInt) that put peoples lives at risk.

> whistle blowing process in the military

I was also in the military, and can tell you if she had complained no one would have cared and probably would have just gotten her into more trouble. Whistleblowing to the military chain of command is just for stuff like if your CO is stealing money or your LT is coercing a sailor into a sexual relationship, not for stuff that makes the military look bad. The stuff Manning released was definitely not stuff you would take to 'mast'.

That's not really true, when I was in I was cognizant of a group of Marines that were being charged due to a request mast. They did have to request past their local unit leadership, which the process allowed for.

Why can't both things be true? Like any large organization, different parts of it behave in different ways. While you had a good impression of the whistleblowing infrastructure due to your experience, it's perfectly reasonable and unsurprising that others might have a bad impression of it due to their experience. And perhaps Manning was one of those latter people.

That can be true, but you can't really have your cake and eat it too though, no? If the process is robust enough for serious internal affairs and someone skips requesting mast, which they can do all the way up to the President, then the next question is "why?". She could've even gone to a Congressperson with this and it'd have afforded her protections. Instead, she went to WikiLeaks.

You’re assuming that anyone in the government cares about what she was surfacing. That’s why whistleblowers go to the press, because the power structures that be don’t care.

Yeah, I don't really accept that kind of logic. That's the kind of stuff that says Jan 6 is okay because the government is that untrustable. In Snowden's case, sure, but in Manning's case her testimony also highlights that intel analysts had been building a case against the helicopter crew for a while.

I am personally fine with whistleblowers going to the press if they are more comfortable. The systems in the government, and especially the military, are very harsh and unforgiving to mistakes and unpreparedness. It's hard to whistleblow properly to the government, and so if there is an important topic that needs to be surfaced, then as far as I am concerned I would prefer people do whatever is necessary for their own safety and security to do so.

I respect your stance as well, but disagree that it's always the best. A messy situation like the Manning stuff had numerous avenues of approach and none were great.

There is a saying goes like this,

"85% of people on earth are followers, 10% are leaders or creators, or manipulators and 5% are observers. The followers need something to follow or believe so the creators capitalize on that and take advantage of their desire to be lead. The observers see everything that's going on and can ruin everything for the 10% but, the 85% label the 5% crazy or plan to get rid of them because the 10% have control."

800 million leaders in the world, and 400 million whisleblowers?

"team leaders", self-employed and small informal business owner could easily fill that number. One just need to be a self-starter, sociable and have an organization to manage

It sounds plausible that one in ten people are leaders, although I don't know how you could measure how many people would report a crime if they saw it occur.

400M observers, of which a large portion might desire to be whistleblowers, but either see it as futile, or as incredibly dangerous to themselves, and therefore stay silent.

Regardless, the absolute numbers or exact percent values aren't important. If we believe the concept is plausible, it's enough to think of the vast majority being followers, with a small number of leaders/creators/manipulators and an even smaller number of observers/whistleblowers.

Maybe 85/10/5 is right, maybe it's 95/4/1, maybe 99/0.8/0.2, whatever. As with many things, it's an intentional oversimplification, intended to illustrate a general idea.

In the EU we already have a law for protecting whistleblowers:

https://commission.europa.eu/aid-development-cooperation-fun...

Also companies have emerged for providing secure platforms for whistleblowers.

Though, as national security and related things are in the hands of the member states, I am not sure how well this EU law and its national adaptations apply to the cases discussed in this article (probably wholesale exemptions have been adopted by the member states at this front).

EDIT #1: At some point they also tried to draft a law for protecting people involved in vulnerability disclosure, which would have been great, but I think this lawmaking proposal failed.

EDIT #2: I should have read the article better; it seems similar laws exist also in the US.

The US also has laws protecting whistleblowers, which to me just highlighted the complete moral bankruptcy of some Republican members of the US Congress when they tried to out the whistleblower who brought Trump's phone call with the Ukrainian president to light, but more importantly, when they tried to impugn his motives.

The thing that made me so angry about this is that a huge point of whistleblower laws is that it doesn't matter what the motives of the whistleblower are. Of course many whistleblowers are disgruntled for various reasons, but who cares? Whistleblowing laws aren't about taking the whistleblower's accusations at face value, it's just about protecting whistleblowers' ability to bring inside information and evidence to light, and then that information can be investigated independently.

The push by folks like Rand Paul to expose and condemn the whistleblower was one of the most disgusting political acts I've ever seen.

I found the treatment of Julian Assange to be the disgusting poltics; after that its just more of the same, innit?

No, it’s not the same because it doesn’t benefit him this time. Leftists are like libertarians, if libertarians only applied their principles to themselves. Bodily autonomy, firearm rights, private property, taxation, misinformation censorship, death penalty, etc. Whether or not they support it depends not on what it does but who it benefits, and so a left winger can never truly take a concrete position like “I support gun control” when they need to make exceptions for SRA, Natives, Palestinians, etc.

Putting aside your implied definition of Leftists here. The Palestinian point is broadly enlightening, but maybe not in the way you intended. Armed struggle for the purpose of self determination should be materially supported in Ukraine, but not in Palestine. This is the glowing contradiction, and I'm not sure real leftists are the most guilty party here.

I don’t want to materially support either country.

As someone who considers themselves on the left, i have broadly the same view.

I also don't have a hard view on gun control, because if the state authorities are militarised then it's hard to argue that civil society can't be. The solution for this of course is to demilitarise the police.

US complicity has permitted the decades long ethnic cleansing of Palestine to continue unabated.

It is truly abhorrent.

However, there's a significant difference between arming a nation under invasion, and arming religious fundamentalists.

The treatment of Assange defies belief, and the hypocrisy is off the scale. The defense from many people who would nominally be appalled by this, seems to rest on the poor character of Assange, so he gets written off. The poor character point may or may not be correct, but is completely irrelevant, and if it relates to civil or criminal offences then it has never been allowed to be tested.

Also it's just insanely easy to malign the character of someone with a few well placed news articles and tweets.

He avoided prosecution of three credible separate sexual abuse allegations by hiding in a non-extraditing country for seven years.

He's also not a whistleblower.

US law doesn't allow public interest as a defence defence, that was partly why Snowden refused to return to the US. https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Justice-Dept-s...

are there any whistleblowers who keep working in their field in the US?

The cartoon at the top of the article highlights the fact that the laws aren't working (the UK was in the EU when some of these people were imprisoned).

Yet the EU continues to make life very difficult for EU whistleblower Roelie Post [0].

Perhaps because she fought against child trafficking and US-based adoption firms are lobbying in the EU for adopting vulnerable children from countries like Romania.

---

[0]: http://www.roeliepost.com/about/

I didn't know that. Nor am I claiming that the law is working properly or have any evidence to any direction. The recent issues at UN are also "interesting":

https://www.transparency.org/en/press/un-whistleblower-expos...

Laws are pointless if they aren't used. The US has laws to allow whistleblowing. However they are so vague US prosecutors can easily get around them to prosecute and imprison whistleblowers, and the system itself is so corrupt that the "channels" you would use to actually do it would shut down the process almost immediately to save embarrassment to the government. The laws are just feel good laws and don't work, that's why people go straight to the press.

"Truth is treason in the empire of lies."

- George Orwell

Perfectly said, it encapsulates America to a tee.

and every other country, let's let them have credit too. Politicians everywhere are usually pieces of shit, as are their henchmen

You're not wrong, but doesn't whataboutism detract from the legitimate criticisms being made of the US government here?

I know a lot of people who take a seriously negative view against whistleblowers, which I find very strange. Do you not want to know the messed up shit that the companies and government are doing? I think people just see it as being a traitor.

isn't that the premise of this blog post

I didn't read it

Because there is a thin line between a whistleblower and a traitor. A whistleblower releases information about "messed up shit", a traitor releases legitimate secret information, how do you call someone who releases both?

Depends. Many people also have things they wish to hide, from affairs to drug use to embezzlement to their politics to just their sexual orientation. So they have to balance preferring to know about the wrongdoing of others (in the opinion of the whistleblower) vs having their own secrets revealed by someone close to them with a similar mindset, who may view their activities as wrong.

Because there's asymmetric of impact and incentive. If I leak some politicians' corrupt dealing, practically no much impact to general folks (because direct impact is divided to millions of people), but for those politicians directly impacted, absolute negative and they have all the incentive including power to do so to silence the whistle-blower.

Whistle blowing policies are not worth the paper on which it's written. Equally worth are HR grievance policies (of all kinds). The sure outcome of invoking either is that (1) you'll lose your job (2) you'll never find a job again.

One difference with blowing the whistle, though, is that it'll lead to your death: you'll be killed if you're lucky. If not, you'll lead a painful life of professional and social ostracization, which will eventually lead to suicide. So, choose your poison.

I think there's some degree of truth to this, but that you're overstating it.

A realistic takehome message is that sometimes it's best to just walk away.

Sometimes you can even ask for help with the walking away gracefully.

(When asking for help leaving, from within the organization... I suspect you'll need either trustworthy institutional mechanisms for that, or to find one or more individuals who are smart, of good character, and who have the ability to help. Don't ask the wrong person for help.)

> Snowden was not a whistleblower

> Despite Snowden's later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing concerns about intelligence activies, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden's actions afforded him protection.

> Snowden was a disgruntled employee who became engaged in numerous spats with his supervisors.

> Most of the documents Snowden stole have no connection to programs that could impact privacy or civil liberties

> Snowden was, and remains, a serial exaggerator and fabricator

Review of the Unauthorized Disclosures of Former National Security Agency Contractor Edward Snowden (pdf warning): https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...

Highlights (pdf warning): https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/snowden_report_...

Just look at this thread of “hackers” saying “well the law is the law.”

It’s an embarrassment the degree to which smart educated leading edge communities have totally and utterly forfeited their own power for the security blanket of these domination based systems.

Actually it’s worse, the official ethos of success in America is now some cynical mix of “If you’re not scamming someone you’re not trying” and “Altruism is for suckers”

It’s like we’ve gotten to the point where even the people who disagree with Ayn Rand Objectvism have given up and just decided to play the same game just with different set of moral criteria

Or maybe this is a venture capitalist forum and of course it’s going to be overrun by people who believe in some version of domination as the right moral philosophy.

I was prepping to reply and you hit my point in your last paragraph. Through my youth I always assumed that people either saw through the corruption or had the wool pulled over their eyes, but the after working at a couple companies with several ex military contractor types and some some new inlaws, I've realized that for some people, tribe is above all. They are patriotic and loyal to the US system, which can do no wrong, and any perceived security or survival needs will always trump law and morals. These are the same thought processes that fuel the rise of fascism.

They are biological instincts, it's normal. What you can do is choosing your tribe as something other than the default one.

Slashdot was a hacker forum, initially (prior to 1999). This has been a forum seen as an adjacency to a seed/VC incubator from the get-go.

People keeping to their roots and not going for the money like Richard Stallman are mocked. Steven Levy glorifies him in Hackers, then takes a break from books glorifying the Google corporation, and when Stallman is down delivers a coup de grace to Stallman in Wired, for soi disant very progressive reasons.

Of course Wired was founded by Rossetto as a continuation of the "New Right" project he was talking about in the New York Times in 1971.

I myself am not surprised that people wander out of their prep schools and universities into these corporations and hold these views. People's hegemonic ideas are borne from the material conditions and class relations they are in.

>Actually it’s worse, the official ethos of success in America is now some cynical mix of “If you’re not scamming someone you’re not trying” and “Altruism is for suckers”

And you're so certain that all of these people on this site saying "well the law is the law" are Americans? No perfectly obedient, money-loving Europeans among them? Absurd.

Some whistleblowers are just disgruntled and are not acting out of a sense of moral obligation but are rather whistleblowing as a form of vengeance

I'm sure there is some truth to your statement. I don't think it negates the need for society to protect whistleblowers who do so under a sense of moral obligation though (which is what the article is about).

John Kiriakou springs to mind a guy who leaked classified info mixed with a bit of incorrect hearsay to push an agenda.

Julian Assange leaked the DNC emails on behalf of Russian intelligence.

And even the guy who turned out to be Deep Throat admitted he did what he did out of pure spite over failure to earn recognition for his role in the crime.

> Julian Assange leaked the DNC emails on behalf of Russian intelligence.

Journalists report on leaks from intelligence all the time, to the point that the "Intelligence sources say"-phrase is becoming a meme of US "news".

You can't open CNN or MSNBC without seeing some FBI or CIA head telling you what they want you to think.

Why something is being leaked is relevant, but it shouldn't be a reason to ignore the truth or attack the journalist.

That's a pretty sanguine point of view. Russia stole emails from a private organization for the explicit intent of disrupting the election and then fed them to WikiLeaks and then Assange had audacity to try to blame Seth Rich. Julian Assange provably lies to further his personal agenda. Any good he has done for the world has been purely coincidental.

Cable news hire experts to give expert opinions. Not to divulge state secrets for personal gain.

Well, except Fox. Fox has Oliver North.

Julian Assange did not leak anything. He's not a whistleblower or a leaker. He's a publisher, a hacker, and an activist.

Does that matter if what they are whisteblowing about is corrupt and it's true?

When I worked in a large-ish organization in the late 1990's, there were some "interesting" hiring practices and office dynamics, to say the least. Our organization had a phone hotline and an email address to raise concerns. I decided to send a short, objective message after observing the negative effects of these practices on the workplace morale.

My message was then promptly sent to the very same hiring manager running the show, and the local director who was equally involved. Obviously, nothing positive came out of it, and there was a fair amount of unpleasantness afterwards.

Back then I was younger and somewhat naïve, but fortunately that mindset changed quickly. None of these hotlines or whistleblower mailboxes work as intended. More often than not, you just end up creating trouble for yourself and for others with a net negative outcome while the original problem remains unaddressed.

The people in the positions of power have everything going for them, it's in their interests to maintain status-quo and expand their spheres of influence. The last thing they want is for an upstart whistleblower to try and make a change.

If you discover law enforcement or prosecutors committing crimes, who do you report it to?

This is a serious question.

You can only report it to their peers, and I promise you, from personal experience, that you will get absolutely nowhere except, like Snowden, have an entire world of hurt come down on you instead.

I can not recommend whistleblowing to anyone. If you see the government going wrong, ignore it. Walk away. You only have one life. How many years of it do you want to write off?

What we actually need is better and better procedures for anonymously reporting misconduct to a body that will actually hold people accountable. Many investigative bodies end up being staffed by those somewhat related or associated with the persons under investigation and therefore guaranteed to produce no meaningful results.

I don't know how to construct a body that actually works effectively, but I would love links to any good studies or articles on this.

I've been thinking about some kind of "regular human inspector" where companies have to pay a government inspector to just ask common sense questions and be a place to bring issues that can't be dealt with internally.

Since they change regularily, bribing becomes unrealistic, we don't need high salaries or expertise. It's a very coarse idea still.

I'm just rambling here!

If it's local, report it to the state, if it's the state report it to the feds, if it's the feds your only real option is to do it and run to another country, or keep your mouth shut and just find a new job. This process has repeated itself many times in the news if you research it.

In theory that is how it should work. I promise in practice that you will get absolutely nowhere. Most prosecutors seem local, either municipal or county, but in actuality are State workers, and the State is generally completely disinterested in investigating its own staff.

The feds are even less interested in investigating matters that should be handled by the State.

I say this from practical experience of trying to move the State Attorney General's office and the FBI to investigate and getting absolutely nowhere at all.

My next plan is to simply take a local friendly reporter with a video camera and perform a sit-in at the prosecutors office until they promise to do something or they have me arrested for trespass.

Most whistleblowers have a high moral and ethical standard. In current societies where people make it to the top lying, cheating and misusing or even suppressing others, we watch movies about Jedi and turn a blind eye to the dark side the minute the TV is turned off. Humans are an odd species.

I think I read this about the original Simpsons: they were very critical of certain things, such as environmental dangers. But most people tuning in fantasize their role in protecting the environment, then go in with their lives without doing much about it.

I think this is deep in all sorts of media with a positive message - scratch the moral itch so you don't have to do it in reality.

Why isn't whistleblowing fully anonymous? Is it because of spam and investigative bandwidth challenges? Given the progress with LLMs recently, I suspect in the very near future we would have AI filters that receive anonymous whistleblower reports, process it for validity and route it to a large number of reporters and other public members for further handling without putting the original whistleblower at risk. For most sensitive things, if record-keeping was tamper-proof through publicly verifiable cryptographic mechanisms (decentralised crypto blockchains for information would become the biggest utility use case of crypto tech – that's my bet), then it would make such automated investigations of records much much easier.

I've thought about blowing the whistle but I'm honestly too afraid. Even if I do, nothing changes. Companies get tiny fines and executives keep their bonuses, yet the whistle-blower's life is ruined.

With regard to the whistle, Ed Snowden described in his memoirs an old naval system of communication with whistles, and in particular how they could be used to signal that there were things wrong with the ship which put it in danger and warranted it promptly being taken to port for rectification.

I don't really have any independent information as to whether that or this present post's reference to Victorian policemen giving chase is more true for the origins of the whistleblower expression, but Snowden's certainly seems more apt for the act.

Anyone have a good example of a good “whistle blowers policy” from a private organisation or non-profit? Im interested to roll out a local policy in some of the non-profits I’m connected with.

I think a good first step would be reaching out to Snowden to have a quick zoom call on what he has to say - I've seen him do quite a few zoom conferences, I can't imagine he would'nt be interested in chatting with you if you are serious.

In general, people with a conscience and acting accordingly suffer more or less gravely. Perhaps this is to be expected, unfortunately.

We should support whistle-blowers much more, but this feels like a problem very hard to solve. How can we trust the state to protect those denouncing the state? Or corporations protecting those denouncing the corporation?

Seems like it's inevitable that the person will be at odds against the organization.

Parts of this blog post read like they are nearly plagiarized right out of Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power by C. Fred Alford

good post otherwise

It's in the reference list.

I haven’t read the book so not validating the plagiarism claim, but citing a book in a biblio isn’t a license to steal content

It looks like the author copied and pasted from the book and used a thesaurus to change a few words here and there. A reference list is not attribution.

The only difference between a leaker and whistleblower is whether you agree with their motives and reasoning. It’s basically the same difference as between a revolutionary and insurgent or terrorist, or a partisan and rebel. The parallel goes even further because it’s essentially a sacrificial asymmetric resistance from within that is impossible to fully prevent.

We definitely need to remember that character assassinations will be used against anybody that threatens those in power, whether they do so rightly or wrongly (and that the truth often lies in between, though of course it could be much more towards one side than the other). There’s also a really difficult balance to strike because being too quick/willing to blow the whistle, or exposing irrelevant information in a massive dump, could end up doing more harm than good.

At risk of going against the HN grain: in a way, you need whistleblowing to be persecuted to provide a check against it being overused. If it weren’t persecuted then people could casually air way too much dirty laundry or weaponize it for personal reasons (like getting passed up for a promotion, or deciding on something an individual doesn’t like but which isn’t objectively bad). By making it have real and severe consequences, you need to have a very strong personal conviction that the truth outweighs the negative personal impact, which biases whistleblowers towards being moralistic (or mentally unwell). That isn’t to excuse the US government’s behavior though, I think the right thing to do would be to excuse the individual cases where it turns out the whistleblowing was necessary post-hoc, which had not often been done.

To give an example of what I’m talking about, consider what happened to Google in the past 10 years. Google for a long time marketed itself as a strongly moralistic company that wanted its employees to be the same. But it grew a lot in terms of headcount and media interest. Many Google projects faced a lot of internal resistance due to the moral implications (eg Dragonfly) but employees took it upon themselves to air the dirty laundry in public earlier than was justified (before it was fully committed and launched) - it’s hard to know if these would have launched without those leaks, but given the strong possibility they may not have, it did a lot of reputational damage just for something that was being considered. And today, you can read many headlines in eg Business Insider like “Google employees shit on Project Y” from people leaking internal e-mail threads and casual discussion groups to media. In that case whistleblowing/leaks are far more damaging and liberally used than they justify, and if people did the same thing to the Us military/intelligence community, it would be completely unable to operate at all.

This is very good

> The only difference between a leaker and whistleblower is whether you agree with their motives and reasoning.

Well that depends. A lot of times "leakers" have no motives with respect to ethics, or weak ones. Like people who leak features for products for fun, or to thumb their nose at their employer.

Aside from power dynamics, one of the challenges with being a whistleblower is that you are making a moral transgression with respect to your organization. One of the commonly accepted foundations of most peoples’ morality is loyalty [1]. So you are not only exposing people to legal risk and to risk of losing power and/or standing, but you are quite literally a traitor from the point of view of the organization you blew the whistle in.

Like much of the rest of the culture war US people find ourselves in, I am fearful of the disparate treatment given whistleblowers nowadays. The whistleblower divulging Trump’s call with Zelenskyy was protected by the media so much that media organizations and social media wouldn’t even allow disclosure of the name of the whistleblower (which is odd because the act itself is about transparency). The media has been in favor of leaks forever because it allows holding the powerful accountable. But the leaks by the young man on Discord are not even being examined for content (such as the revelation that US troops are on the ground in Ukraine); the US press is decrying the leaker and demanding harsh punishment for revealing secrets. I literally have never seen the media act like that before in my life.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

We can do things to protect whistleblowers, but it's important to realize that whatever we do to encourage them could lead to more false claims. There's a balance. There should be a price for whistleblowing but maybe not as high as it is.

At least one day people will appreciate you see Emily Brontë.

Julian Assange (not a whistleblower, I know) said wars are a way to transfer public money into private hands.

Everything in the US is about the same. Like quantitative easing.

Julian assange is a hypocritical scam artist - says a bunch of nice sounding words about democracy, abuse of power and war and yet his actions, speaking louder than words, increased all of those.

his actions, indeed speaking louder than words. he showed how the American government is corrupted to the core and lawless and he is facing the consequences.

2016 decisively showed assange had a vendetta against the US and the Clintons in particular and didn’t actually care about democracy or human rights, or at best let his personal grievances completely override his supposed beliefs in those things.

I hate that he is pulled into these conversations, especially aligned with Snowden

if anyone would WhistleBlow current War Crimes for the wrong side, he would get immediately dismissed. No one would follow it, because it would affect their money.

Current Situation: Any trend big money works with, it cannnot be whistleblowed.

Karl Jung wrote about the social purpose of scapegoats years ago. Feels apropos.

“Conscience does make cowards of us all” - Shakespeare

but - it should be noted that a suffering conscience is a well-known cliche.

How about the guy right now who's blowing the whistle on favored IRS treatment of Hunter Biden? Does he count, too?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/irs-whistleblower-told-congress-hu...

Who gives a shit about the IRS taking not enough cash from one guy?

That's a shit hill to die on don't you think?

Thanks for role-playing the whistleblower's experience for us.

Anytime

He is a potential whistleblower.

Your linked article says: "[My client] would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress." "[T]here are no specific examples provided to support the accusations."

I don't understand the tone of this post. I guess the implication is that whistleblower support relies on the political leanings of the people involved?

Is it my politics talking if I say that the scale of this argument is completely underwhelming to me given the level of true atrocities being committed in the world?

The article details 'incredible' examples of retaliation. That's the biggest concern here, not the whistleblowing.

I think what you & the other downvoters are illustrating is:

You can only be a 'whistleblower' if you're on MY side.

...of course? If he's correct? Who would ever argue he wouldn't count?

But I don't know what your point is in picking one potential whistleblowing example out of thousands. Let's not inject partisan politics where there's no need for it. Whistleblowing has nothing to do with being right-wing or left-wing.

Who are the "Thousands" of others?

I'm assuming that if you counted every potential whistleblower in the US that was ever reported on in the national or local news over the past few decades, it would probably add up to something in the thousands?

In other words, you don't have any basis for that number you threw out.

Can there be a whistleblower exposing some official you like? Please give some examples of those.

The word "thousands" is entirely irrelevant.

And I already made clear, of course there can be a whistleblower on somebody you like, if that person broke the law. People aren't above the law, end of story. So why are you asking for examples? Examples don't matter. It's a principle that applies no matter which side of the political aisle you're on.

I'm sure we could come up with a dozen more tragic ironies about our society, if we tried.

Aren't weaknesses in current whistleblower laws pretty well understood ? By the bureaucrats that exploit them, and by the journos that report on them ?

So have rewrites been proposed in Congress ? Or by any of Biden's people ?

Or are they ALL in on the whistleblower "protection" scam ?

This outlet seems pretty Putin-friendly: https://covertactionmagazine.com/category/ukraine/

Why is it a problem to be Putin-friendly? I don't understand how you can praise Snowden and completely ignore what he has been telling us about the Ukraine and Russia and why we can't trust what US media and politicians are telling us.

Conscience is rarely a good thing.

Explain.

Depends on what you consider good.

What "you consider good" can be bad, especially if you are going by conscience and your source is faulty. Otherwise we would never learn from our mistakes or feel sorry for wrongdoings. A faulty conscience leads one to feel good for their wrongdoings, and to live by their mistakes.

If you do not go by conscience, but use your own observation and feeling, you must will thyself not to fall for the wrong moral nor to value the wrong ethic. One learns and grows more without conscience.

Conscience depends on the source of which you trust and believe. If you are the source, that is not conscience but regular sciens, also called sentience. If your sentience is true to nature you have no need of conscience, also called sapiens.

On the other hand, there are people that look at whistleblowing as a way to propel into fame. They call themselves and whistleblowers when in reality they are just publicly critiquing their company over known facts. They give whistleblowing a bad reputation.

I often wonder if such people are being encourage by those who seek to undermine the concept of whistleblowing as a whole. Like encouraging the appending of 'gate' to every scandal name, even trivial ones, to minimize the seriousness of Watergate.

EDIT: I should point out that an effective strategy to undermine opposition is to encourage the worst in them by secretly supporting those who embody the worst. When doing this it helps to have contacts in the media on your payroll.

Whistleblowers don't do that. The media does. Do you know what whistleblowing is?

Is the motivation to minimize the seriousness of Watergate? I just take it as a lazy way of tagging a story and I suspect many headline writers couldn't even summarise what the original Watergate scandal involved.

That's not whistleblowing, so no, it does not give whistleblowing a bad name. This is actually very simple.

the media labels them whistleblowers though so doesn't it?

Sure; all kinds of motives may be involved. It would be interesting to read a study on how these laws and their practices have worked in practice and what kind of issues have been reported. From the article's references I found this:

https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx...

I suppose much of the reports have been about financial mishandling, work safety, and such things, maybe things like environment protection violations thrown in.

Do you have examples of people who have been enriched by so-called whistleblowing?

I think Frances Haugen just wanted to be famous. She didn’t whistleblow anything really and yet called herself a whistleblower.

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