Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
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I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...
The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.
"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.
I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.
The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.
No, technically direct democracy would lead to no better outcome, though I'm sure at some point in our history we'll try it.
As people are people, real democracy would not be worse than the status quo as we're already ruled by people with lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
But you can't for example corrupt the majority of all people. So real democracy would be at least in this point better.
By no means worse, but better in some regards is a clear win imho!
> lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything, making them even easily to manipulate. I'll include myself in this.
For real democracy to work it's more than giving all people the right to vote on all things. They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand. That I'd say is impossible.
It's even easier with single persons or small groups… Just given them a little bit money or alternatively aim with a gun at them or someone they love. This method wouldn't scale to a whole society.
> Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything […]
> They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand.
And you really think the "decision makers" are anyhow better informed, smarter, more altruistic and don't just think about their own well being most of the time? That's a very naïve stand, to be honest.
At no point did I say anything of the sort, and I'm not sure how you've extrapolated that from what I've said.
I'm not saying it's working but I don't think true democracy would work any better either because the underlying issue with democracy is you're relying on ill informed people, people who don't understand either the issue upon which they vote or the consequences of a vote either way, to make decisions.
People easily manipulated by social media filter bubbles and ridiculous slogans. Or in our current democracies just money.
I think democracy is probably the best we've had to date but it's showing its flaws.
No. We own the consequences.
> the most fair one.
The most fair, yes, probably. The fairest? No. Though I’ll admit I’m stumped (though in good company I suspect) as to how to possibly achieve the fairest outcome. I suspect it’s a platonic ideal, barring a Star Trek reality coming to life.
Humans are very diverse in their abilities and society needs to account for that. Division of labour is key here.
Not everybody needs to decide on or be informed about everything. What is necessary is transparency, accountability and the resulting trust in those responsible.
Our societies are so messed up in that regard, we don't even consider that being possible anymore. But it is.
Beyond that it seems to be mostly mythology and nonsense. You either have smart good rulers or you don't. At least if we don't they only have so much time to do damage and we try again.
The idea democracy gives people agency over their future I would put in the category of mythology.
Every effin' politician knows it, yet they conveniently ignore it, or even outright attack it when they are spewing words like freedom and democracy. It doesnt matter if EU or US or any other place.
Politicians here have a completely different role in society. They ain't hero's, they ain't badman's the are just smart people doing their democratic jobs.
And society talks about concrete topics and not politicians.
Any minority will never truly have a say. It doesn't matter if you can vote if you don't have enough numbers to make a difference. Your best bet would be that folks tire of voting on these - but that's only if you can get enough signatures. Hope you can work and get signatures at the same time and that you aren't in too poor health to do this.
It isn't 'freedom', it is just another way to be tyrannical and claim there is "freedom". It isn't like folks born in a country/region can just move somewhere else. Heck, folks fleeing actual war have some issues with this.
Yes more often than not Revolutionary or forward leaning ideas don't get a yes on the first glance.
But at this point the whole population talked about the topic.
And here comes the magic. A few years later a new idea arises better than any idea before and suddenly people get it.
We talk and vote about topics and not politicians.
Imagine getting only men to vote yes to lose 50% of their voting power. Imagine getting a million farmers and their family's to vote for a drastic new way in ecological farming. Same issue, different times.
To be pedantic it was one Canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) that the supreme court finally forced to let women have full voting rights, as in the rest if the Cantons, in 1990 [0]. So it was part of the state forcing this rather than through their direct democracy, which makes the issue even more interesting.
The other states were still slow at granting universal suffrage, Vaud being the first in 1959.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
Electronic voting machines and vote counting machines are hackable. Technology is the disease here, not the cure.
I wouldn't trust anything other than hand-counted paper ballots.
Sure. And elections in general aren't malleable? In a lot of cases that's even simpler than hacking a distributed cryptographic system.
The problem with electronic voting is not the security. It's "just" the secrecy. That's the only hard problem.
> I wouldn't trust anything other than hand-counted paper ballots.
So you should stop trusting in any decision made in most parliaments on this planet. Almost all of them are made by primitive and completely nontransparent "press the button" electronic voting, which can be trivial hacked. But "voting" in parliaments is anyway just show for the dump masses. All the decisions are pre-made behind closed doors, of course.
Our governments have since figured out that you can merrily hand out the privilege, as long you remain in control of what is allowed to be put on the vote in the first place. I'm not alone with my view, btw. Lessig has made the same point in his "Country of Lesters" talk.[0,1]
0: https://www.politicallawbriefing.com/2013/04/a-lester-whats-... (overview, writeup)
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g (recorded talk)
Watching the UK vote on "Brexit", without an understanding of what that actually 'means' or if it's possible, shows the failure of democracy.
In other countries, people really do lose their voice in government. Plenty of countries are under the jack-boot of totalitarian regimes that will torture and execute whoever steps out of line. We live in a country that is so far away from that, that all we have to do to change our government is mail in a form. And we still can't be bothered to do that. So any lack of government control is completely our own fault.
The government's still gonna do whatever it wants to do. But we also have the power to bring it to heel. The thing is, you have to actually do something with that power.
Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.
You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.
The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.
Where do you think that fear comes from? It can be fabricated using real or fake events anytime the government wants to pursue a political or financial goal. Modern media is a government mouthpiece, even in apparent liberal democracies, and is used to sway public opinion in any direction.
This mechanism is also exploited by political enemies, to sow dissent and social unrest, crippling democratic systems.
We live in the most information accessible time in history and in the US most people can read and write and are capable of researching topics on the internet. If someone is falling for fake information, it is not the media's fault, they can fact check any media themselves. It is because their ears are hearing the lies they crave. Even when you debate with people these days on many political topics they basically plug their ears and scream "fake news". They are more interested in winning culture wars than the truth. The immigrant family down the streer driving down home prices or having to attend diversity meetings at work is a greater concern than the FBI monitoring all their comms.
There have always been media and politicians that want to use fear to control the people. Why is now and why is the US special?
The US certainly isn't special. We see the effects of disinformation in all countries. Increase in social tensions and belief in conspiracy theories, elections swung by social media campaigns, the radical right gaining power, Brexit, etc. These are all orchestrated in part by companies like Cambridge Analytica, foreign and local propaganda, troll farms, etc.
None of this is really new. What's made it special _now_ is the internet. It has given both local and foreign agents the reach and power to influence public opinion on an unprecedented scale.
> If someone is falling for fake information, it is not the media's fault, they can fact check any media themselves.
Really? Fact check it where, on the internet? If all sources of information are polluted to the point where it's either impossible or very difficult to discern fact from fiction, can we really blame people for believing what they read, hear and see?
But you're right that the average person won't even make an effort to doubt the information they're provided from whatever source they already align with. So, yes, education and critical thinking are crucial, but this is exactly what disinformation agents know how to exploit. Psyops and information warfare work, and they work better today than ever before.
I wanted to provide a counterbalance to that view. Snowden is a complicated case - in my view it isn't as simple as 100% hero or 100% villain - but Assange is in my view relatively clear.
Wikileaks and Manning appear to have leaked anything they can. I don't support such a scattergun approach. Also, while some of their leaks pertain to surveillance (the vault 7 ones) most of them do not.
Then there's Assange. He was facing extradition to Sweden under a European Arrest Warrant for rape alleged to have taken place there, but instead skipped bail on the pretext it was all some US conspiracy. Until extradition was approved he was free on bail. Likely had he been extradited to Sweden he would also have been free on bail, and the burden of proof would have remained on prosecutors. I'm sure he would have had a fair trial.
Instead he made it to the Ecuadorian embassy and stayed until he made himself unwelcome. At which point he was arrested by the UK for skipping bail and has since been subject to the very extradition procedure that was his pretext.
I'm British, although I no longer live there. If you are the US government and you want to extradite someone legally I can't imagine a friendlier jurisdiction than the UK.
I'm also mildly irritated that the UN torture experts keep sounding off that this is torture. Not at all. Assange chose to enter the Ecuadorian embassy and in doing so chose to break the law by not attending court. He chose to remain there for a considerable time, making labelling him a flight risk so obvious as to be automatic. When he came out of the embassy, he was convicted and jailed of that crime. He has also remained there because he's currently subject to extradition proceedings and no judge is going to grant him bail. I'm certain living in a confined space in the embassy wasn't pleasant, but that was a choice. I'm certain prison isn't pleasant either (no matter what UK tabloids say) but that is a consequence. This is a far cry from what, say, the Syrian regime does.
I support encryption and anything that frustrates mass surveillance because I believe fundamentally that private citizens have a right to a private life and that invasion of that privacy should be specific and justified, including when it comes to electronic communications. I accept that law enforcement will sometimes be faced with a situation in which they cannot decrypt communications between two almost certain criminals and this may make their job harder, and I'm happy with that trade-off. In the end, all a pervasive backdoor does is target law abiding citizens, as criminals by definition won't feel bound to put their keys in escrow or whatever. They're already developing their own handsets and the police have shown themselves capable of targeting them (encrochat).
At the same time, if Assange is extradited to the US tomorrow then good riddance. I don't see that I have to support him in any way in order to object to mass surveillance, pervasive monitoring and mandated backdoors.
The modern state is far more freedom-restricting than any other type of state which came before, and this is due to technology. Historically there were many slaves who were freer than the “free” man of today. You’re also right that fear is the predominant feeling/force that maintains order in a modern state. See the book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...
Except that's never been how democracies work. Going back to the first democratic greek city-states, to now, they all tend to operate on a number of different motivators, the last of which is law-makers changing what they do to fit the public interest.
Landed gentry and the aristocracy get priority, followed by merchants, and then the rest of the government gets its say, which often competes/clashes with other parts of the government. For the most part, anyone who gets elected got there through political savvy, money, and being exceptionally good at convincing people to trust them and give them power. So they're quite good at doing what they want despite what the people might want.
I agree that the people are often quick to give away their rights to secure their safety (or desires). But with transparency in government, people will notice the things they don't like (despite what they've given away or sold, including their principles) and can become outraged enough to reverse their previous acquiescence. You actually see this outside of democracies in most nations where people see enough bullshit that they eventually revolt.
Also one of the reasons communism doesn't work - the mechanisms needed for it to be implemented centralize even more power to a central committee than with other systems of government.
I agree, the world-view really changes once you realize this.
Just look at past secrets that have been disclosed recently and think: should those things really be secret? I say absolutely no.
The mentality of keeping things secret to hide your real intentions, or to not upset people too much (or they will panic!), or to keep other governments on their toes so you're ready to take them by surprise in the event of a conflict (how has that worked so far? The real threat actors will know anyway what naughty stuff you're doing to make sure they'll be the losers if the need arises - like when you just urgently need more cheap oil) is something we, all peoples of the world, need to overcome as soon as possible.
You may argue the situation in the world right now proves that governments need to be ready for conflict all the time, and secrecy gives them more power to take enemies by surprise... but you're mistaken, it's exactly the opposite! The whole China/Russia animosities are due to the West patently doing things, like keeping military bases in every weak country[1] that will let them around China and Russia, that clearly shows they have every intention to escalate to a war with them at the earliest sign of trouble, yet we lie without hesitation about it... like we're the peaceful people who keep trying to convince evil governments to change their belligerent ways. Perhaps if we stopped putting weapons pointing right at them, right at their neighbourhood, they would be better persuaded that war is not a possibility?
We do the same with climate change by the way... we want everyone else to change, or we won't do it alone, forgetting that we're the ones who pumped 90% of the CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of industrialization, while some countries that are now considered "climate villains" have been on it for only a couple of decades... hypocrisy at its worst.
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/where-are-us-and-russian-military-ba...
"Biden’s classified leak isn’t the problem. The government shouldn’t have secrets in the first place."
https://cinchnews.com/2023/01/26/bidens-classified-leak-isnt...
Russia and China have the objectives of their own. For Russia it is to expand their empire that in their own mind rightfully belongs to them. They didn't attack Ukraine because of US actions but because they seriously believe that they have some kind of right over Ukrainians lands, or even more seriously, that Ukrainians don't exists.
If US would have been in Ukraine, or moved in rapidly when the situation became dangerous, there wouldn't be war at them moment. We see this clearly play out in far east, where China has ambition to overtake Taiwan (what they like Russia with Ukraine believe to belong rightfully to themselves). They clearly would have already attacked if it wasn't clear that US will prevent them doing so.
I'm certain that they would have done it, had US backed away from Ukraine. I'm also certain that what led Russia to believe that they could pull off Ukrainian invasion, was the US departure from Afghanistan, not that they did it but how they did it by letting Taliban completely humiliate them without any response. Russia believed that US is weak, not interested, and it would possibly have been like that, had Ukraine not managed to pull off very strong response.
US is there to fill the vacuum. If it was not US, it would be China (or it could Russia possibly). If not today, then eventually it would be one of them. I prefer US because it is more predictable and rule based and in the long run more favorable for the people.
With regards to Russia, Putin, (being a Russian neocon), is using the example of how Russians are sometimes treated in former Soviet countries with regards to citizenship, speaking Russian etc., as well as Ukraine say banning Russian language books or the Russian flag being banned at sports events, which actually helps his cause domestically. If we were actually interested in weakening his grip, we'd strongly oppose such policies imo.
You may not know this, but Russia enjoys some sympathy in the Global South because they see the situation as being at least partly provoked by the U.S. The same could happen over Taiwan, but it doesn't have to if cooler heads prevail.
The fact that Russia has received some sympathy shows how important is to express the situation correctly - Russia was not provoked by anything. They would have attacked either way because they consider these lands theirs and the people who live there at best as nothing. The thinking goes - those countries they attack will greet them as liberators or they are the worst enemies that must be eliminated (e.g. Nazis).
Now I can understand that some countries have strong anti-US sentiment, but reason for the whole war has a very little to do with US despite Russia's huge effort to make it appear to be the cause.
Thinking non-Westerners can't think for themselves isn't helping sentiments there either I'd imagine.
Russian language, and Russian books are not banned in Ukraine. Some anti Ukraine books were removed from public libraries.
Information about the law is very easy to find. If the topic interests you it may be worth your while to have a look.
The books are either banned or not.
Or there's a greyscale. Like you know, most things in life.
Again, do yourself a favor and look into the law and what it does. I could explain, but you need to at least do some of the work yourself here rather than just speculate into the air about the state of things in some far away country.
I'm not being snarky. It just seems weird to me that, having been given perfectly sufficient context to answer the question all by yourself ("2019 law") -- the only impulse you seem to have is to sit back and speculate.
As predicted every year for the past 15 years.
You ignore that Russia's number one fear after the collapse of the USSR was for another military invasion from the West, as had happened several times over the last few centuries... that Russia's border with Ukraine is its most "porous" border, easy to cross for whatever purpose, including a military invasion... that NATO's whole purpose since it was founded has always been to counter Russia, so the Russian's fears that NATO is an enemy are absolutely correct... that Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution caused Ukraine to go from a neutral country (or a buffer country as most people call it) to being actively hostile against Russia, which was the trigger for the Crimean invasion in 2014... that the US and UK, as guarantors of the Budapest Agreement with Russian and Ukraine, should have immediately intervened to defend Ukraine when that happened, but did absolutely nothing, giving Russia confirmation that it would be able to keep Ukraine out of NATO by force, which is really what it is trying to do currently... and finally, that every country has its motivations to do the things it does, a lot more complex and subtle than "being evil and wanting more land", and perhaps trying to understand what those motivations are, why their culture has evolved the way it has and how it is likely to react to your actions, would go a very long way to avoiding stupid conflicts like this. But yeah, it's so much easier to keep parroting the news and thinking of the whole story as a black-and-white, villain VS hero story.
Nice, Russia is just defending itself. Excuse me i need to go laugh out loud somewhere
Sometimes, when everyone else is hostile to you, it can make sense to consider that maybe... just maybe... you might be doing something that triggers their anger. Like, what possible reason might the countries of Eastern Europe have to hate Russia? What possible reason might Ukraine specifically have to hate Russia? Does "Holodomor" ring a bell?
It is ironic that the countries of Warsaw Pact were more likely to be invaded by Warsaw Pact than by NATO.
> trying to understand what those motivations are, why their culture has evolved the way it has and how it is likely to react to your actions
But when we do exactly this, you call it "parroting the news".
Anthromorphizing, just another symptom of the human mind’s inability to really comprehend things as complex as geopolitics. We’re not meant for this, people! Technology has complexified our simple and beautiful world.
They choose the West. We all know why. Money you could say, but it's more something like "a better life". And yes, the Holodomor is part of this. That came from the east. Something else starting with "Holo" also came, but from the West.
But if Maidan proved anything, it's that the West offers Ukrane a better life, in the mind of Ukranians, a better Future. It's not really about history. And, of course, this government will not let that go.
You can say the same about everyone from Estonia to, really, even Turkey (I mean, at this point they're seriously insulted by the West ... but not nearly insulted enough to choose Russia's side).
And Russia is afraid. They're "locked in" with impossible to defend borders. They're not friends with the West ... and they're not quite insane enough to imagine China is their friend either. So the idea that Putin initially defended, that without a "buffer zone": countries that will fight or at least obstruct the west, Russia cannot avoid losing large amounts of territory very quickly if it comes to an open conflict, from either side. And they cannot really project power over the sea, without approval from either Europe or China either (or if the Arctic melts, with US agreement). They're fucked, or at least, you have to admit there's a logic there.
Disagree. Replace "evil empire" with "Old-school imperialist power" and you have a 90 percent approximation to the essential truth about that country (or its current leadership, in any case). For all its banality.
Though "evil" of course is not a misplaced word to use either, in regard to its actions.
My first instinct was 'wow, those wacky 60's', but then it slowly dawned on me 'what's changed?'. Nothing, nothing has changed.
I wonder what they are doing today.
They didn't. You interpreted the Snowden revelations incorrectly. The government actually cares a LOT about civil liberties.
How does that help? For me the lesson of the Snowden affair has been that it does not matter whether we know what the government is up to, because they will do what they want to us regardless; there is nothing we can do about it.
I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.
I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.
The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.
See my other comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097082#36098762
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
People still believe this to this day. Globally.
Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
perhaps you recall trump’s first two acts in office — recognizing jerusalem as israel’s capital, and sanctioning russia. curious!
I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny.
Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-r...
It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that.
That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasse...
when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?
I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.
More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly.
Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.
How do you know that this is true without mind reading or lie detection powers? I'm not being sarcastic. You see these people talking and have somehow arrived at the strong belief that they do not believe what they are saying. How?
* "Now this guy may be a child rapist," he says, "I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her."
and
* When the show host describes 14-year-old girls at Mr Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he says: "If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario."
and then
* Mr Carlson refers to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as "the biggest white whores in America", he calls the journalist Arianna Huffington a "pig" and says that Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton are "anti-man".
Yes I'm sure that guy who has day in and day out pushed "extreme" narratives for so long is just a totally well-adjusted person. You know, just like Bill O'Reilly who proceeded him ... what's that? He went down for sexual harassment in the workplace? [2] Total outlier. Definitely all an act.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47523608
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/21/bill-oreilly-3...
It’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to discuss Russia because a lot of that is actually true, but why don’t you hold America to the same standards? Also regarding the concentration camps thing, this is another narrative. Can you describe to me what you think is going on in China? I’m genuinely curious. My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay, because you know, they had terrorist attacks where there were hundreds killed in stabbings in Xinjiang but you probably don’t know about that right? It seems all that people know is the pictures of lots of Muslims sitting in blue overalls behind wired fences, which has been deliberately used to evoke comparisons to gas chambers and the Holocaust, by ASPI. But when I say this, people often have a knee jerk reaction which is along the lines of: “How can you support genocide or another Holocaust, you’re evil.” Which is the exact problem because the whole premise of the discussion has been completely warped by so called accepted “truths“ and people manipulating our emotions in a classic appeal to pathos. Could the world really be this cartoonishly black and white and good and evil, where my side is morally righteous and our adversaries are morally despicable? This is exactly what Orwell described in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
Regarding the concentration camps narrative, just Google ASPI and you’ll realise that about 70% of this narrative originates from them. Not only that but they’re literally funded by the military industrial complex (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Thales) and their plan worked because Australia recently bought billions of dollars worth of crappy missiles from the very companies that sponsor this so called “think tank”. It’s most definitely NOT a conspiracy theory and it’s very revealing that these think tanks can be this brazen. If you want to get to the root of this, just search for the origin of common narratives like this one and you’ll find it’s just a handful of sources all repeating the same misleading points. You’ll be shocked at how easily narratives can be seeded in the media.
https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-be...
And this video is kind of memey but you get the gist.
Just write "China bad" and automatically get 2x more views and clicks.
When was the last time you read something positive or even neutral on China in the mainstream media? I can't remember the last time. Probably before Trump.
1.4 billion people and not a single positive thing happens in China, according to Western media.
Show a Chinese person being happy? Must be CCP propaganda.
You didn't automatically say "China bad"? CCP shill.
Show a Chinese company having international success? Must have stolen the tech.
Social media app that US teens love to use? China must doing mass surveillance on Americans.
This sort of black and white demonizing of China creates extremist views. You can see these extremist views on China all over HN, where one expects users to not be easily deceived. I was wrong.
People are so concerned and fearful of pro-China propaganda that they don't even realize they've been drinking propaganda from the other side as well.
Mainstream media gets more views and clicks by generating fear, anger and saying "China bad":
* Your view of China turns negative over time
* Politicians need your vote in order to advance their careers
* Politicians say "China bad" to get your votes
* Media quotes politicians saying "China bad"
* Your view of China turns even more negative
* Politician's approval ratings are down
* Politician says "China bad" to distract you
* Your view of China turns worse
Because of this endless cycle, it's career suicide for a US politician to not be anti-China. Any US politician objectivity on China has been lost since 2016.
And it's not like there are alternative media since the media landscape has consolidated into a handful of powerful conglomerates.
I know some will accuse me of being anti-western or pro-CCP below. No. I'm not. I'm anti-extremists.
The fact that even people on HN are convinced by the good (western) vs evil (China) narrative shows you how effective this sort of thing is.
Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!
Guantanamo Bay isn’t for US citizens though. You can’t be arrested in the US for being Muslim and be sent to Guantanamo bay.
They aren’t in any way similar because it’s not used against citizens, which is strictly what China’s concentration camps are for.
The military has claimed they could keep a citizen there indefinitely, but they haven’t yet and if they did it would get challenged in court pretty quickly.
The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system.
The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp.
The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clearly better about the US is, people being able to talk about it. But that only has meaning if it is done and actually leads to changes. Else it is only another layer of deception.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-c...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...
There is still a great difference between mainstream media and politicians avoiding certain topics and police activly supressing knowledge about historical events and rewriting history as they see fit (tiananmen square).
And completely banning Winnie Pooh, because some internet dudes made a funny picture.
Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).
It pains me to say that, because I strongly align most of my values with US ones in this world, but this is fucking horrible and cant be ignored or marginalized. All done for profit of few since day 1.
The hundreds of millions of people who lived under Soviet communism (entire Eastern Europe, South East Europe, Central Asia) are fucked badly for generations.
However, a lot of the other wars are just bizarre. Taking Afghanistan - the costs, suffering caused and damage to the global economy are completely absurd. Nothing was achieved. There isn't any reason for someone in the US to even feel better after that debacle. The decision makers had to know that was what they were triggering, they did it anyway and many of them are still treated like reasonable choices for leadership positions.
That decision making was worse than anything Russia or China did, it was just pointless killing and destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...
It's a country, not simply a geological region.
Exactly what Peter Pomerantsev described of domestic Russia in 2014. https://youtu.be/5Au332OG-M4?t=980
That was out of left field. What about people who believe it was plausible that Russian intelligence services were behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta emails, that the intent behind those leaks was to interfere in elections, and that such leaks had a non-trivial influence given the election was so narrow? That seems like a reasonable set of beliefs to hold, not "absurd official lines". I don't have access to the evidence behind the set of claims, but it strikes me as highly plausible.
Many of these "spook-adjacent types" (why not just call them "NPCs", wasn't that the lingo as of a week ago?), don't believe such attempts are primarily trying to skew the outcome in favor of Trump, they believe a general effort is being made by Russia and China to weaken confidence in elections, liberalism, democracy and the West broadly. Not because Russia and China are intrinsically evil, but because they are rivals, and as rivals have found an effective tool capable of undermining from within. The DNC/Podesta email leaks being only one of the more visible outcomes of these efforts.
I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.
https://twitter.com/blackintheempir
How do I know it's a troll account? Take a look at this: https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1662112840554098688
Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away.
https://twitter.com/JoniPyysalo/status/1567799462751309826/p...
It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that.
We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russians-boasted-tha...
This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down.
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA19...
Meanwhile Lyman remains under Ukrainian control: https://deepstatemap.live/en#11/48.9534/37.8129
That's just one of them, this guy was on an absolute tear during this period. He deactivated his account to clean it up a little because it got a bit too obvious and hard to hide at one point.
Their strategy seems to be to just flood every channel with all sorts of ridiculous things to make people think "I can't make sense of this stupid conflict, it's too complex" and tune out. It's not a bad approach within Russia and it certainly strikes a chord within a few people in the west. It's just that if they don't clear their tracks when they're wrong you can pretty easily identify them for as pro-Kremlin trolls
Lyman is under Ukrainian control
Looks pretty recent and active.
At this point, is there an employee behind that account or a LLM?
While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.
Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.
Why because she’s anti-war? What’s your proof of this, can’t wait to hear it.
You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens.
It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage.
Everything in the above comment is propaganda by someone who wants you to not look at the evidence because it would instantly discredit their position. If you want to know what Snowden actually did - go look at a random sampling of the documents, and tell us what you see.
That is worth really letting sink in.
I try my best to avoid every kind of online discussion on these topics that I reasonably can avoid. Some might even see it as paranoia. But I assume that every single thing I post online (or say on the phone, send in text, or write in emails) is traceable back to me directly, that it is being captured and stored by multiple agencies and countries and that it is all fed into AIs that are at least as capable as GPT-4.
Imagine a Gov-GPT where you can ask it: "Tell me everything I need to know about John Smith" and the AI can related his job history, credit score, recent emails at home and work, his phone calls, his purchases, his political opinions, his spiritual beliefs, his likely weaknesses ... all smartly formatted in a succinct essay that we know and love from ChatGPT.
My question is, if we aren't there already, how long until we are?
If you need clear facts without the possibility for r/confidentlyincorrect material then I don't believe GPTs are the tools of choice.
I don't doubt you but a reference would help folks know what to make of this.
This for example
“Companies interested in the contract included Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle”
and
“The deal was considered "gift-wrapped for Amazon" until Oracle (co-chaired by Safra Catz) contested the contract”.
So pretty much every single large cloud provider went after this, though Google did eventually bow out early. Other than winning the second round of the bidding (and not actually going live), is there something Microsoft did specifically that warrants being singled out?
Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.
Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.
A lot of people are dead or in jail because of that software, and not just “predators”.
Some gentlemen will find you shortly to provide a more in depth example.
What is a good example?
They also switched Skype to using a centralized system for signalling when they acquired it. It's still decentralized at the protocol level, simply Microsoft whitelists their own nodes as supernodes.
Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.
Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.
Not only is that poor "proof", how do you propose a public key be used to subvert any user's security?
though this isn’t much new I suppose, how many times has nike been caught using child labor? how many waterways has nestle depleted, how many animals have been tortured for cosmetics… how many bison were slaughtered to spite the natives, how many whales for lamp oil…
we seem to always find something or someone to exploit
Do you also want other national agencies to spy on US citizens without "being slowed down by too many procedures"?
No?
Well, if they did not do it before, because of "friendship", then they surely started doing it.
Further increasing the amount of illegal hacking for everyone.
I actually do believe, there should be some restraint with hacking each and everyone because of "national security", because that can applied to everything. There should be a real reason, a actual threat.
They already do, and with less oversight. What makes you think the US not spying on them will change their behavior?
> Further increasing the amount of illegal hacking for everyone.
There is no law that prevents countries from spying on each other, so I don't know what you think is illegal here.
"There is no law that prevents countries from spying on each other, so I don't know what you think is illegal here. "
Depending on your definition of "law", is there a law preventing agencies from going somewhere else and killing and stealing as they see fit?
International law is kind of complicated, but the basic idea is to not interfere with each other to keep the peace.
And activly hacking foreign computers is considered interfering.
How would you consider the act, if a foreign agency would hack the Phone of Biden?
Probably hostile?
Well yes, that was how it was considered in germany, when it became known that the NSA did hack the phone of Merkel. The reason why we are still allies is merely, that russia and china are indeed worse. And that is the reason, why the US is still kind of "the leader of the free world". But keep on doing Guantanamo stuff, hack every friendly nation, say "fuck the EU" and other countries might decide one day, they might as well stick with china then.
Some african and asian states made that decision already.
Well, mostly they do not seem to care that much. Politicians have probably the worst opsec of all people. Mrs. Merkel was a target, but so was President Macron recently:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210720-phones-of-mac...
Yes, the laws of the country they go to.
>>International law is kind of complicated, but the basic idea is to not interfere with each other to keep the peace.
How is spying interfering with each other?
> And activly hacking foreign computers is considered interfering
What about passively collecting the information they send to the US?
> Well yes, that was how it was considered in germany, when it became known that the NSA did hack the phone of Merkel.
Utter nonsense. Merkel isn't that naïve. https://www.politico.eu/article/spying-allies-normal-us-denm...
Hacking into computers on foreign soil, sounds quite interfering to me, or would you be OK with me giving it a try at your computers/network?
"> is there a law preventing agencies from going somewhere else and killing and stealing as they see fit?
Yes, the laws of the country they go to"
Same with hacking. It is not legal, to hack computers here in germany.
And sure, Merkel wasn't surprised, nor was me, or anyone in IT security. But the general population was. They assumed naivly, ally means respecting the other party.
I wouldn't be OK with it, but I wouldn't call it interfering either if you don't actually interfere with my actions after gaining access.
> Same with hacking. It is not legal, to hack computers here in germany
Then try to enforce those laws on other countries, and see how far you get. If the US sent an agent into Germany to kill someone, the killer would be held liable.
> They assumed naivly [sic] [emphasis added], ally means respecting the other party.
Exactly. https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/18/spies-like-us-germany-s...
Would Germany have acted differently had the US not spied on Germany? Of course not.
But people will not be sickened by this. People mostly only react to consequences and will find someone else to blame.
Companies only grow if they are allowed to otherwise they are legislated out of existence. I imagine that growth is actually encouraged if they are bearing fruit.
Though yes, Microsoft is a particularly grossly sycophantic player - their strategy clearly is to be the IC’s best friends because it will get them IC contracts and probably help protect/benefit them in many other aspects.
This really well describes the feelings I was getting around the time of the revelations, as I scrolled through the secret documents, it's like a different world out there.
Hackers can hack. But these agencies can do so much more.
Intelligence agencies have the law behind them, can force you/the hardware suppliers (so called "interdiction")/software providers (PRISM etc) to play ball and force you to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) at the end of the day.
Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply). The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.
Again, it's just a different world out there. Would love to know what their capabilities look like nowadays.
Being involved in these activities can also diminish your ethical base, which I guess explains some of the crazy law-ignoring/law-breaking activities within all governments.
That's why I laugh at whoever suggests about unions. Downvote me as you wish, but it won't fix the problem for ya.
How's that working out for people's retirement age huh? Seems somehow it's still increasing.
And people that get too specific get daphnied, lombardied, assanged or jfk’ed.
Or maybe not, but you won't find out because all media above a certain threshold is in a spotlight, and has been since before CIA bragged about its all encompassing media operations 50+ years ago.
I remember this info being somewhat widespread when the internet was still new, but wikis, forums and blogs are slowly being disappeared from search or drowned in noise while clownish conspiracies have conveniently smoke-screened all attempts to create an alternative to the status quo.
Intercepting communications gives them a leg up, but that's about it.
Anybody who’s been in a large organization, even one that’s highly selective or difficult to join, knows that they’re as a rule chaotic, dysfunctional, and reactive with no coherent or coordinated planning. They’re also composed of individuals who usually run the gamut of moral and honest to deceitful and self serving - but the “sociopathic puppet master genius” is more of a fictional archetype than something that exists in reality.
Of course a lot of this is just conjecture and we may never know what happened from the government side.
Schneier would know.
also the Lavabit owner, Ladar Levison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
This is just absurd.
Because, historically, the US Press is compulsively deferential to the NatSec state.
It's the same reason the press twistered themselves to report the Mark Klein revelations as a warrantless wiretapping issue - instead of the NSA live cloning internet backbone traffic in a room custom built by AT&T for the purpose.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
That the US press was loudly silent over US Gov's revenge campaign against - not only James Rosen but also James Risen and other journalists who outed NatSec wrongdoing - is for me one of US Journalism's most defining (non)actions.
ref: US Gov's persecution of James Risen https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/03/james-risen-anonymou...
ref: US Gov's persecution of James Rosen https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/05/james-rosen-name...
There were some one-off stories but
by the time we got to the point where PotUS candidates were pausing their campaigns so they could return to DC to vote in favor of amnesty for AT&T,
99% of the coverage was about the ancillary warrantless wiretapping issue; NSA's bulk collection of US citizen's data was soundly ignored. Every bit of this process was stunning to witness.
Our lives weren't nearly as completely mediated by online services.
"Total Information Awareness" made a splash in the news around 2004 also, but then faded.
Also, Bush's team was busy outraging everyone so many other ways, like blowing up Iraq for oil money, and making up nonsense legal defenses for kidnapping and physical torture of civilians.
Surely we can encode better behavior into our institutions.
The thing that was pretty apparent from Snowden's leaks is primarily that they don't need to. This fear that "NSA can crack cryptography" is the wrong fear. First, as others have noted, there are legions of other researchers evaluating and attempting to break widely used crypto-systems. There is no reason to believe the NSA has some unique brilliant minds that aren't available elsewhere.
More importantly, though, why bother with a "frontal assault" on breaking crypto schemes when endpoint security is a million times more hackable. That is, usually at some point someone wants to view the encrypted data that is being sent, and at that point it needs to be decrypted, so why not just try to hack at that point (which is exactly what they do). As an example, just look at all the stolen cryptocurrency heists. All of these heists resulted from stolen keys or from implementation bugs, not from cracking the crypto schemes that protect cryptocurrency in the first place.
Basically: if I threatened to hit you with a crowbar unless you gave me your car keys, you'd give them to me, because a car isn't worth anything.
Same story with an ordinary person's computer: they just don't have enough worth hiding that can't be repaired later, compared to serious injury. "Oh no, someone got my credit card! I'll have to argue for some chargebacks from my bank after I report it was stolen" rather then recover from a shattered knee-cap.
468 points by feross on July 20, 2021 | un‑favorite | 333 comments
As a participant in the "digital underground" since the early 80's, we were very aware of "ECHELON", "5 eyes", and other spying programs. The "Snowden revelations" are not really anything new, living a life around digital communications 20 years before most people ever heard of the internet it was clear very early that surveillance is just something the government is going to do. And yes, they definitely would consider it top-secret info if they did create a quantum computer capable of cracking modern encryption. We wouldn't know about it unless someone leaks it, but I don't really care if anyone leaks that info - they either already have it or will have it first so it's fair to just assume that they do have that capability.
And if the criminals are government entities or government-sponsored entities?
The authorities asked for them and, possibly after consulting a lawyer, he handed them over.
The only way I can think to intercept prior to encryption would be Key logger, so this would require an already compromised device. Alternatively the government could force a vulnerability state (e.g., the Perseus text message of doom). Is this also your understanding?
There are many ways to get to those messages, like getting access to your unlocked phone/unlocking your phone, if your signal is not password locked (and if they can't break that password), or doing this with your recipient.
OpSec is a process, not single tools!
I think “I’m not that important” is basically either the result of someone not thinking very hard, or it is a dishonest anti-encryption position. Embedded in it is the message that only certain types of people ought to be worried about the scrutiny of the state, and that the person holding the position is happy to take advantage of the fact that they aren’t that sort of person. Force them to face that position head-on, I think.
And that person doesn't have to be anti-encryption, just anti-bad opsec.
Sure. Not everyone has to agree with me. I think it is unpopular to be happy about intelligence agencies spying on us. So hopefully I can win over some of the in-between people by causing them to fully face their position. But if someone just fundamentally disagrees with me, I think this tactic won’t work. Coming up with arguments for people who fundamentally disagree with you is pretty difficult.
> And that person doesn't have to be anti-encryption, just anti-bad opsec.
I’m not sure I follow here. But in general, for example I don’t think it is reasonable to expect non-technical people who aren’t, like, spies to have perfect opsec all the time. So, like journalists and activists, they will inevitable slip up sometimes, anything we can do to mitigate that is good.
So you really have a disagreement on terms, not on merits.
It isn’t really clear to me if you are actually trying to make these arguments in and of themselves, or if you think they add light to the first point. So, I’m not sure how to respond, sorry.
I think we should have lots of encrypted communication out there, to make it a normalized day-to-day thing, and to make bulk surveillance more difficult.
You are right that “eye of Sauron” evokes a different idea, which is more like investigating a specific known target. If done correctly that could be OK in some cases.
Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.
This is a bastardized version of events. Snowden had a number of jobs that required high level clearance from 2006-2013. He supposedly took the final Booz Allen Hamilton job because it had a great deal of access to data, but he had long since passed the security checks necessary to get the job.
You can argue that there should be more checks done upon switching jobs, or that people with clearance should face more periodic checks to their current status, but there was no real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks.
Second, some coworkers afterward the leaks said they thought Snowden had started to act disgruntled towards the industry, but he was never a "visibly active protester against government surveillance." He was an active cog in government surveillance from ~2006 til 2013.
You're kind of right that he seemingly only took the Booz Allen Hamilton job to get access to data, but every other detail you're way off on.
The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.
What I found particularly interesting was he had a distinct look, and either he was a trend setter or following a popular trend amongst young men as I saw it everywhere at the time amongst professionals. I would have thrown away my glasses and gotten a haircut immediately if I had been in that lane.
And he was totes a Russian spy.