RFC 9446 Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
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Anybody who saw him speak knows he was doing everything possible to make it about the content, and not him as a person- only putting his name to the light to prove it wasn't false or the result of some disgruntled employee trying to stick it to his manager.
Yet the narrative very quickly focused on him; the content of his character, his upbringing, his connection to the government, the fact that he is in Russia and decidedly not on the content of the leaks which quickly got glossed over and to date I am unaware of single arrest due to it- despite clear evidence of lawbreaking (including but not limited to: deliberately lying to the Senate).
Lets not forget that diplomatic plane that was downed across international territories because they suspected Snowden was inside.
Despite posing no continued threat to the US, they sure spent a lot of effort making him as uncredible as possible yet anyone who has eyes sees it as completely transparent.
The scariest part of it all is that people actually are falling for that narrative, do not look at the leaks for what they are (proof of unconstitutional behaviour by a branch of government) and call Snowden a plant or a terrorist- ironically the kinds of people who would otherwise argue against government interference. Boggles my mind, and scares me to death how clearly susceptible the population is to disinformation.
Edit: To clarify my own frustration, I see Snowden as more of a true whistleblower, and Assange as more of a fame-seeking middleman willing to promise or withhold information based on his own self-interest.
Its totally possible that he’s a massive rapist, and its a great cover to be a known enemy to governments with your journalistic endeavours.
But its terribly convenient for the US government that the circumstances landed where they did, and it was even told to us that it would land this way and those saying it were branded as conspiracy theorists.
One might consider that Snowden went in knowing exactly what was possible, came prepared was completely “clean”, additionally he has not had a particularly difficult living situation. Yet even he is able to get massacred by certain sections of the media. Assange is living in (self-imposed, sure) exile and doesnt have the luxury of maintaining a lifestyle that promotes mental well-being, and the media are very quick to jump on his transgressions and blow them to insane proportions. Please keep that in mind when talking about him.
Assange's argument against going to Sweden should've logically also applied to the UK, where he physically was while trying to make the argument to avoid extradition to Sweden, as demonstrated by the UK not even bothering to inform the Swedish authorities when they finally did arrest Assange.
Just picking a nit here, but IIRC Assange was not arrested by UK authorities to be extradited to the US (that's just a "bonus" for the US), but because he broke UK law by "jumping bail,"[0] which is a crime in the UK.
There are a raft of other details/issues around Assange and his Swedish/British/Ecuadorian odyssey, and those have been endlessly discusssed/litigated in the press.
I won't address those issues, as I don't think it would add productively to this discussion.
Assange did violate the terms of his bail in the UK and was convicted and sentenced accordingly, regardless of other issues.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_in_the_United_Kingdom
Edit: Clarified my thoughts.
Ok, fair. My recollection was that they did both at about the same time, though subsequent focus on the (clearly motivated) US extradition rather overshadow the Swedish issues (which don't look politically motivated to me; though obviously that's what they want me to think :P).
That the UK didn't bother to tell Sweden is even more egregious given what you say.
The suspiciously flimsy case had been dropped already.
Also why the hell did he go to the Ecuadorian embassy without an exit plan?
He has spent more than 10 years in prison and self-imprisonment. And for what? That helicopter combat footage? Is that it? Sure - it doesn't look good, but...that's Tuesday for the Russians in Ukraine.
He wasn't incoherent when the charges were filed.
Currently the extradition of Assange has been refused on humanitarian grounds, as the US can't guarantee that they won't stick him in an ultramax facility and/or drive him to suicide. It's still facing appeal, but it's entirely possible the UK refuses to extradite.
I believe historically Sweden has been more willing to ignore such concerns when dealing with the US, which is why there would have been an incentive to fake charges that could get him moved to Swedish custody.
Extradition has actually been approved by all relevant UK authorities, after formal reassurance from the US about his treatment. Assange is appealing that decision, arguing then-Home Secretary Priti Patel was an id-- could not seriously accept some meaningless words that they can renege a minute after getting him.
Meanwhile, the Australian government is trying to vaguely save face by making some noise, probably to extract some extra money from Biden to just shut up.
What is crucial to understand is that prisoner transfers (IE; to Australia in this case) are eligible only after all appeals have been exhausted. For the case to reach the US supreme court it could easily take a decade, even two. What the US has proposed is a formula to keep Assange in prison effectively for the rest of his life, and in a US prison.
So - 5 years. Fewer than Assange spent in the embassy.
They can't increase your sentence anyway.
The US is trying to set the precedent that if you air our dirty laundry, we can go after you, wherever you are in the world. Not in the US? No problem. Not an American? No problem.
But collateral damage is something else: if I blow up a house with a terrorist leader in it, weil the debris kill a bystander? It happens in every war and it’s the main reason why a ‘just war’ still can’t be fought without tainting conscience.
Not to mention a completely unnecessary war sold using lies, and launched in violation of international law (not in self-defense, no UN Security Council authorization).
I disagree. Maybe a court should decide?
My understanding is that Assange:
1) Isn't a US citizen
2) Had never set foot within the United States
3) Committed no acts that could be construed (even to idiots) as violating US law
It makes it a little difficult to genuinely extradite. More than likely there was a plan to use extraordinary rendition once he was off UK soil, but before he had arrived in Sweden.
Not a citizen of the US? No problem-actually, all the better since it doesn’t have to follow “…”.
The US pretends that its law extends and applies everywhere when it says so, damn the rules or consequences.
I do not remember him being alleged to be a massive rapist. Certainly, one charge of any kind of rape should be enough to have him brought to the jurisdiction where the charge is made.
It wasn't for any of Epsteins clients.
This is the first time I've ever seen anyone defining "being in prison" as "self-imposed exile".
Assange has been in an English prison for 4 years now. The only thing for which he was actually convicted (skipping bail during extradition proceedings) accounts for only 1 of those.
My information is a few years out of date but I've been assured that at least he is only being extradited to Sweden for wild sex crimes and not the United States! Now let me check the Wikipedia arti... oh, turns out he is being extradited to the United States. A lot of people didn't see that coming (never really understood why not, but that is people for you).
The situation is in this awkward position where there was an obvious conspiracy to get Assange and making predictions on the assumption of a conspiracy has had great predictive power. The only change is it is isn't a conspiracy any more because everything is playing out publicly in British courts.
So while Assange is certainly being subjected to a lot of usual processes, the usual processes are being turned on him because he embarrassed the US government by bringing its activities to light. I have no doubt that is illegal. If I was a government, I too would want to criminalise people trying to hold me accountable. The issue is that punishing people for encouraging transparency is an inescapably political act.
And Assange is on the right side of history on this one. It is easy to see him as a footnote in every textbook one day as "and this was the moment when people started to find out what was going on".
Because people very strongly said this was only about accusations of sex crimes and the US would never lay charges for publishing - because that would mean what the New York Times does is illegal, we were told.
> But its terribly convenient for the US government that the circumstances landed where they did, and it was even told to us that it would land this way and those saying it were branded as conspiracy theorists.
I wonder if its both. He could be a massive rapist who would have gone unnoticed without us gov involvement. I imagine if you want to discredit someone it is much easier to find their real sins than to make something up wholesale.
Of course if that's true it still doesn't really matter how it was dragged to the light, he would still be a dirt bag.
let's focus on the crimes they both uncovered. please.
Well, since you phrase it that way, sure:
* Snowden uncovered mass-surveillance programs and intelligence agencies lying to congress.
* Manning uncovered Iraq War records, such as a helicopter attacking civilians.
* Assange uncovered... What? What pieces of information do you specifically credit to Assange which puts him in the same position as those first two whistleblowers?
According to The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL, Assange exposed the corruption of the US State Department. This is apart from his exposing the war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq [1].
"Cable gate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US State Department disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale." [0]
[0] https://www.nytco.com/press/an-open-letter-from-editors-and-...
Maybe I wasn't explicit enough: Assange is categorically not a whistleblower, but rather a publicist at best, figurehead at worst. Other people did the important uncovering, putting themselves in far more legal jeopardy.
I have to disagree. The US govt and its national security state have done a pretty good job of persecuting Manning, Assange and Snowden alike albeit in differing ways.
Flying to Berlin doesn't make sense. Germany is a NATO member and a US ally. He'd be extradited ASAP.
You're saying the US government helped Snowden cover up his plans?
That's some lizard people level conspiracy theory you got there.
Russia has also shown that they're not interfering with him as long as he doesn't speak about anything Russia is doing.
Contrast that with his destination countries that he originally wanted to go to, all of which are also of course "enemies of the US" (which is the only reason he's safe there), one of which has been strongarmed by the US directly (Bolivian prime minister forced to land and be searched, breaking international law[0]) and one of which has already permitted one of it's refugees to be captured on sovereign soil.
I should also add that a lot of countries would not grant asylum to a person who is in what they would consider a safe country. I know for instance it's a point of much contention in the UK that an asylum seeker must stop in the first safe country.
Additionally, since Putin's "special military action" (invasion of another sovereign country) there actually are a lot of restrictions for Russian citizens travelling, both outbound and inbound. -- and even if you manage to wave away all of that: he isn't in a better position anywhere else and he still has to travel over US Allied countries to get there.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
Back to what you said:
> those stories about him "being stranded" are bullshit
He really really was stranded. He had no passport, and the only place he could go without one would send him directly to prison without even a right to raise his defence of "public good" in his trial.
So unless you're saying "he wasn't stranded, he could choose to go to prison forever", that's not really true.
And as we later found out, the US would force even diplomatic planes to land and be searched for Snowden.
Sweden was playing US lapdog with Assange, so presumably would be the case for Finland too, even if not NATO at the time.
perhaps snowden flew to moscow once his passport was cancelled, with help from china, as part of a diversion
And he will be handed over to the USA sooner or later. The UK has already approved the extradition.
Ftfy
Even if he were guilty of some information crime, the level of persecution against him by the US government is way overboard and not in proportion to the supposed offense.
But it is clear to me and many others that what he was doing was journalism, even if you don't like his message and methods. He should be protected at all costs.
This kinda feels like the same thing, but politically. “You…” … “so we” … “and it’s gonna be ‘proportional’. Sorry-not-sorry.”
A nation that looked the other way when its leadership engaged in torture and relocation of people to nations where they could be tortured out of sight was already a nation that wasn't going to care over-much about being spied on. If civil rights mattered so little to them when it was actual pain and disfigurement being inflicted on human beings, why would we expect them to bust out the pitchforks for a little traffic-skimming?
They couldn't protect the World Trade Centers from a couple of cult members stealing planes.
They couldn't protect us from the water problems in Flint, MI.
They barely gave aid during Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.
They let children die in schools every year, the biggest one Uvalde, TX.
By all means let's see the truth, but from my vantage point, America is not capable (or interested in) protecting her people.
I believe what you're vocalizing is a younger-generation mindset (one that didn't feel the whiplash of 9/10 being a day everyone felt safe in their beds and 9/12 being a day nobody did). That younger mindset is one that I'm only too eager to see become the dominant mindset in American politics.
Governments are responsible for more than protection for foreign threats. I think the remaining items on the GP's list are legitimate in light of Jefferson's words.
As an American who was in his mid-thirties on 9/11, I have to disagree with your assertion about 9/10 vs. 9/11. I was (especially as a native New Yorker who worked across the street[0] from the World Trade Center for several years prior to 9/11, and provided IT support and services to several companies impacted by the events of 9/11) appalled and angry at the death and destruction wrought by those bloodthirsty scum.
However, I applauded the decision to not only rebuild WTC, but to build an even bigger building than the ones that came down. When challenged on that opinion (with the idea that it was just painting an even bigger target on a new building), my thought was that 'freedom isn't safe, and to ensure liberty risks are necessary.'
As such, I was disgusted with the Patriot Act[1] and the various other surveillance mechanisms and security theater (cf. the TSA[2]) implemented after 9/11.
I think that many folks felt a loss of control (control which they never actually had) and sought out means to regain that feeling of control. One friend refused to fly after 9/11, not because she believed that driving 1000 or 1500 miles rather than flying was actually safer (she knew the statistics as well as I did), but because she felt more in control in doing so.
And that's dumb, especially when it comes to making laws. I wish more of my fellow Americans understood that.
As traumatic as 9/11 was for me (I still avoid the WTC whenever possible, not because I'm afraid, but because it's still painful to think about 22 years later), I believe that a free and open society is important enough to accept some risk to preserve it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_Vesey_Street
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
Can we name as many successes, or is empty and pithy antagonism our flavor today?
My point was that it's not a persuasive argument. Even if you made a laundry list of failures, you have no baseline to compare against.
I would compare the Twin towers falling to them not falling, for example.
Can we not point to some kind of success this country's made, in unambiguous terms? Have we eradicated any diseases? Some sort of government action that has a clear cause and effect? Statistics are too prone to manipulation and classification mismatching. For example, you don't count as unemployed in the US stats unless you're actively looking for work. Someone who's given up the search is not counted. Methodology counts immensely for statistics, and those choices will change the numbers.
We could counter the shooting angle with the number of mass shootings stopped. That's something we can work with. I've only seen one in recent memory and I'm not sure if it was this year or last year.
That's effectively saying that no amount of failure is acceptable.
You mean some arbitrary assumption about competency and the threats the populace faces.
Yes, government invariably could do a better job of protecting people, and the US government in particular could do a better job of protecting people. However, even with the US government, if you were to systematically dismantle it, there'd be FAR more deaths.
Take your example of mass shootings, do you really think there'd be fewer if there were no regulations, no police, no public emergency response systems, no import restrictions, no safety restrictions, no military, etc.?
I wasn't defending their argument, I was pointing out why your rebuttal of their argument wasn't a rebuttal at all.
Sometimes when I speak to old French people who held activist reunions in Paris in March-May 1968, I get that feeling that it was true, that they were building the rules for how they should be treated, how they should intervene abroad, and most of them also donated 2 years of their life for humanitarian development in Africa, building wells, etc. They seem to believe it so strong. The explosion of the Rainbow Warrior taints the picture a little, but shows how little the spies could do, with amateur leverage. Did pitchforks ever influenced the course of affairs? Maybe yes, during a short period of time.
As a generation Y, having lived through the social media times, having seen printed media say blatant falsehoods about feminism and manufacture uproar that doesn’t exist in real people’s feeling, I do feel that we’re living in a sock puppet show.
I have nothing but respect for individuals that put countries on blast. We all know they are corrupt in their dealings. You don't seize control of a territory and 300 million people by dotting your i's and crossing your Ts.
Like it or not, every sovereign government had to engage in terrorism and one-sided treaties against natives to "build its country". They are not moral actors.
What Snowden did was very damaging to the Obama admin’s “hope and change” brand. Of course they were gonna go after him with everything they had.
But the US isn’t invading a country to wipe it off the planet nor is it committing genocide to an ethnic minority within its own borders.
And genocide? Need we discuss the native Americans?
Is America doing this right now? I mean in the past. When 9/11 happened we didn’t really have internet and social media like we do today. But if it happened today I’m pretty sure there would be a lot of people against going to Iraq. Especially with what we have learned over the last 20 years.
> The thing is that nobody invades a country desiring to wipe it off the planet.
Putin said Ukraine is not a country. He wants it gone. It’s literally his desire… or do you believe it’s NATOs on the door step conspiracy theory? Lol
> And genocide? Need we discuss the native Americans?
Is America doing this today? Is anyone alive today that looks back on history and thinks “gee wiz that was a great period of time! We should do that again!!!”
Native americans died mostly of disease brought by the immigrants from Europe. This decimated their populations more than guns.
I don't think you've spoken to a very diverse number of Americans then.
Libya today is a violent country with slavery and all other kinds of horrors. Before the US wiped the previous gov't off the map it was prosperous country. Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Yemen. We've been a part of 11 coups on the African continent. You really need to read more.
Also the Libyan situation is a lot more complicated than that.
America's treatment of Native Americans in general was extremely dehumanizing and brutal, but it was especially so under the command of Andrew Jackson, who enacted the Trail of Tears. (NB: And then we put his damn face on the twenty dollar bill... smh) Could you say the Natives of today are of the same health and status they were 300-400 years ago? We made that happen, as part of building up America. Most reservations now have high alcoholism, poverty, and some rely on fringe businesses like casinos or firework stands, etc. Those conditions aren't natural or endemic to their cultures. Our country is squarely responsible for the downfall of Native cultures.
That's not even touching what we did with African slave trade.
One could also argue that the concentration camps America had during the World War eras were only a few steps away from genocide. There was no legitimate reason to round people up the way they did.
There are also other events where American interests have disrupted activities, like in Panama, Haiti, Cuba, etc. Meddling with other countries trying to influence their leadership isn't just a Russian thing. America has thrown its weight around in many places it had no business in.
Maybe we could tweak our discourse into a more concrete direction? Pointing out some American propaganda might be a good start for us.
My go-to for this stuff is the way bills are named in Congress. There's bullshit like the CARES Act, EARN It Act, No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, I'm sure there's more obvious ones I'm missing, but it's deliberately named to pre-load bias on the legislation, and to use as petty political weapons ("Wow, you voted against CARES? Why don't you care?").
The Patriot Act might be the most relevant, in the modern age. It gave so much to the government and nothing to the people. Our rights were gravely injured when that was passed and I resent our government for manipulating language in such a way to push it through.
The fact that they write the history only hide their crimes.
Cough... Corea, Vietnam, Irak, Afganistan, Libya, Syria, Native americans.
supportive -> ambivalent -> hostile.
The intersection in the Venn diagram between Intel and Infosec community is substantial. And quite a number of accounts directly linked to US IC influence decisions of who is allowed to have a voice at DefCon and BlackHat.
The same happened with public support for Assange.
Nobody talks about the retaliation by proxy against Ola Bini. They should.
If you stand up for them better prep yourself to either get labeled a tankie or get character assassinated¹ by some nutjob with pink hair and overly strong feelings about pronouns. Which is an odd hostile spectrum to find oneself in. Jacob Applebaum was especially torn down hard using manufactured content of blog posts of "rape victimes" coming forward. And until today he remains so:
¹ > In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy.[10] In mid-May, Snowden gave an electronic interview to Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum which was published weeks later by Der Spiegel.[119] -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
It's amazing how the "American whistleblower randomly ended up in Russia during transit" revisionism is being pushed.
> Why do you take the words of Snowden as gospel?
I am not sure who could possibly be more of an authority on the intentions of Snowden than Snowden himself.
I mean if he:
* says he was on his way to Latin America
* was in an airport transit zone for a short length of time before;
* having his passport revoked (which he couldn't control), and;
* after applying for asylum in latin american countries, and also notably;
* had not applied for asylum in Russia (or China).
Yeah, I kinda take his word for it that he knew where he wanted to go.
Here is my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37095083
Maybe they were tired of him smearing shit on the walls of their embassy.
Unlike the US, Russia requires one to carry an ID.
Snowden said he was trying to get to Ecuador, but the Ecuadorian government would have handed him over to the US for the right price, just like they did with Assange. EU countries are too cozy with the US, and would never have given him asylum. In fact, when the US thought Snowden might be on the President of Bolivia's plane, it got a bunch of EU countries to deny overflight, forcing the Bolivian President to land and submit to a search of his plane. Snowden's only realistic option was to seek shelter in a large, powerful country with a poor relationship with the US.
Or maybe it’s possible to disapprove of Snowden not as “a plant or a terrorist” but as an unwitting accomplice or a useful idiot who chose to make classified information public in a way that was extraordinarily favorable to what were obviously (even in 2013) two of the most repressive regimes in the world.
Like, don’t flee to China after you supposedly blew the whistle to highlight abuses of government surveillance. And never ever transit through Russia! If Snowden had given 1% as much thought to factors like that as he had to stealing and disseminating classified information, maybe it would be easier for me to believe that his motives were completely pure and/or he hadn’t fallen under the sway of foreign intelligence services.
Instead, the most charitable assessment I can give him is that he’s a guy who’s not nearly as bright as he thinks he is who got in way, way over his head. I have a hell of a lot more respect for Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner than I do Snowden.
However, some minor facts:
1) He was in Hong Kong when he blew the whistle, which as much China as Puerto Rico is the USA - its a special administrative region, there is a strict border when travelling to Szhenzen.
2) Whats your transit strategy if the US is trying to get you?
Finally; that something is nice for an enemy doesn't mean that it shouldn't see the light of day, for example if your favourite fast food owner rapes a bunch of women but the company he represents is basically the only thing standing up to a big chain, well, unfortunately, you have to own up to it; not doing so is worse for everyone, including you as you are now complicit.
Frankly: Laws were broken and the governments of the allied countries (colloquially: 5Eyes) should petition the law to be changed if that's what they require and it should go through our democratic system.
You cant claim to be a democracy and then not permit your democratically elected leaders oversight or intentionally mislead them under oath, as General Alexander has knowingly proven to have done in the leaks.
It /was/ a special…
Interesting how few of Snowden's and Assange's fanboys care about RW. Maybe because her leaks proved Russian meddling in US elections?
Just flooding the fields doesnt produce fruit. Producing fruit takes time, knowledge and skill. There are no shortcuts.
Snowden should have spent time scanning the data to find allies high and low. Building networks of like minded folk. Regularly meeting to come up with better solutions. Testing them out till the good ones are shown to work. And then launch attacks on those most corrupted. That is what a character like Gandhi did. And the outcomes were very different.
I don’t expect either of those things to happen, sadly. If everything stays as it is, he will remain in office and continue his behavior. He’ll stay there until he dies.
At the same time, he exposed behaviors that were clearly wrong in both government and industry, and spurred a number of people into actions that would not have been undertaken otherwise. For this he should be thanked. That doesn't erase everything.
He was under great personal pressure as a result of the actions of the original criminal (US gov pursuing him and canceling passport etc), and had very limited time and resources of his own.
He could have dumped it all on the net, but instead handed it to big name highly resourced journalists, who were definitely aware of the seriousness of what they'd received.
There's two ways people try to discredit Snowden. The first is the government absolutist way, that no-one can wrong the government even to remedy its own far superior wrongs. The second is the backdoor version of the same: to say yes we get why he did it, but to impose a burden of performance that only a superman could attain in the reality of that situation, falling short of which: "he caused more harm than he prevented".
I'm not trying to balance actions against one another in some form of equation to see what the net good is. That doesn't make sense. It reminds me of Dave Chappelle's skit about trying to process rape allegations against Bill Crosby. He was a great comedian. And probably a rapist. Well, Snowden is similarly complicated.
He saw that he had to take a different path, even though it was one that was illegal. And I respect and honor him for being willing to make that choice.
Heck, Assange never stole anything, his crimes were journalism and publication.
Also, 10 years on, there hasn't been any direct evidence of any "damage" from the revelations and it's doubtful the document archive is of any present-day risk to anyone.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/08/no-regrets-s...
Here's how the US Constitution defines treason:
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
Under no sane interpretation did Snowden do anything even remotely related to treason.
Snowden is literally saying how helpful and useful to him Bitcoin was. How can you make such a cognitive dissonant statement? Like I said in my original post, crypto hasn't been helpful to you, that doesn't mean it hasn't been helpful to everyone. Newspaper owners hated the internet, that doesn't mean the internet isn't useful.
Cryptocurrency is a more dubious system. It's trustless and has some cryptographic elements, which is cool and very nerd porn, but it's also intrinsically social and complicated beyond understanding for the layman. That's where custodial scams and interpersonal exploits crop up, along with the other problems of sharing a universal ledger. Wildly variable gas fees, fraudulent transactions, systemic abuse and non-canonical forks are all just a part of the Blockchain model. Combine that with a lack of implementation spec, an incentive to fleece your user and zero regulatory bodies, and you might see how people dislike cryptocurrency. I don't even like the startup culture this website worships, but trusting the Blockchain to be a solution is fatal overcompensation.
I can recommend something like PGP or OpenSSL full stop. I cannot recommend cryptocurrency unless you know what you're doing, have a specific use for it, and treat your crypto-assets as disposable if you intend to keep them in the long-term. Those aren't just unacceptable terms for a successful currency; that's unacceptable for any online networked platform.
Imagine that every time you go through airport security, a full body scan is made of your kids and wife and they are sent around to a thousand or so unknown people (most of whom aren't even directly employed by the government) for salacious reasons or to be mocked. Now, there's a law that protects your kids scans from being sent anywhere (like HIPPA for doctors!), but incidentally it's a government institution and thus, according to themselves they do not need to follow the law. - despite that law existing for the only purpose of protecting your kids from the government.
When the information gets out that this is happening (this part happened before Snowden btw), everyone involved, including the head of the organisation, knowingly lies to the "Oversight committee" which is democratically elected, is transparent and wants to protect your kids. The "Oversight Committee" have no choice than to just trust airport security at their word, for "security" reasons. (this was one of the things proven to have happened in the Snowden leaks: IE; General Alexander knowingly lied to the US Senate).
Lying to the "Oversight committe" in this case is also a crime, but such flagrant disregard for the law has become pretty standard.
This is what we're discussing here, not just that there was laws being broken, not that there was surveillance after all: their job is surveillance.
The fact is here: that you, dear citizen have a right to privacy enshrined in the constitution. The reason that protection exists at all is to protect the very democracy that you uphold: freedom of expression.
A rogue government agency that lies to your democratically elected leaders, that breaks laws indiscriminately and does so under a thick blanket of secrecy -- while wielding a very powerful hammer to discredit and chase people to the ends of the earth -- that's what was exposed.
Not "the good guys". If they were "good" they wouldn't be lying to the US Senate. They wouldn't be assassinating the character of the people that expose them- these things would have clear answers and when exposed people would shrug.
Remember: people are using tools like XKeyscore to spy on people they personally know (ex-lovers, spouses etc; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog... )
You can't defend it by saying "it's national secrecy". Tell me how spying on your ex is in the national interest? Tell me why there can't be oversight?
Disgusting, and so is anyone who defends it.
This was discovered long time ago and the three letters agencies use that as part of their playbook to control the narrative.
They also want backdoors in your crypto on all your communication devices, so they can better protect you.
It's quite scary how well government smear and disinformation campaigns work.
Just normal Stalinist propaganda (made by the CIA) at work.
The idea, just like in the case of Assange, was to turn the people away from their revelations and in turn, to turn people against Snowden by painting him as a vilain.
There several implications to his actions. One is that he has no faith in the US legal system and has rejected it, another is that he believed his revelations were unlawful and without precedent, both things are untrue, the intel oversight committee was aware of what the NSA was doing and it was not their first time spying on americans. Even before electronics, intel agencies opening the letters of americans and spying on them was a thing. Many regular people I talked to about this are actually glad because they hear about ISIS and terrorist bombings all the time (back then at least). When bombings like the boston marathon bombing happened, what did the public/media say? They all blamed the fbi for not stopping it beforehand, and after 9/11 the NSA and CIA were expected to work hand-in-hand with the FBI and domestic LE by lending/extending their capability to help them.
You will all remember how this was not even a 2016 election issue.
Personally, I am very glad snowden revealed what he did, and a lot of people in the USGOV should have been imprisoned for it.
But the people voted and continued to vote in favor of the government, vindicating them and condemning snowden. Other leakers followed his way and they were appropriately jailed and then released as he would have. This is thr unfortunate reality of democracy and the state of mind of the majority of americans.
Self included, the USGOV is not my enemy but Russia is. As much as I appreciste snowden's efforts, expecting americans to side with a person who defected to Russia is silly. He is someone who did what he thought was right but defecting to Russia makes him an enemy, not a hero, despite what he said.
Let me put it in a very simple way: American's (self included, as much as I care about privacy -- I have been a victim of this more than you know!), compared to defecting to Russia or humiliating the US by fleeing to our enemy don't give a shit about the government spying on us unlawfully.
The people are aware,every major media outlet and even major movies told them exactly what snowden did and revealed. Snowden is a pariah because that is the will of the plurality of americans.
> He leaked top secret information
True, however it was detailing criminal behaviour and projects that were designed with criminal intent. The Government was not allowed to be running those programs as dragnet surveillance is against the constitution.
> fled to america's worst enemy Russia
False, there is ample evidence to support the fact that he was travelling somewhere else and was unable to continue passed Russia. Where he has decided to settle.
> His revelations are not as shocking to the public as they are to tech people.
True, Which is unfortunate, the tech industry taking notice has had positive impacts, like the taps that were placed on google datacenters being less effective due to TLS being deployed between all services inside google. A very serious undertaking. It also pushed us to create new TLS suites (TLS 1.3) with this in mind and was at least partially responsible for LetsEncrypts existence. So, despite the public taking less care than they should have; it has been for their benefit.
> The journalists he went to were not american.
Laura Poitras is not American? Glenn Greenwald is not American?
> If he indeed exhausted legal options to report his findings he should have made his case in a US court.
How did that go for William Binney? I'm fairly certain you never heard of him or his revelations.
I think the point you've missed is that NSA is above oversight. It's "Enemy of the State" but.. actually, it's exactly like that.
> but defecting to Russia makes him an enemy, not a hero
This is so extremely childish that I am at a loss at how to argue this.
He is in Russia, by the US's own doing, there is a lot of evidence to support that he preferred to be elsewhere. If the only thing you have to smear him on is the fact that he's in an enemy country then sir: you've missed the point. He was always going to end up in an enemy country if he was going to be safe from the US's agents.
Assange was in an embassy in London and there was still discussion in the intelligence community (up to the president) on whether they should assassinate him. In an allied country, in a fucking embassy.
Indefensible.
----
You're also making a cardinal sin, (as am I by responding to you).
If a crackhead gives you a video tape of your child being raped by the local priest, you don't say that the crackhead is a crackhead and thus ignore the video tape.
You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
This is not about how much integrity Snowden has, that's completely irrelevant. He shows that the NSA broke the law and knowingly lied to congress. This is absolutely not open for debate, it's a plain and simple fact, and yet we sit and bicker about how Snowden just "isn't american enough" and how "it's nice for our enemies". -- No. It's nice for our enemies because our governments are doing things they shouldn't be. Not holding them to account is not going to make our governments any better.
The patriot act is also unconstitutional yet it nearly unanimously gets reauthorized. One could argue the NSA spying was merely a tool in support if that. The government gets authority from the people, the people authorized this. And if it is criminal behavior, what crime was violated? The DoJ signed off on NSA spying telling them it is not a crime. Proper legal authorization was obtained from both legislative and executive branches of the government and there was popular support for it.
> False, there is ample evidence to support the fact that he was travelling somewhere else and was unable to continue passed Russia. Where he has decided to settle.
I did not speak about his initial intention but his eventual decision. He knew the implications of settling for moscow. Working in intel, he knew better than most people exactly why Russia welcomed him, it was to cause harm to the US and he became complicit.
> Laura Poitras is not American? Glenn Greenwald is not American?
Fair enough. But I meant theguardian and der spiegel FWIW.
> How did that go for William Binney? I'm fairly certain you never heard of him or his revelations. > I think the point you've missed is that NSA is above oversight. It's "Enemy of the State" but.. actually, it's exactly like that.
I think you missed the fact that the US is a democracy. The NSA has plenty of oversight. DoJ authorization is oversight, the whitehouse being aware is oversight, the intel oversight committee being aware is literally oversight. They are not above oversight, oversight just meant sacrificing liberty for little security. That is where oversight led to. Did Snowden not know about binney? The thing both you and him wrongly presume is that the NSA or congress were contradicting the american people, that is not the case.
> This is so extremely childish that I am at a loss at how to argue this. > He is in Russia, by the US's own doing, there is a lot of evidence to support that he preferred to be elsewhere. If the only thing you have to smear him on is the fact that he's in an enemy country then sir: you've missed the point. He was always going to end up in an enemy country if he was going to be safe from the US's agents. > Assange was in an embassy in London and there was still discussion in the intelligence community (up to the president) on whether they should assassinate him. In an allied country, in a fucking embassy. > Indefensible.
It doesn't matter what he preferred, he went to the enemy in the end willingly. The US did not force him to settle in Russia, nor was he forced to leak any information. Fleeing a country to avoid criminal penalty is called being a fugitive. Working for a spy agency and settling in the enemy's capital being used as a propaganda piece by them is called defecting! "If he was going to be safe from the US agents" give me a break, his name was globally infamous, do you think he will be assasinated? Do you think the CIA cannot assasinate him in Moscow? He was fearing being arrested and facing legal consequence in the US, the laws of the people of the US!he fled because he knew what he did was illegal not because spies will kill him anywhere else. He saw it fir that benefiting a US enemy is worth letting the american people know something they already authorized when they tolerated the patriot act and have been doing so for two different administrations at that point!
I would like citations on the government discussing assasinating assange, but even then assange is not American. If snowden flies back to DC today, do you actually believe he will get assainated? To what end? Wouldn't it be better to just lock him up?
Had he stayed, his fate would have been similar to reality winner: 5-10years in prison. He fled to avoid that, if he really did everything lawfully he had nothing to fear.
> If a crackhead gives you a video tape of your child being raped by the local priest, you don't say that the crackhead is a crackhead and thus ignore the video tape. > You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
I agree with your analogy. What you keep missing is that the government is the crackhead in this situation and snowden is the other thing (i won't use something horrible like that even in an analogy). His betrayal, and decision to avoid legal consequence made him a fugitive defector. For the american people, he betrayed them and the government did what was authorized by them to stop terrorists or whatever boogeyman.
In a democracy, nothing trumps the will of the people. If reality was such that the american people did not expect their government to do whatever it took, including sacrificing civil liberties and privacy of americans to stop the next 9/11(despite success/failure of their attempt), and/or if Snowden's revelations were things congress oversight, the DoJ or the whitehouse were not aware if then it would indeed have risen to a very serious level of "rogue agency breaking laws" scandal, but that wasn't the case. Even from snowden's perspective, he raised his concerns to the NSA ombudsman and every other internal means of raising the alarm. He presumed the NSA was acting on its own volition or that congress was not aware (he could have notified the whitehouse or members of congress instead of the press).
> You fucking use the videotape to go to the police.
Yeah, not the press and if the police were compicit you make your case in court and tell the press
> This is not about how much integrity Snowden has, that's completely irrelevant.
I agree. But he did know how moscow will benefit from his presence there. He chose to aid a foreign enemy to expose a domestic one (turns out the domestic enemy was just the gov doing what people wanted).
If a law was broken, it was the entire executive branch, not just the NSA, spanning 3 (now 5) administrations that have been arguably breaking the law. EO12333 and the patriot act were known to the people. The DoJ authorized that mere collection is fine, so long as when a human looks at the information a foreign entiry was associated with the communication.
> This is absolutely not open for debate
Who was prosecuted for breaking the law then?
> it's a plain and simple fact
Absolutley nothing argued as a matter of breaking the law is a plain and simple fact. Just about any law, including murder can be violated in the name of self-defense or national security. Everything leaked by snowden was approved by everyone in the executive branch that should have had to approve it. So bush and obama broke the law in your opinion but whether not their national security defense was lawful, that is what FISA court is for as is the supreme court who are ok with FISA court.
> It's nice for our enemies because our governments are doing things they shouldn't be. Not holding them to account is not going to make our governments any better
If you get anything from this, get this one thing: it doesn't matter how shitty our government gets, the american people will never be ok with aiding a foreign enemy to acheive that goal. Even if the US were to turn into a totalitarian fascist regime, I would rather have that than aid terrorists or Russians in their efforts against us. We live in a time where a major political party is cozying up to Russians who we are fighting a proxy war against, so this is even more true today than ever before. You overestimate how serious if a thing it is in the minds of americans when the government spies on them compared to a foreign enemy that is working hard to destroy their country and way of life.
A foreign enemy is an entity against whom we send our sons and daughters to die just to make small gains at defeating that enemy. Use that perspective when evaluating snowden's presence there as a voice of propaganda against the US. Also consider that lawful or not, the NSA's surveillance was intended on catching foreign enemies and their actions were largley in accordance with the expectation of most americans.
Had he gone to any other country like ecuador as he originally supposedly intended or had the american public not already made a collective decision to sacrifice privacy and liberties for security then I would be agreeing with you on most things. But that just isn't reality.
Keep in mind that this same democracy and sentiment had led to japanese internment camps in WW2 and even worse in other situations.
I have a feeling history will rule in favor of snowden but I just wish he moved to a country not hostile to the US. Especially these days when Russians themselves are fleeing Russia, it's hard to defend Snowden. His Moscow relationship undermined whatever intention he had to bring change to the NSA.
The bigger problem is that he was trying to change a symptom, while ignoring the disease, that is the sentiment of the american people. I fear it would take the abuse of the NSA's powers against the american people at scale by some tyrant to fix the root cause.
But it doesn't actually work that way. People don't specifically vote for the politicians that are currently in the office over this particular issue - they vote on their entire platform, and if we we're being honest, they mostly vote on the few "wedge issues" that are particularly prominent in mass media at the time the election happens. In the past two decades, it's also increasingly "voting against" the other guys as opposed to voting for someone.
The end result is that, while those elected certainly claim to have a popular mandate on the basis that they won the election, it's very misleading in practice in most cases.
Aside from the very real gains in privacy and security, I would also like to make the argument that we would currently be living in a fragmented hellscape of an internet if the net had not turned (mostly) opaque after 2013. Imagine the same AI spam filters currently operating on your email but for all network traffic. We would be suffocating under the weight of (sometimes) well-meaning, but ill-conceived security solutions. Fortunately, we took a different path.
That said, the leaks did leave some aftermath[0]. All the tinfoilers, pre-Snowden had their suspicions confirmed in real, tangible ways. Yeah we knew abut ECHELON[1] but the Snowden leaks were far more substantial IMHO, and leaked at a time when The Internet was really starting to ramp up (in terms of all the services/tooling now available, and social media making leaps and bounds).
Work on ECH was enabled by significant developments to encrypt DNS traffic, using DNS over TLS (DoT) [RFC7858] or DNS Queries over HTTPS (DoH) [RFC8484], which also started as a result of the Snowden revelations. Prior to that, privacy hadn't really been considered when it came to DNS data or (more importantly) the act of accessing DNS data. The trend towards encrypting DNS traffic represents a significant change for the Internet, both in terms of reducing cleartext, but also in terms of moving points-of-control. The latter aspect was, and remains, controversial, but the IETF did its job of defining new protocols that can enable better DNS privacy. Work on HTTP version 2 [RFC9113] and QUIC [RFC9000] further demonstrates the trend in the IETF towards always encrypting protocols as the new norm, at least at and above the transport layer.P:
Of course, not all such initiatives bore fruit;"
Indeed. People are still sending cleartext domain names in SNI. Are the alleged privacy gains of encrypting DNS traffic meaningful when anyone can see the domain names in SNI, when the user makes a TLS connection. Arguably cleartext SNI is even worse for privacy than cleartext DNS because with SNI anyone can see when the person is connecting to a website whereas DNS only tells them when the person looked up a name. Concluding that a person accessed a website from a DNS lookup alone requires some assumptions. Cleartext SNI requires no such assumptions.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9446.html#name-steven-m-bellovin-governmen* RFC 1121 "Act One - The Poems". https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1121
* RFC 1983 "Internet Users' Glossary" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1983
* RFC 2468 "I REMEMBER IANA" https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2468.html - Yes, people kept having fun after RFC 2119.
More goodies at https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?sort.... A lot of the April Fool's RFCs are Informational too.
The even older categorized class contains more essays. https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?sort...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments#History. RFC started out informal!
BCP #188 made it easy to say why EDCO's arguments for RSA KEX in TLS 1.3 were unactionable. ECDO (the Enterprise Data Centre Operators, mostly big banks and similar outfits) wanted to use the obsolete RSA key exchange method in TLS 1.3, and sent somebody to argue for this right at the end of the process, years after it was removed - because otherwise they'd have to do a bunch of work, and who wants to do work? Well, too bad, RSA KEX makes surveillance really easy, so we got rid of it.
[1]: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/103500_103599/10352303/...
Are you? I would expect it's completely moribund.
Here is a vendor implementing TLS 1.3 inspection [1] - they probably don't call it ETS (since there's a CVE attached to it) but it probably implements that exact spec (since ETS only deviates from TLS 1.3 by using a static DH key instead of ephemeral).
[1]: https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/product...
Edit:
Here's another vendor that probably does it too: https://blog.gigamon.com/2020/04/15/how-do-you-run-cryptogra...
It's a full proxy. Your client (say, Firefox) connects to their product, which has the real end entity certificate and keys for say, big-bank.example, which will have been provided by the customer who bought this product - and so it can prove satisfactorily that it is big-bank.example. Then the proxy forwards this to the "real" system which does the actual banking or whatever.
This is completely orthogonal to the TLS security design. We have successfully connected to you to a system which can prove it is big-bank.example. No need for static DH.
Should your bank trust third party suppliers with the ability to seamlessly impersonate them? I guess that's up to regulators.
- General Hayden
This means we haven't got anything right. DNS over HTTPS was used to circumvent security, not to improve it.
However, I also think that the real annoyance felt with respect to the Snowden revelations is (in general) not felt nearly as much when it comes to the legal but hugely privacy-invasive activities of major employers of Internet engineers.
It's noteworthy that RFC 7258 doesn't consider that bad actors are limited to governments, and personally, I think many advertising industry schemes for collecting data are egregious examples of pervasive monitoring and hence ought also be considered an attack on the Internet that ought be mitigated where possible. However, the Internet technical community clearly hasn't acted in that way over the last decade."
--
We are all very aware of Snowden's revelations and call him a hero, but we also routinely ignore, if not get paid by, major tech corporations that make tracking and advertising, a form of surveillance, their main source of income.
I guess it's easy not to care when you're paid $250,000/yr and have a nice cafeteria to get unlimited free snacks.
The latter half of your comment is factually incorrect: I’ve been a member of both IETF and ISO cryptography-related working groups and seeing people who work for NIST or NSA is not uncommon.
Not that they're of the same ilk as RFC 9446, but they're even further afield.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...
I suspect the IC has been seduced by the conceit that they are essential to the movement whose activists have infiltrated it and is using the agencies to ratchet its people into government. The IC people just don't get that this movement won't need the NSA when it has Google and Apple. It doesn't need the FBI when it has digital currencies. It doesn't need any of them when it has snitch networks and legions of the mentally ill denouncing people for counter revolutionary thoughts. The last thing on earth it needs is professional bureaucrats with networks of relationships, let alone sentimental beliefs about nationhood and freedom, and who know where its blind spots are. The simple reason behind 20th century atrocities is they were all committed by people who thought they would be the exceptions, and it was accepting the exceptions that enforced the rule.
Snowden showed us that we were all the suckers at the table with NSA, but I would observe a decade later that now the IC as a whole doesn't know who the sucker at the table is anymore. If you don't believe me, then tell me, the flag on your boss' desk or hanging in classified areas, its stripes, what colours are they?
I just want to be protected from criminals and other black hats that only do harm. It's pointless to be protected from the government, because I want real criminals to get caught. The chilling effect is real, but I still don't want criminals to hack me, and so far it seems things are okay, and online ads are more worrying than the NSA.
What's worrying with this NSA story, is how politics can influence with justice, when agencies use their powers for political gain but it doesn't seem the NSA is really using it on the US political scene.
However, the US abuse its power on the international scene, so it spies on its allies or even work with large US corporation to loot other countries. That's a real problem.
At the end of the day, lay people will just argue that what the NSA does is to preserve American dominance, so it must be good.
So in the end, the NSA and digital surveillance is never the problem, the problem has not changed, the problem is how the US behaves on the planet.
But ask yourself this question: do you trust your government? I'm not american, the US scares me, and I trust the US government. Even Trump could not do all the damage he wanted.
So in the end, the Snowden story only resonates with libertarians who fears that the US government will turn into a fascist soviet empire. It's not cyber surveillance that will do it. They should learn more about politics and history. Technology isn't everything.
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
Such a thing is akin to a rogue government entity, it’s the stuff of Mission Impossible movies; though much more mundane and sleazy as people were shown to be stalking ex-lovers using the tech.
I won’t jibe with comments about how totalitarian regimes come about, though that’s certainly an issue- I would invite you to read the thought experiment of Roko’s Basilisk though, you should be warned that some people consider the awareness of this thought experiment to be akin to a virus[0].
Essentially, you don’t just trust this government and all it’s employees implicitly, you are basically trusting all future governments and government employees, and you are trusting them to only break the laws that suit you. I’m not sure what laws you think they should be beholden to in that case.
Law is not optional, it works or it should be changed, via the democratic process.
All government entities can go rogue, there's nothing new about this.
The snowden story was good as it made people be aware about cyber surveillance, but there's not much else.
This is not a hypothetical - it’s actually been a serious problem for groups of people. For example, census data voluntarily filed by citizens to probably then trustworthy Governments was used by a later regime that invaded to identify which people to exterminate in the holocaust.
Then there is the problem of leaks. Sure you might trust the Government with that data, but what it it’s hacked by a criminal organisation, or other governments etc.?
1. There is a Presidential candidate who has absolutely, positively stated that if elected President, he will use government power to go after his political enemies. Like 100%. No ambiguity on this, he is campaigning on it.
2. This candidate has been estimated at having at 45-49% chance of being elected the next President (since that is his chance of winning the electoral college) according to a recently quoted US political expert.
As the expression goes, life comes at you fast. It really wouldn't take that much for being protected from government to be even more important than it currently is. So if today you'd say 'I'm not worried about the government scanning my data', please note that the negative power of government interest, and prosecution of perceived enemies, could escalate exponentially very quickly.
This isn't a hypothetical: we have a candidate that has said he's going to pursue his political enemies, and there's good reason to think that nothing will be off limits.