10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?
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When I first heard his story I expected him to be hailed as a hero, and thought we might even have a holiday to celebrate him for risking his life, freedom, and career to inform us that our government is doing something deeply unethical in secret with our own money, that violates our basic freedoms. Thank you Snowden.
You probably mean Marxist-Leninist "Communist" states. Those are centralised capitalist states, China, NK, etc. There a lot of explanations regarding why Marxist-Leninism only leads to a more centralised form of capitalism.
Communism is understood to be an ideal state (in the platonic sense of the word), it isn't meant to be achieved, more of a thought experiment or something to strive for.
>We can speculate about literally anything. What's realistic?
Socialism. Socialism is different from Communism, it isn't an utopia or an ideal.
Where do you aim to take this conversation?
> In a commune, there isn't a state which can secretly surveil in the first place, making the issue a moot point.
But I assume they had some point beyond snarky posturing, and they envision some version of the world where this is true. To try and understand their point, and to better understand how their vision of the world differs from what we currently have, I was trying to get them to anchor their abstract point in concrete examples. I also wonder if there is an inherent contradiction or at least cognitive blind-spot in their thinking because every time communism has actually been tried in the real world, it has led to the most highly surveilled states, not the least. Again, just empirically speaking. We can have the "no true Scotsman", "communism has never really been tried" all day, but again we're leaving reality for untested hypothesis.
In that context, your reply that a theoretical communist country would not have a government is a bit irrelevant to my purpose, because that is again an entirely hypothetical proposition with no precedent in reality. So what is real and worth discussing?
I am aware of the difference between socialism and communism. I am aware of the many countries that have successfully organized themselves along broadly socialist lines (and I applaud them). But I think that still doesn't align with the original author's dismissive attitude as the presence, extent, and regulation of government surveillance is a topic that must still be addressed in those successful socialist countries. They still have a state that has the power to secretly surveil its citizens.
Alternatively, in a system with more democracy, like Socialism. Where there isn't vast amounts of inequality, the surveillance state would have a hard time to exists.
My response was not irrelevant as your question contained a contradiction which I pointed out.
Another thing I would like to point out, is that you are committing the "no true Scotsman"-fallacy-fallacy. The "no true Scotsman" fallacy occurs, if and only if, the other person never defines what is a true Scotsman. I can give you concrete definitions with no logical contradictions, whether or not you accept them, that's on you.
>I am aware of the difference between socialism and communism. I am aware of the many countries that have successfully organised themselves along broadly socialist lines (and I applaud them). But I think that still doesn't align with the original author's dismissive attitude as the presence, extent, and regulation of government surveillance is a topic that must still be addressed in those successful socialist countries. They still have a state that has the power to secretly surveil its citizens.
It seems like you are going by the definition of Socialism that is common in the United States. The definition that says Socialism is when the government does stuff and you probably think Scandinavian countries are Socialists. Those countries are not Socialists, they are Capitalists. There are no currently existing Socialists countries. Here the definition so you don't accuse me of being Scottish, Socialism is when the workers (not the government) own the means of production. The so-called democracy of the workplace.
That Isa false dichotomy
Being opposed to capitalism does not make one a communist.
There are more than two things
No surprise, following the leaks Snowden was painted as a traitor that clearly only pandered to Russian interests.
More pieces of the Zeitgeist, really.
US media is just Propaganda.
Aaron Mate is a regular on his show.
Jimmy has been debunking the Russiagate conspiracy for years now. He's a comedian turned truth-teller. I stumbled across his show many years ago, and my honest first impression was that this guy looks like a shady used car salesman, so I was very skeptical of his claims. He will go into angry tirades often.
But after seeing enough of his segments, and seeing how things unfold over weeks and months, I realized he's actually legit. Whenever I see news unfold now on mainstream news, for example - the Nordstream pipeline being blown up and Russia being blamed for it, I know I will get a more accurate assessment of the truth from Jimmy Dore. And again, it's not that I take his word for it, I see how things unfold weeks and months later and turns out he was right.
Note: The left smears Dore as a right-winger. That's so bullshit. He's actually progressive and more left than the establishment left - antiwar, wants universal healthcare, pro-union pro-worker, free-speech. Dore was one of the first people to endorse and interview AOC when it looked like she was a legit anti-establishment lefty (that turned out to be wrong). The left doesn't like him because he criticizes them from the real left and reveals their hypocrisy and corruption.
Trump assassinated a foreign dignitary, but not much else. His rhetoric is worse and aesthetically he’s somewhat worse, sure.
I don’t see much practical difference.
It is true that Biden was heavily involved in foreign affairs during that time, but that may actually be why he might currently be the perfect president to have during the war in Ukraine. For a US president, he's doing a much better job at finding a good balance in supporting Ukraine without escalating than I can imagine any other recent president would have done.
Was Biden responsible for the drone strikes? I thought that was Obama's thing. It was certainly a terrible atrocity and something that should never have happened. With Obama's presidency I had high hopes and ended up mostly disappointed. With Biden, I had very low expectations, but he's surpassed them. Not my favourite guy, but definitely better than Trump. Better than Bush. Possibly even better than Obama.
Although I'm deeply disappointed about his union busting. Train union busting, even. I thought he liked trains. That is where I expected much better from him.
Of course Biden wouldn’t support unions. Like his entire party, he represents one faction of US capital.
For what it’s worth, US communists and trade unionists don’t talk about Biden the way liberals like you do.
If you want a more neutral perspective on American media, look at foreign media. Trump is worse than the US media are willing to tell you, and Hunter Biden's laptop seems to be entirely made-up by US media and a couple of political figures.
But also, people with political agendas have been messing with that laptop for years, so it's hard to trust anything coming from that laptop anymore. Whatever evidence there may be has been quite thoroughly compromised. The fact that it was handed to people with a political axe to grind, rather than to the police, was a mistake.
I'd put it a bit differently but I think we have the same idea in mind: people believe what resonates well in their minds because they are already tuned for this. So if someone likes to believe that natural medicine is good, then their mind is more likely to believe in big pharma conspiracies and that homeopathy is valid medicine (yes, I'm aware that natural medicine can be evidence-based and homeopathy is not natural).
In that sense, propaganda always needs to consider how minds are tuned already to give them something that they like to consume.
Oh, the best one (not in the above book as that was written in the 1990s, before the following): Israel offered the Palestinians up to 94% of all lands they claimed their own. Unilateral, without demands. On 3 occasions and under 2 different PMs. The Palestinian leadership refused each time with no counterdemand.
Read a book.
Footnote: This isn't to say propaganda isn't ravaging the West.
Here’s a book for you to read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ethnic_Cleansing_of_Pale...
Will you actually read it?
You are simplifying the issue to the point of absurdity. It's not "Israelis are angels, Palestinians are devils", but it's not the reverse either. It's a complex issue in which there isn't an easy path out, because of the actions of both sides.
Israel isn't solely to blame for the problems of the Palestinians; they were even refugees in Arab countries before they became Israeli refugees. And their current situation is at least partially caused by themselves, and at least partially caused by the fact that other powers in the region have a lot of incentive for the conflict to continue. It's also partially caused by Israel having incentive to continue the current situation, as it is strategically beneficial to Israel. (Which of course doesn't make it right!)
More to the point of your original post, I think coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian situation is very biased against Israel in most parts of the world, including the US. And I say this even as someone who is very "leftist" in my views of the situation, and absolutely hate what our current government is doing (in many ways, but including in this way). And in fact, I hate how Israel has acted over the last many years, though I, like most Israeli, have no idea how to "fix" the current situation.
Any politician who steps out of line on the issue, even just pointing at obvious facts on the ground, is disciplined immediately. See what happened to Rashida Tlaib a few years ago for making mild factual observations.
I'm opposed to laws against boycotting, fwiw.
Its an occupation started by the Arther Balfour deceleration in 1917. Started with Zionist crime gangs that later turned into the mossad and other occupational military forces who run the apartheid occupation.
It doesn't matter where Palestinians come from, why they live there, etc, ITS AN OCCUPATION, as simple as that.
Its an occupation of one of the holliest lands for all three religions, with ethnic cleansing against Palestinian Muslims and Christians, through every way possible, killing journalists, children, families, mass killings.
Yet when Palestinians go to defend their land and their rights they are called terrorists, what unfavorable coverage are you talking about? Palestinians throwing Molotovs against occupation forces? Terrorists, Ukrainians doing the exact same thing? Heros.
But the whole “both sides are wrong” issue is total bullshit. One side has all the power and the other exists below the boot. One side is actively ethnically cleansing Palestine and the other side is being ethnically cleansed. You can’t possibly make both sides equal in blame.
I think there's something really fundamentally wrong with US media. And not just with Fox News, but with all of them.
Therefore corporate media ends up defending the status quo, by default or by design.
I remember all the talk about quiet quitting and working home and all that, but because media has slowly shifted away from that, I seemed to think about it less. In fact, I completely forgot about quiet quitting until you just mentioned it, when I realized they have slowly blocked it out.
Imagine that. It took me a while to realize that. And I still needed something to remind me of it. A lot of people aren't constantly reminded about it, which means they'll think more about whatever is currently in the media and keep falling for their trap.
It’s not like he has any good options. I don’t blame him for staying in Russia.
Frankly as a non American I don’t know why you’re weighing in so strongly on this.
Ecuador
Yes, the level of wiretapping and surveillance was bad. It should have been exposed.
However, that's not all he took. And those documents have had negative effects on U.S. operations and that of their allies.
I have my conjectures and speculations, but ultimately, I do not believe Snowden is completely in the right.
Page 20:
"As of August 19, 2016, press outlets had published or referenced taken by Snowden.'™ This represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the nearly 1.5 million documents the IC assesses Snowden removed."
Page 22:
“As of June 2016, the most recent DoD review identified 13 high-risk issues . . . . Eight of the 13 relate to [redacted] capabilities of DoD; if the Russian or Chinese governments have access to this information, American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict.”
It’s not like I don’t believe that Snowden likely took things that endanger elements of national security. However, I’m going to need a bit more evidence to believe a government that routinely and flagrantly lies to its citizens, and equates “risks to national security” with “things that make us look bad”.
> a government that routinely and flagrantly lies to its citizens
You are biased.
I’m claiming they are being vague.
Something can be technically true, and while it is given a framing that is far out of proportion with the supporting evidence.
> > a government that routinely and flagrantly lies to its citizens You are biased.
Snowden’s leaks demonstrated that what I said is a fact, and no one in the government even disputes the content of those leaks!
> How do you explain what he damaged at a technical level without revealing classified information?
I don’t know, but that does mean you just get to exclaim “it’s classified!!!” And I magically just have to believe everything you say.
> Please show evidence that anything in the report is not accurate.
The report provided no evidence to dispute. Again, the national security apparatus has shown itself time and again to not be trustworthy: gulf of Tonkin, wmd in Iraq, warrantless surveillance, spying on its own citizens and lying about it to congress under oath (and getting away with it with no consequences). Flagrantly violating the law (Iran contra), etc etc.
I’d rather be “biased” than a rube.
They said there were 13 risks and that 8 would be bad/endanger troops if China and or Russia were aware. That’s it. How many troops? Endanger them how? What kind of information are talking about? Sources and methods? Weapons systems? Other technology? Literally any detail???
I understand your position is that “they’re in a bind”. Well, there shouldn’t have squandered their reputation by lying about major issues facing the American people like war making, mass surveillance, illegal activities, etc.
Finally, the sheer number of documents he extracted was a red herring/immaterial to nation security. All that matters is content.
Edit: a move careful reading of the report demonstrates that the 1.5 million number appears to only refer to the number of non blank documents that were downloaded, it is not at all clear that the is any way for the government to get a precise measurement of what Snowden actually took with him to Hong Kong and disclosed. Anything that hasn’t been disclosed in public would therefore be purely speculative on the part of the US government.
Edit 2: a more careful reading of the section that outlines how he took the documents shows that “removed” simply constitutes the number of documents that he downloaded off of the respective NSA networks onto his local machines while at work. It says nothing about what he actually took offsite. Everything in the risk assessments are purely speculative based on what he had access to from the automated downloads he implemented.
I am not sure why we struggle so much with that idea given the complexity of the situation.
See: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/18/the-trouble-wi...
He obviously had a negative opinion about the US government and very little trust for it, so he is quite biased, but that seems expected given his history. I don't read this as him somehow supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Degenerate is a stretch, but 'criminal' does not seem controversial. Whether you agree with the laws or not, hate the USG, love Snowden, whatever, the fact remains that he did most likely break the law. He hasn't been convicted, true, but his own choice to stay out of the US suggests he believes he would be.
If my government had secret programs that my own courts would rule illegal later, I damn well hope that someone is going to run to the press,and I also hope that this someone is gonna get a medal...
Are you simply going to tolerate corruption, illegal and unethical behavior as long as there is some law that forbids talking about that?!
What he did was clearly not espionage, because he didn't sell info to a foreign country, he released it to the American public. And if I recall correctly, he made sure not all of it was released, and it was redacted as responsibly as he could. That's not how espionage works. Charging these whistleblowers with espionage is a flagrant abuse of the law.
Snowden, despite the injustices he revealed, fell on the wrong side of American opinion in relation to the military, foreign policy, and associated intelligence agencies.
I wouldn't be so fast to use the word "deeply" there.
Though clearly I think most Republican voters are pretty explicit about it. At least the ones I have met. This is kind of the undertone to "America First" really.
EDIT: And I'd add that many often seem to have the attitude that this extends to other countries in the American sphere of influence; even self-style liberals will make comments ot the effect that Canada or France or Germany etc are all benefiting from the US's world dominance and that we basically "owe them one"; as if this isn't in reality a two-sided coin where the US gets ... plenty... in return
Still I'd rather have US dominance than Russian.
Americans know they have spies, they know the CIA and the NSA exist and have a vague idea what they do. They know it's unpleasant and may be technically illegal and they're fine with delegating their elected leaders to deal with that for them.
I don't know; maybe there are plenty of people like this. But I think there are many (more?) of us who are not OK with these things but feel powerless to do anything about them.
And that includes those of us who do appreciate America's hegemony and the relative safety and prosperity that it affords us, but who think that doing things like spying on citizens, bombing weddings, supporting coups, assassinating dissidents, invading and occupying countries for no good reason, torturing (e.g. waterboarding) prisoners, detaining people indefinitely, etc. are both morally wrong and counter-productive toward maintaining our position of power and prosperity and esteem in the world.
Snowden is a half-way martyr.
He made the decision to die for a cause, and then backed out of that decision and swore an oath of allegiance to modern day Hitler.
He showed an example of someone who didn't like the consequences of his actions and if you want to escape the consequences of your actions, you do that via corruption: swearing loyalty to someone powerful and reaping the benefits of that loyalty (them shielding you from consequences) in exchange for your servitude. In order to prevent being a victim of corruption, he chose to engage in corruption.
Him and Wikileaks together delegitimized the American government and ultimately created a fertile ground for a fascist to be elected president. (I think it's more arguable that Obama was the person who delegitimized the establishment).
His ultimate fate, to see his legacy largely ignored and unaddressed, to become a slave to a dictator, and to see that his oath of allegiance calls into question his sacrifice... I don't think America could have created a harsher punishment if we had tried.
I think America's founding fathers would understand and be sympathetic to his plight, but be disappointed.
FWIW, I have been in rooms talking about hardening infrastructure against government malfeasance. There were a lot of engineers at companies mentioned in prism docs that said "lets assume this is true, how did it happen," and worked on hardening infrastructure against the attacks they could imagine. So while outwardly his sacrifice seems largely in vain, it lives in the memory of many engineers who see hardening their systems against government action as a real importance many of whom donate to many organizations like the EFF.
> “The Committee further found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.”
It's not one person doing something bad, it's an entire powerful organization that pays for the livelihood of the people who work those whistleblower channels.
I have a hard time believing congress didn't authorize it in the first place. I am probably uninformed, but it seems reasonable and likely that prism is authorized directly by the patriot act. Congress told us they were going to do it, and they did it.
There are no good answers.
1. Snowden materially damaged the US government.
2. Snowden swore an oath of allegiance to the entity who most desires to damage the US government.
My personal opinion is likely closer to the idea that Snowden was a ethical person who wanted to do good, and he was handled as an asset by people who knew how to manipulate a desire to do good to achieve goals like chaos and distrust. That is a casual opinion, not informed by facts or significant research.
All that was damaged or lost was the pristine public image (which was a delusion in the first place and Snowden exposing it doesn't make him culpable).
I also dont get the whole "Snowden was a cleverly manipulated asset" attitude: Where is the evidence for that? This is exactly the kind of overcomplicated but soothing conjecture that conspiracies thrive on; Snowden put out concise and sensible descriptions of his motivations actions and timeline-- what makes you discard all that and suspect some grey eminence instead?
What we have learnt from the Snowden leaks as evidence by "what has changed" is that it wasnt a branch of government that is a problem, but the entire country its laws, its values and its people.
What I won't concede is that if you measure relative power between Russia and the US, Snowden's actions reduced US power and increased Russian power. Not in a values sense, but in a realpolitik sense.
I think he planted a seed in our rot which will eventually destroy us. I think that seed is in the form of a warning to people of good faith and good conscience that the government is not the place for them.
I think it is probably most correct to say that we are damaging ourselves in response to Snowden's actions.
> Where is the evidence for that?
I am pretty convinced wikileaks is/was/or became part of the Russian intelligence apparatus. Assange's second hand girl accompanying him to Russia is a tragic coincidence.
Ultimately this all comes down to trust. Who should I trust and why? I am amenable to your answer, but cautious of imparting trust to Snowden himself.
Any proof to back up this wild claim?
Certainly it's debatable whether swearing an oath to Russia is the same as swearing an oath to Putin. I don't believe there's much of one.
The comparison might not be entirely spot-on, but it's not that far off either.
The only thing Putin has in common with Hitler is being a jerk. There's no commonality between Nazi ideology and the Russian state, and beating the nazis is a huge part of their national identity.
Hilariously, you're more likely to find Nazi fans in the Ukranian militias.
Do not let some internet meme stop you from identifying fascism when it's real.
That Putin doesn't use the symbolism is irrelevant. That he's doing similar actions is what should concern you.
Indeed it does not. In fact, the US itself has had its share of fascist tendencies.
Fascism is a specific ideology, and while Putin does not officially subscribe to that ideology, in practice he operates like he does. As did Stalin.
Mind you, not all fascism is Nazism either. There's a difference between Hitler's fascism and Mussolini's fascism. Franco's fascism wasn't even warlike. There's room for differences. But Stalin and Putin are sufficiently similar to put them in the same corner.
But let's talk definitions, shall we? I'm using Umberto Eco's definition because it's well known, and established well before Putin came to power, so not tailored to him in any way:
> "The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
Putin absolutely does this. He's constantly claiming traditional values, is best buds with the leader of the Russian Orthodox church, etc.
> "The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
Again, Putin does this. He rejects many modern concepts like equality, rule of law, LGBTQ rights, free press, etc.
> "The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
His war has certainly become a case of action for action's sake, lacking very clear goals. He isn't fully anti-intellectual and does use some highly conservative intellectuals, but he does attack modern aspects of western culture and science.
> "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
Definitely. Dissenters find themselves falling out of windows. You're not allowed to disagree. Russian media are fully state-controlled now and only allowed to say what Putin wants. There's no room for intellectual discourse or critical reasoning in Russia.
> "Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
Russia being a multicultural empire isn't as racist as the Nazis were (though non-ethnic Russians do seem to be second class citizens), but he does instill fear of foreign connections, and Russian organisations that he doesn't like are often branded foreign agents. Other differences he strongly opposes are of course LGBTQ people.
> "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
I'm not sure how big of an issue this is in Russia. Is there even a middle class? He does promise them food on the table if they leave the politics to him.
> "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite's "fear" of the 1930s Jewish populace's businesses and well-doings; see also antisemitism). Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
This one is pretty clear. Everything is an American plot to him. Ukrainian people can't possibly want freedom by themselves, it has to be an American plot. He's hyping up NATO as a threat, claiming to already be at war with NATO in order to justify his war on Ukraine. It's less of an internal thing than with the Nazis, though. Except of course that any Russian who disagrees with him is proof of this foreign plot.
> Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
He does this. He keeps saying the West is decadent and destroying itself, while simultaneously branding it as a threat to unite against.
> "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
Putin has been talking about the prospect of decades of war. I think it's unfair to count his mobilization towards this, as mobilization is common in many countries. Although in his case it's for an offensive war, of course. However, I can't help but think of the letter of a Russian wife who wrote to her husband to rape some Ukrainian women. There's a horrific obsession with dehumanising violence there.
> "Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
Less sure about this one, except maybe in painting outsiders as decadent and weak. I don't think today's Russia is as hierarchical as Nazi-Germany or Stalin's USSR was. Though he does like to surround himself with macho oligarchs and strongmen.
> "Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
Not sure about this one either. He certainly expects Russians to be eager to die, and the Russian death count in the assault on Bakhmut is staggering, but I'm not sure that counts as a cult of death. This is one that Ukraine sounds more guilty of. But then, they kinda need to in order to keep morale high in the defense of their country. Ukraine didn't choose this conflict.
> "Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".
We've seen him bare-chested on a horse, right? He certainly loves his machismo. As does Trump, by the way.
> "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
Also less the case, I think. He even held some fake referenda. I'm not sure to what extent he claims to speak for all Russians.
> "Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
I don't speak Russian, so I can't tell. Well, "war" is a "special military operation", so there's that.
Still, Putin hits most of these points. Some of them very hard.
What was unique about fascism was the ethnic superiority and the unifying totalitarianism where all public/private resources are aimed at national goals. Russia is too multiethnic for the former and too disorganized for the latter.
> Rally around the flag, point to the external enemy, it's all pre-industrial, fascists didn't invent it.
Flags were far less common or standardised in pre-industrial societies. People didn't fight for their lord or king because of propaganda about an external enemy (with the possible exception of the crusades), but simply because their lord or king wanted to go to war and that was their place in the world.
> What was unique about fascism was the ethnic superiority
That too existed before. There were many places in the Middle Ages where Jews had reduced rights, for example. It's the kind of division that fascism loves to build on.
> unifying totalitarianism where all public/private resources are aimed at national goals.
That's more like it. More specifically, the extreme nationalism and elevating those national goals to some higher ideal and inevitable necessity. And that's something Russia definitely does. Or tries. You're right that they're not very effective at it, but it is definitely how Putin talks, and how the fascist ideologues he relies on, talk.
Yes they are. You're engaging in binary thinking here. These demagogical patterns that Umberto Eco describes were in The Iliad, they've been tropes as long as we've had writing at least, probably longer.
First russians did when they occupied some territory of Ukraine is to remove and prohibit Ukranian language.
It is as similar to Nazi as could be except the name. Their ideology is to slowly remove any nation russia controls and claim them to be russians. Rise children as russians and kill nation if it doesn’t obey. Literally.
We can argue if it’s new form of Nazi or not but perhaps it’s much worse.
Exactly. Such tactic if reducing seriousness can be also used to promote future crimes. Hitler didn’t became ‘Hitler as we know him’ in one day. There were stages of ‘progress’.
He had no choice but to acquire a Russian citizenship since the US gov stranded him there. Unless you think rotting in a US super max prison for the rest of your life is a viable choice.
He blew the whistle and he doesn’t owe you anything and certainly doesn’t owe it to you to make a martyr of himself. Pathetic.
Just curious, do you consider Bush, who started the Iraq war, to be a modern Hitler too?
Bush did more damage to America than Russia could ever hope to have done. I think he damaged America more than Trump.
I think America's time in Iraq was not fundamentally genocidal and I don't remember America violently putting down opposition to the war at home so I think it falls short of "Hitler". While we did destroy the regime, I don't think we tried to destroy the notion of "iraq" or of being "iraqi." I could be convinced that we were worse than I think.
'I don't think we tried to destroy the notion of "iraq" or of being "iraqi."'
That's not what genocide is.[0] Destroying 'notions' isn't a genocide. (That's without delving into argument of whether or not Putin's actions fit such description.)
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
"I don't remember America violently putting down opposition to the war at home"
I don't think there was much opposition[1] thanks to American free mass media[2] and ones who did protest occasionally got arrested. [3][4] Situation in Russia now is harsher, of course, but still.
"I could be convinced that we were worse than I think."
Don't really want to, my point is that Hitler has set a pretty high bar and both Bush and Putin failed to reach it. So far at least :( Look at the genocide in Rwanda, that's what qualifies as a good attempt.
As a side note, do you remember Bush's Freudian slip when he said Iraq instead of Ukraine? The laugh in the audience is pretty disturbing [5]. I'd expect somber silence full of regret.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War#...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...
[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/17/sprj.irq.antiw...
[4] http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/01/19/sproj.irq.peace.protest...
> Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Keep in mind: Putin does do these things. Ukrainian children are separated from their families and placed with Russian families to be raised as Russians. That's genocide. Adult Ukrainians have reportedly also been deported and made to live as Russians on the other side of Russia, separate from other Ukrainians. There's plenty of talk in the Russian media that all Ukrainians believe Ukrainian is a valid ethnicity should be killed. And we've seen the result of massacres.
Sure, Putin doesn't do industrial scale murder of millions the way Hitler did, but as you point out, genocide is broader than that.
Really? Would you leave an orphan in the war zone or move them to a safe place? Calling that a 'genocide' is cynical distortion and serves only Ukrainian propaganda.
"Adult Ukrainians have reportedly also been deported "
"Reportedly"?
"and made to live as Russians"
What does it even mean? Drinking vodka and playing balalaika?
"There's plenty of talk in the Russian media that all Ukrainians believe Ukrainian is a valid ethnicity should be killed."
"Plenty"? I don't know what you are talking about but just go to Ukrainian segment of Facebook, which allowed hate speech against Russians, and tons of genocidal fantasies.
No, I would reunite them with their families. Intentionally refusing to do so and leaving them with Russian families to raise as Russians is genocide. You don't get to whitewash that.
This is not some people on Facebook; the UN has condemned it, the ICC issued arrest warrants, it's widely documented. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russia... for some sources.
Same with the other stuff. Your rhetoric doesn't change the facts.
Once you understand someone is delusional, there is no point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukr...
7 countries voted that it is, and prominent historians at ivy league institutions (you know those one's people badly want to get into so they can learn from the worlds top experts) have said it definitely is.
As far as I'm concerned the matter is pretty settled.
The person you're talking to doesn't have any desire at all in understanding you, nor do they have any desire to create the best argument against themselves and respond to that.
That's 7 out 193 countries. Hmm, I wonder why.
By the way, the Ukraine itself didn't recognize the obvious genocide of Armenians by Turkey during WW1.[0] Countries can be very flexible when recognizing or not recognizing something as genocide is in their interest.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide#Internationa...
Seriously? The Ukraine had over 30 years of independence for that.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_recognition a total of 34 countries have recognised the Armenian genocide as genocide. That's not a lot. Even the UK and half of Scandinavia haven't. That Ukraine hasn't means nothing, it doesn't mean they don't consider it genocide, and it certainly doesn't mean they're okay with genocide. You're being overly anal about this issue.
Their insulting comment is not based on anything real just as their arguments.
It serves as a form of mockery or dismissiveness towards you. It was used also to belittle and undermine the seriousness of the discussion. Typical for russian propaganda.
it’s not a delusion. it’s typical russian propaganda tactics. explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270224
A false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite
incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially
in mental conditions.
Delusion in the form of denial is a natural response to grief. "This entity that I am apart of is doing something heinously evil" would naturally cause grief. I experienced grief in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan because I believed my country was doing something evil.
Denial is the first stage of grief, and I think we are seeing denial in the form of delusion, delusion supported by propaganda.
Exactly. He doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter for russian propaganda which is known for intentional twisting facts and expressions and making their opponent to explain obvious lies. Russian propaganda uses such twisting as en excuse to promote their narrative even if unrelated.
The initial question about Bush was invented in order to shift the discussion from undesired topic and deliver narrative in which actions of Bush and putin would look similar which is intentional lie to cover genocide actions performed by russia in Ukraine.
I think it is about avoiding personal responsibility more than it is about a desire to spread propaganda. Alternatively, it might be about showing that ones side is powerful and willing to fight.
If American elections are a sham, then it justifies Russia's sham elections.
If Americans don't get a say in how they are ruled, then Russian citizens don't have to be upset or take responsibility for their own lack of say in how they are ruled.
If America invades Iraq, that justifies China's pending invasion of Taiwan or Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I kind of knew what that person was doing, and engaged with it in good faith anyway, which I regretted.
The sad part is that when you run into someone like this person, the battlefield is the only way to resolve the dispute.
The battlefield is going to be the arbiter of whether Taiwan is part of china or not too.
These people live in a fundamentally "us vs them" world and frame every problem in terms of a "them." The question is how do we got from "us vs them" to "us vs the problem" or said a different way: justice for all.
I agree. This way is more precise or I can reformulate what I’ve said this way: shift discussion toward justification to avoid responsibility.
> I kind of knew what that person was doing, and engaged with it in good faith anyway, which I regretted.
well, I know the feeling. Actually it’s the goal of propagandists to create such regret and more preferably a desperation with lack of wish to fight for reason to prevail. They try to exhaust opponent by intentionally saying some bs and forcing opponent to explain obvious things while push their lies and mostly ignoring the answers.
On the other hand I should say that I enjoyed reading your argument and the very fact that propaganda was met with a proper response done in good faith. I think this keeps hope and light to those who read it. At least it has this effect for me and I am thankful to you for your efforts.
>The sad part is that when you run into someone like this person, the battlefield is the only way to resolve the dispute.
Unfortunately.
It is still a question what to do with intentional propagandists. Giving them answers that are blocking their ability to spread another lie is degrading the discussion. Giving them proper answers feeds them with grounds to push their narrative more.
Perhaps in a discussions with such people we should pronounce that we kind of know what they are doing and address the core of their motivations instead of the topic itself which they aren’t discussing properly anyway. I am not sure it will work and still looking for a better solution.
This really is the core of it. If it were anywhere but Russia, I would probably hail him as a hero who made a great sacrifice, but instead despite my general distrust and dislike of the US government, I feel like his motives deserve questioning.
I am open to being convinced that I am over emphasizing Russia. I am definitely no Snowden scholar and I'm not very well read past the various headlines and comments I've read over the years.
Lol. After Assange/Manning, that demonstrates a singular failure of imagination.
Snowden released unredacted classified documents that lead to real-world damage and potentially casualties. Compare that to wikileaks which redacted locations, IP addresses and other sensitive information.
He wasn't a hacker by any means. He was a lowly SharePoint admin that was rumoured to have been coerced remotely by the Russians.
He was angry with the NSA for being denied a promotion for TAO which drove him over the edge.
It isn't hard to theorize that Russian and Chinese assets lurk the corners of chatrooms, looking for depressed/vulnerable US assets to coerce and corrupt. Money well spent for the West's enemies.
If a single American intelligence asset lost their life because of Snowden's leaks would your opinion change?
Can you point to a specific article in the Washington Post or The Guardian which you believe lead to casualties?
(The rest of your comment is rumor, wild speculation, and in the case of 'lowly sharepoint admin', outright misrepresentation)
Do you realistically think the Washington Post or The Guardian would make Snowden look bad by aligning IC asset fatalities with his leaks? I doubt it.
Consider this: IP addresses and devices of Western assets were leaked in the documents. Counter-intelligence can use those to correlate known or suspected IC assets. This has real-world consequences.
The way Intelligence works is much more shrouded in secrecy. Everyone in the know knows he had privileged access via his job and leaked the entirety of the documents without redactions because he was mad at being passed up for the TAO job. His bosses were interviewed which confirms my statements - 1
Swift on Security is an example of a Twitter account with connections to IC. Her statements on the subject echo how the industry feels about Snowden. - 2
1/ https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/what-snowden-get...
2/ https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/64971712356500684...
Also your Slate.com link contradicts your explanation for his ostensible disgruntlement - Ctl-F "TAO offered him a job". Not that it ever made the slightest bit of sense in the first place - who would banish themselves from their homeland over that? Snowden's character study is as crystal-clear as it is inconvenient to the NSA: the man was an idealist.
You can't trust a single word intelligence agencies say. We have no idea what they are collecting, how it is stored, indexed, searched, or used, or how long. They actively deny operations they are currently engaged in, i.e. they lie, at the highest levels.
There are only technical limitations imposed by computational resources. Which aren't really limitations when they have effectively infinite funding at this point.
They've infiltrated hardware; inserted backdoors, not just at telcos, but into privately-developed and owned locations.
They consider encryption to be a stumbling block and are willing to intervene to weaken it to serve their purposes.
Absolutely shitbirds, all. I don't care what their ends are, their means are to create a digital dystopia that simply cannot be trusted. They basically broke tech; usurped it to serve the power structure. And so many people and companies went along with, are going along with, and are enriching themselves by doing so.
This future sucks. I hate my own devices.
Installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel was the closest I'm come to feeling like having an actual PDA I could trust and living in a cool future. But of course it's still on Google hardware, so it's not trustworthy. And it still requires apps, some of which are not trustworthy. And, worst of all, I still have to communicate with other people on their phones, which voids most privacy efforts. I don't even give new friends my real phone number because I can't trust their contacts list not to be shared with everybody who wants to buy it.
Iff the design is secure with regards to storing the secret used to unlock user data, then Google signing a blob to unlock signed boot for a new arbitrary image still wouldn't allow that new image to spill existing user data. (I have no idea if this is actually the case though)
But on a practical level, that's just wildly unlikely to ever happen or ever have an impact on a normal person's life, so why stress about it?
Don't get me wrong, it's not to say we shouldn't advocate for govt. orgs not doing this sort of thing - but I also don't know why you'd spend so much time and mental energy trying to avoid a theoretical bogeyman.
Because, one day, you will make a mistake or say something wrong. And then they will correlate this wirh all the information they have about you.
Remember NKVD ? Remember STASI ? Remember Gestapo ? Remember CIA ?
In the 50s, people who organized civil rights bail funds were called in front of the Anti-American Activities Committee to be blacklisted from their careers and communities.
If anything, privacy is incredibly important because the powers at be continue to prove they will use state-sanctioned violence against people who protest these systems. We like to tell ourselves its only those other bad countries, but rights in the US are just as delicate. Enough money or power behind a charge and you have to real ability to uphold your rights.
All the information on who they are friends with, where they hang out, maybe even contents of images or text messages, the searches they did on the net. In a period of the life where the try out many things and often are curious. And then combined with details about their whole life and career.
I personally assure you that you can. You also don’t need to have cable tv, YouTube or unlimited video games. The positive impacts can be significant
I denied cellphones, live tv, anything with ads, unfiltered internet, Roblox, TikTok and many other things until they were 16+ and could demonstrate self restraint and future-oriented decision making abilities.
Don’t abdicate your responsibility to your own flesh and blood to anyone.
To shape the society you want to live in.
Data is eternal, and is analyzed and aggregated forever. Just because there's nothing realistically to fear _today_, doesn't mean that a future AI won't find reasons in that data to label you a terrorist/murderer/wrongthinker, and apply whatever policies are deemed acceptable at that time. We're really not far off from a Minority Report future.
This may happen by accident, BTW. "Whoops, we sentenced you to prison on a wrong conviction" happens far too frequently. People spend decades getting out of the system once they're already in it, and lives are ruined by this.
You can think of all this as hypothetical, but realistically, there are other concerns as well. Do you trust your government to keep the data they collect on you safe from corporations and other governments? Aside from the top intelligence echelons—and maybe not even those, I'm not sure—governments are awful at information security. Data leaks can happen anytime without your awareness, at which point you can only hope that you're not an interesting target for whoever now has access.
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Criti...
Every time government abuses its power and isn't held accountable, the likelihood of future abuses goes up. Eventually the frog is fully boiled, and "wildly unlikely" becomes "commonplace."
Wait for an advanced AI to get hold on that information. Not even for its own purposes, just one serving a rival power.
Even assuming that's true for an ordinary person, which I don't think it is, let's consider what constitutes an ordinary person. Maybe it has no effect - if you never run for office. Or if you never participate in a political campaign. Or if you never challenge the political status quo with direct action. Or if you never run a business and express views that could be viewed as potentially threatening the status quo. Et cetera. In other words, it's fine if we're controlled as long as you're ok being controlled. But if you think, "I'd like things to be different," you're in danger, because the police and other government orgs know everything about you.
But even that's not enough.
Stuff can happen that's not under your control. Suppose you're accused of a crime because you fit a profile or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or you're actively framed for a crime because you fit a profile close enough. Or suppose you witness a government official being corrupt or breaking the law. Or suppose you don't take a bribe and those offering the bribe take revenge. Or a psycho develops an infatuation with you and stalks you. Or you piss off the wrong person in an online game and the 2030s version of being "SWAT"ed is getting ratted out to the wrongthink police by some snot-nosed teenager.
The fact is that no one should hold this data about anyone. No one should have that kind of power. That's the bedrock of privacy.
Constant stream of beeps and buzzes, notifications, text messages and phone calls from unknown origin, phishing attempts and more. They are conditioned to enter their phone number or email for the most trivial of reasons, to use apps for everything, and to leave them on their phone forever, sapping their attention and privacy.
I think it's nice to see people pushing back and telling others about it.
I think you should help normalize the pushing back, not the giving in.
There are a number of ways to answer this.
This is the type of mentality that led to sudden surprise with "What? We have to take our shoes and belts off? Not just those guys but us?" It is an example of how ignoring the issues could end up having them affect you.
At the time of this writing, there are over 270 comments in this thread. I submit to you that it is very likely that multiple commenters have been directly impacted. I've known two people charged with bogus terrorism offenses. One of them stuck it out, had his day in court, and was acquitted - at the cost of over a million dollars in legal fees that his family had to pay. The other guy was not as wealthy and was presented with a fantastic deal by the prosecutors that he took the deal and pleaded guilty. He's out of prison now but with that record, his life is ruined. And he very likely was not guilty.
Another guy I know was messed up by the government on similar grounds - it destroyed his livelihood and cost him his marriage. He did, however, manage to (mostly successfully) sue the government for what they did to him, although one of the suits went to the Supreme Court and he lost the case there. He didn't have the means to mount these lawsuits - thank heavens for the ACLU who did it on his behalf!
I know a few people who were on no fly lists for extensive periods of time. They were never accused of anything. Just all of a sudden ... could not fly.
My gentle suggestion is that you expand your social circle to get to know how not rare these things are.
I also submit that more people are directly impacted by this than are directly impacted by gun violence. Would you agree we should chill out about guns?
If you're white, you are a lot less likely to be impacted by police brutality than an African American. Would you argue that white people shouldn't be bothered by the issue?
Having said all that, I do agree to the utility of what you are saying. I tend to be more concerned with corporate surveillance than government surveillance, and have gone extended periods with primarily cash purchases and limited CC usage. I didn't get a smartphone for a long time for the same reasons (and oh boy, when I did the privacy loss was very palpable). And yes, I can say right now that I have discovered that the utility of using those devices and paying with CC definitely exceeds the risks - for me. I have automated flows tied to both and they are very valuable.
Still, though, the comment you are responding to is not discussing anything extreme. I've not installed GrapheneOS but I have installed custom ROMs like LineageOS. It's not a big burden. An hour of effort perhaps? The main down side was things like Netflix not letting me download episodes and the inability to use Google Wallet (which I didn't want to use anyway!)
And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.
"Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016
It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
I doubt that. The best we can hope for is that such information is compressed and moved to long-term storage or pointers to it are lost. More likely the only protection it really endures is that it is being obscured by the massive influx of new data; i.e. buried under an endlessly silting riverbed of new data.
> and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals
Check up on China[1]. They've massively stepped up the surveillance to the point where it's actively intervening on people's behavior to make them act "better" and discourage such bad things as....playing loud music on trains. They are barreling towards a dystopia where they can digitally un-person you for wrongdoing and wrongthink. Right now it's just the soft whips of not being to buy a train ticket or fly, but it will absolutely reach into every aspect citizen's lives, from charging different prices to determining where you can live and whether you pay fines or go to jail. China has a long tradition of un-personing politic dissidents, including jailing and killing them. The future looks horrifying.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=T....
I agree about the social credit score, we don’t know the fields they use (unlike FICO) so it probably does include private communications.
Even if you theoretically were able to collect the voice recording of every human conversation happening between every human on Earth, actually parsing or using that information proactively is just not feasible. So I think people are being a bit unrealistic about the extent the agencies can even use the massive amounts of data they have.
It's about later, more so than now.
i'm going to refrain from making a whataboutism joke right now.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/belgrade-huawei-cameras
https://cepa.org/article/a-disturbing-marriage-serbia-and-ch...
Although I know it's a made-up statistic, it's worth pointing out that even if that's true, that's a horrific number of people it does affect:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=.1%25+of+the+us+populat...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black...
I'd assume a lot of stuff isn't stored either.
People I've met who might've been involved in IC don't talk about it, at least not with me (and I assume it's improper to ask), but I did once meet someone peripheral to that, who vocalized one kind of thinking about it.
Years prior to the meeting, around the time of the Snowden thing, in a private research forum, I said something like: one of the IC orgs did important work, etc., but seemed to need guidance on Constitutional balance. It was a random comment, and I forgot about it.
Years later, I was meeting with someone from that forum, about a (non-IC) job, and their attention was divided with laptop while they talked with me, like they were also reviewing my resume or something. Suddenly, they were agitated, and seemed to be referencing -- not our conversation, nor my resume -- but my forum comment from years earlier, as they angrily started saying how people at such-and-such org "know the Constitution better than anyone", etc. Then angry impromptu speech about (public) information about threats, and (public) information about a claim of why such-and-such org had done certain things.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, and I also realized that I needed to get the interview-gone-sideways back on track, so the discussion recovered after that. But at the end of the interview, there was obvious (renewed) irritation in their voice and manner. (And that's not my worst interview ever. :)
I realized that the person's work had probably led them interact with IC orgs before, the person had been impressed by the orgs, was very concerned about threats, and was offended on behalf of the org by armchair critics like me.
I imagine that person is not the only one with strong feelings like that, but that people actually at the org, and who had similar feelings, wouldn't speak with an outsider about it.
If if they were able, how could they possibly win people over? They've violated our trust, privacy, and (arguably) our legal rights. Even if they're literally keeping the nation from being taken over by China or Russia, they're also the bad guys. I can accept that it's possible I'm better off with them than without them... but I hate them, because they abuse me.
The idea that they wouldn't win over a majority of Americans seems unlikely.
They can definitely manufacture consent, but for many that won't even be necessary at this point.
Maybe there's some string of successes they can't brag about, but they still regularly defend themselves in the court of public opinion and further often dominate the discussion.
That's a pretty good description of most people IC affiliated. I'm not sure about your interviewer friend though, doesn't sound like someone I'd want to interact with.
That said, almost all of how these things work are out there in memoirs, biographies and non-fiction books. Robert Gates is a prolific writer and did a great job in his memoirs describing the IC. I mean yes the majority are purely discreet in their current or former capacity. It took me a long time before I would discuss my affiliations etc... and I generally don't discuss anything more than structural "how it works" kind of things that can be found in a lot of memoirs etc as described.
I'm always happy to discuss to a point but most of it would just be boring stuff.
The IC consists of:
-16 domestic partners (CIA, FBI, US Army, US Navy, NSA etc...),
-Five Eyes (Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, US),
-NATO,
-Whatever non-NATO intelligence service we are working with internationally as a coalition partner, or Major non-Nato Ally (MNNA) Singapore is a great example here.
So your question is better asked: Which civilians does the IC track, for what period of time, based on what requirement, using what tools?
"Dragnet" surveillance is kind of a misnomer. If data is created and stored somewhere, even on a private server in your basement, then the IC might have an interest in knowing what and where that data is. This exists in the form of the Warrants and National Security Letter process, or many other processes wherein private data becomes public via national security interest. However, until the IC actually begins investigating and (depending on jurisdiction) has an analyst look at that information for a specific intelligence requirement - it isn't technically "collected" - which is important legally but doesn't make a difference to most people.
The IC at it's most effective, using international treaties and a combination of Title 50 and Title 10 authorities, could find anyone, anywhere, anytime in the world and then could arrest/capture that person without firing a shot within lets say a week. That's the service guarantee that the IC provides to presidents and world leaders. However those ops cost MILLIONS to do and with hundreds of people. That kind of effort is for someone who is legitimately an imminent mortal threat to someone from the above coalition.
7.999M of the 8 Billion world citizens are so uninteresting in this context that they are not worth the time of a GS-13 analyst or case officer/agent making $120k/yr.
Any information/data you produce that is stored somewhere, or recoverable can be "collected" should you be involved in something that the Five Eyes determines is a threat.
So it's much like Capitalism: in the background and present always, able to do productive, positive things and operate effectively and efficiently BUT over the long run, generally is there to maintain power structures that exist, keeping adversarial organizations in a box on behalf of the ruling elite.
So for most citizens the "spying" is neutral and invisible and keeps the world running within the law/power structure as it is built - which, depending on which side you're on can be great or terrifying. As with anything that powerful though, has a tendency to crush and run over a lot of things unintentionally too.
So if your perspective is that the EXISTENCE of such an organization is itself a threat then you'd rank it 10/10
If you're wondering what the chances of being directly and individually oppressed by "spying" from the IC, I'd rank it 0/10 unless you're an international criminal of some sort.
The more interesting question to me is: What are lawmakers and elected officials asking the IC to do?
to assume that everything companies tell you about security and encryption is an intentional (legally bound) or unintentional lie.
to realise that there are shadow laws that we are not aware of that govern these things.
Simply make unelected people have lifelong careers within governmental organizations. Snowden talks about this in his book. Yeah a new ~puppet~ figure head gets elected every 4 years. But what about all the layers of folks who actually perform the "Government" actions? They are the same people for decades, they say yes or no to actions you can/cannot take, they influence in their every choice they true meaning of policies...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
It was reformed for a reason! Putting politicians in charge of all hiring and firing turned out to be bad for everyone.
Unions work when the group they are bargaining with has competing interests. When the union negotiates against itself everyone else suffers.
The difference with police unions is that they work in the inverse - we're in danger when they do work. Police hold us hostage by doing their jobs (badly) and offer mob-like protection.
I'll also just that I see the police union as a perfect example of what I called a US mafia style union. In Nordic countries you can't behave like this and get away with it in a union and there are pretty strict rules for what is and what isn't a legal strike.
Nah, the smart ones know they're not. They're just keeping up appearances.
Somewhat like those stories about being chased by wolves through the snow. Once in a while one who got ideas is tossed out as a distraction (Liz Truss, anyone?).
Early in the history of the country, we experimented with evicting the entire government when party changed hands, all the way to individual post offices. It turned out to be ridiculously inefficient. It turns out institutional knowledge is extremely important, and institutions are generally terrible at writing everything down that the next person will need. Imagine trying to conduct a business with 95% turnover every 2 years.
As a result, we intentionally established standards for employment and safeguards against arbitrary firing of unelected bureaucratic officials. The elected officials have control over setting policy and, in the long-term, deciding the criteria by which the unelected officials retain their jobs.
None of this implies that the unelected officials are unaccountable. They are held accountable by our elected officials. But that process does require the elected officials to do their homework and, to some extent, understand the Chesterton's fences that exist in the system. A failure mode I observe is that we seem to keep trying to solve the problem by electing conspiracy nuts who are then basically ignored because they try to approach the problem of reining in unelected bureaucracy from the "Why don't you show us the secret UFO tapes?" direction instead of the "The president needs a full accounting of how many terabytes of data have been stored for terrorism fighting purposes" direction.
It was quite a hard path over decades to finally admit a reality that was obvious since decades. That realization has far more impact to mankind than petty politics.
Who has time to worry about privacy breaches and mass surveillance when aliens are real?
It would be harder to imagine an easier psyop to pull off. The only thing that strains credibility is that apparently it works.
On the other side, it is novelty to force western governments admitting that some flying object is surpassing our own technology capacities. That is a window opportunity into open science, into discovering what is powering them.
It is OK that your interests are more aligned into holding someone accountable, many other people on this globe are more interested in other topics. That's basically it.
Yes, as the kind of foolishness the people who should be holding government accountable are distracted by instead of doing their jobs.
> It is OK that your interests are more aligned into holding someone accountable, many other people on this globe are more interested in other topics.
Indeed. It is a very useful lack of focus that maintains the status quo.
It's a feature when positive, and a bug/liability when the institution is criminal/rogue . The NSA/CIA/FBI have (presumably knowingly) broke the law and using shady techniques. Which is of no surprise -- it's in their DNA to be secretive, shady, and create and exploit loopholes.
James Garfield’s assassination was over his refusal to give a patronage job. That lead to a backlash against patronage in general.
Jobs as patronage continued at the lower level for a long time. In many states, the most powerful political official was the Postmaster General because he controlled the jobs.
At the federal level it still continues in various forms: appointments to military academies require congressional sponsorship, Supreme Court justices hand out clerkships based on ideology, etc.
When people talk about the civil services reforms being inspired by efficiency, they usually are talking about the British civil service (Northcoat-Trevelian report) or Chinese civil service.
But those are very different things than the American civil service.
America never really had a civilian civil service in the “Yes, Minister” sense of the phrase.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/professorn-myndigheter-bo...
The rational is that you always get road assistance when needed. Never trust that conversations inside a modern car are private.
I feel like if that were exploited at scale, we could see a huge number of criminal indictments etc., of the sort of behavior that's technically illegal but nobody enforces, but would suddenly be exposed through such an effort. Of course if they took it to court they'd have to discuss how they got the evidence.
But the fact that we're not seeing this makes me think it's not as bad as we think, that some amount of discretion is used, or that there is just so much data that nobody is acting on most of it.
I frankly think the more scary abuses of the post 9/11 era are things like Guantanamo. The idea that they can round up people and hold them indefinitely, with no or little due process. If someone does warrantless surveillance and brings a case against you based on that information, the expectation is you can challenge it. If they falsely claim you did 9/11, then... Less so.
This might or might not be true, but let's say it is. But what then in 10 years when something you do or are becomes the next Red Scare?
I personally think the resurgence in the last few years of "tough on crime" political rhetoric is another similar wave. The people who want to lock up the homeless or whatever. People demanding more incarceration of petty criminals. Judges are frequently described as weak if they let someone go due to insufficient evidence. If we start thinking due process is for chumps and that we need to lock everybody up no questions asked, I think mass surveillance can be a terrible input to that system.
| The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the
| very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did.
| Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than
| Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising
| his concerns through official channels. And he got
| crushed.
| Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI
| agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged
| with crimes that could have sent him to prison for
| the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially
| and professionally. The only job he could find
| afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban
| Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to
| injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s
| surveillance programme were largely ignored.
I'll have to read more but it seems that he didn't use proper channels he went to a reporter (with only unclass material, he claims). They raided him probably expecting classified material to be involved. Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this instance.
His career was largely derailed, and his post-retirement second career options are most likely severely limited.
To be specific (and iirc):
- He was not kicked out of the military. He retired due to “bullying” and a big congressional kerfuffle that was about to happen because of his delayed promotion to full bird.
- Iirc, he was told that he could remain in his career, but he would have to move from a hot shot track he was in to something like being commandant of a nowhere base in Alaska so he could lay low. Note that moves like this happen when being promoted to full bird, but I got the sense that this was not his trajectory pre-testimony.
- His post-retirement options probably exclude working at any organization that is pro-Trump and most that are pro-Republican, which is a not small number of DoD contractors (common landing spot for retired military).
- Note that his lawsuits were dismissed. This type of discrimination is fairly easy to do in such a way that makes it difficult to sue successfully, usually due to something like “documented personal opinion or discretion” that the discriminator had. Note that I have personally seen this knowingly done several times —- it was super creepy to see in action.
Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vindman
Some of his interviews were enlightening if you search for the links.
We were talking about protections from prosecution which Snowden absolutely had.
Realistically, there is nothing rule-based that I can think of in the US that would protect someone like Vindman. He probably knew that.
The protection has to be from a system of shared beliefs about what is ethical and appropriate.
Trump’s whole campaign and strategy (love it or hate it) was to completely dumpster that idea.
There could be an interesting discussion about the merits and demerits of disrupting the existing system of shared beliefs that was in place when Trump was elected (I would actually welcome that), but Trump mostly (if not entirely) just used the opportunity to feed his narcissism.
> Would you force the MAGA crowd to wash his feet?
Totally uncalled for.
A simple solution would be things like:
- Don’t block his career for petty politics. The problem is that Trump specifically was all about retaliation and petty politics. I think most of the folks around him gave guidance not to do these sorts of petty things, but that was his style.
- Own your mistakes. Again, I don’t think this was Trump’s strong suit.
- Factor in the bigger picture when making decisions. Vindman, if my read on his career is correct, is precisely the type of person we need more of in the upper officer ranks. Tanking his career was bad for Vindman, but worse for the country, imho. That’s just short-sightedness.
(Too dark?)
I love that saying. But if it would be true, then why do people lock their bathroom doors?
I'm on the side of privacy, decentralization and offline technology that is free from modern shackles.
Julian Assange should have come to Russia, not Sweden
we are 20 years in the dark. we are 20 fucking years, in the dark.
we shine the light on the present and they hang us by the balls.
We would never see something even remotely similar to the Gracchi in the US today.
And because of the increased saturation of the MSM with "former" three letter agency staff, we also see today's liberals as staunch defenders of the same agencies they used to harshly question. That's a huge shift and I think it's attributable mostly to needing to do damage control post-Snowden.
Such secret networks, to the extent they exist, generally value stability. Chaos is dangerous to the powers that be.
If these groups felt threatened by leftists and liberals rocking the boat, don't you make the mistake of what they feel threatened of.
It's not primarily the ideology, it's the rocking of the boat.
If the right is now rocking the status quo, don't you think that is also threatening?
Somewhere mixed in here are also (probably a huge majority) of bureaucrats, for better or worse, just doing their jobs.
Neocon figures realized they couldn’t rely on popular Republican support for intervention, so they started making alliances with liberals who had shown willingness to be swayed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/edward-snowd...
so, it seems to me that we've learned a lot, but the "nothing" you claim would be more appropriately describing the response from what was learned.
It's akin to how we seem to be getting more and more info about UFOs lately. When it's finally confirmed, we can't just act like we knew nothing about UFOs existing, we had a clue for a long while - just no official confirmations.
right, and for the 99.999% of the population that is NOT, we learned all about it. what a weird caveat you've added that assumes "we" are only HN readers that could have possibly have learned anything.
It's much more nuanced than "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", as it's just wrong. Everyone does something that is against regulations every day. It's just a matter of time before that is truly enforced using this "nothing to hide" data, and then people will be "I guess I did need to hide that".
A current thought experiment on this is, if Trump won 2024, it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone if he went off the rails and tried to punish anyone that spoke poorly of him. Citizens included. Meanwhile, half the country has been posting openly on social media about hating the guy for the past 8 years. Some of us, thinking we did so anonymously behind a @non account. We collectively just don't fathom the risk of that type of institutional upheaval. But, it's bound to happen at some point, in some way.
An example with less consequences (perhaps?), everyone knows that something is listening to them even when they don't know what. We all have stories of something unusual coming up in conversation, then immediately you notice you're being targeted for those ads. Even though you never search for it, etc. it just came up at the watercooler in conversation with Bob in accounting or something. Everyone knows it's happenings, for years now, but nobody is really too concerned or asking for real answers about how this occurs. It might be a complex of an answer for the average joe, but he's not even asking the question because the consequences are perceived to be low.
I'd agree with the parent that no, we haven't.
Heck, if we are playing this game: most still make fun of their 'weird tech relative/friend' who can do this rather than ask them to help for what they will probably do for free. The people have spoken and continue to speak very clearly.
However, that's not the only data that is gathered and sold. The information that is gathered passively from extensive efforts to track individuals across the internet is the elephant in the room that you seemingly want to ignore. These are direct attempts by companies to subvert individuals that might actually NOT be posting every little thing they do on social platforms. Things like tracking people as they move about brick & mortar stores or other types of beacons for whatever purposes they are being used for are examples. SmartTVs gather metrics, grocery stores gather metrics, and the million other "little" things that when gathered together all paint a very very detailed picture about someone without them necessarily knowing about.
so you're "don't be so public on the internet" is not such a simple little thing
By nobody I meant the amount of people who care is rounding error.
The article mentions revelations of Verizon participating in illegal spying. It was also revealed ATT and others participated. This prompted congress to pass a retroactive law making the illegal telecom spying, during the Bush Jr. administration, legal. I guess the US hypocrisy is more plain now? The US is a nation of (retroactive) laws that protect powerful men.
There were a few technical fixes. The NSA presentation slide that stated, OpenVPN and SSL were "not a problem" led to using stronger ciphers by default.
Google reportedly encrypts its inter-DC links since the revelations that the US was tapping and spying on the communications.
You are less likely to be treated as a tinfoil hat nutter if you talk about US spying on its own citizens and the rest of the world.
The rest of the world's population stated the US as the greatest threat to freedom in the world today in polls across allied nations, so some who had prior, are no longer believing US propaganda. Although recent US illegal wars of aggression and revelations of torture and other war crimes, probably played a large part here too.
The powerful have tried harder to ensure secrecy, and control over documentation of their misdeeds. It is highly likely that the powerful also are more careful now to ensure there is no record of their crimes.
But, what should have happened was the displacing of all the federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drug offences to make room for all surviving politicians and surviving members of the NSA, CIA, FBI, federal courts, etc., who reasonably could be expected to have known of illegal behavior of those agencies, and who did not do everything within their abilities (including whistle blowing) to end it. There would have been a lot of powerful members of the corporate party's far-right wing (Republicans) and the corporate party's right wing (Democrats) being locked up, so of course, go after the messenger, sweep what you can under the rug, and as a last resort, pass retroactive laws to make the illegal, legal.
* That the U.S. Government is above the law and no one will ever be held to account.
* Privacy in the U.S. for citizens is dead, but alive and well for corporations and government.
* That 50% of Americans would glady kill the other 50% so that they can be little racist Nazi shitheads.
* That things will get much worse before they get better.
> “The Committee further found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.”
> “The vast majority of documents Snowden removed were unrelated to electronic surveillance or any issues associated with privacy and civil liberties.” (p. 22)
> “Since Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.”
> “Some of the personal network drives Snowden searched belonged to individuals involved in the hiring decision for a job for which Snowden had applied. On these individuals’ network drives, Snowden searched for human resources files and files related to the promotion and hiring decisions.”
Are any of the claims inaccurate?
Edit: OK, here's some actual data on this and a little less hyperbole. "Almost nobody" is wrong. But it's not obvious that most Americans care.
* On most questions about surveillance Americans are pretty evenly divided (it's about 50/50 for/against government surveillance and wiretapping)
* On the question of monitoring non-citizens Americans are broadly supportive (80% in favor)
* When you ask people about their own data they actually turn out to be less concerned than if you ask them about surveillance in the abstract (a majority are "unconcerned" about surveillance in that context)
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/06/04/how-ameri...