Snowden Archive – documents leaked by Snowden
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Back in the day, three gigs ago - when this stuff was full on the boil - bunch of people got insta-fired for just clicking on news stories about Snowden. It was insane how fast it happened. Click -> Bathroom -> boxes+guards+parkinglot. I mean, granted, leadership does[1] precious little other than looking for new ways to get rid of as many heads as possible, but it was still impressive.
[1] Not counting the "Instant VPs" hired on from procurement offices, which is where virtually all new business comes from. Seriously, guys, just can the entire BD division and let the double dippers sell corner offices to their old pals.
I remember one single exception. One of the regular rotating layoffs took out this one engineer who had extremely niche knowledge when it came to microphones. Like, there's four other people on the planet who do the math this guy does. But he's on the list, so there he goes. Pink slip, boxes, guards, parking lot . . and then they call him back in before he even gets everything packed. Someone must have run upstairs to yell at someone important - I mean, this guy wasn't just "make new things" sort of skill, but also "keep everything else working" sort of skill, peppered with "the FAA will get extremely angry if we don't have this sort of thing" skills. Luckily, he was a canny old gent, and replied on the spot: "Sure. I'll come back in. But it's gonna cost ya." Rumor was he managed to double his wages, and get a stock thing to boot. That still brings a smile to my face, many years later.
[1]The monkey wrench is that Cost Plus pays for hours, so they're gonna try and get those hours cheap as they can. This is one of the reasons they haaaaaaaated hourly headcounts - see, you pressure your salaried people to stay 50-60 hours, but you keep billing the DoD for hours, and it's like free money. Hourly, that doesn't work so well. They converted literally everyone to salaried as soon as they possibly could.
Surely it's been long enough that anything in them that might compromise the security of undercover people or irrelevant personal information or whatever could have been redacted.
It's so frustrating.
You could steal all the emails of any HN user and cherry pick a few dozen to make them look like a monster, where I believe on the whole most users of this site are good people.
There are undercover intelligence assets that have been undercover for 10-20 years.
And the US is actually a relatively good gov’t on this front.
We have stuff that can't go offsite what do we do? Burn it. Why? Because that's what we always have done. Why? Because it is cheap, fast and it works anywhere. Ok, lets just burn it. Good burn it. Ok here is the burn pile dump secret trash in. We don't have a list of dangerous stuff to burn just a bunch of stuff with no other costly or timely plan to dispose of and everyone has 100 other important things to do like process stuff that is still useful and not being burned. Just burn it and save the country with a more important task on the 100 point todo list. Ok done, and had time to save the country left. Oops we burned carcinogens. Who? No idea ... something in the pile. Will we ever know? No way to know but xyz is highly classified so no can do.
Somewhere somehow the risk of material leaving site exceeded the risk of burning carcinogens. We can't ever let anyone know what we burned. That's why we burned it. The institutions rights again exceed the humans rights. Why? Because institutes are few controlling many. Why? Because humans are mostly automatic and predictable. Why? Because we programmed them to be. Why? Because we are lazy and useless without successful programming and hedonism rules the land otherwise. What's wrong with hedonism? We get complacent and die faster to the trillions of dangers we have successfully mitigated with our institutions. Ok burn it. Got it.
They classify them because they either look bad, or would be helpful to enemies if they got out.
And as long as they stay classified, they get to keep the courts, etc. from using them too.
Assange was the one that just dumped documents, and look what happened to him.
Edit: I see a letter to American judge Hilton on Cryptome where Young states that he will be closing after 27 years until Assange is granted freedom, though the site remains alive and appears there is ongoing publishing, so I'm still unclear of the current status and any references regarding the status would be welcome.
Um. I just don't know what to say about this. I'm so confused by this logic. I'm sure the people in the US Intelligence services are going to be crying themselves to sleep because Cryptome closes. I bet they'll be begging US prosecutors to charge him with a crime just to keep Cryptome open. I just don't get the logic behind this. Someone please explain it to me.
I think one reason is… a lot of “personalities” in the leaker movement seem to have a pathological martyr-like demeanor (often amplified for good effect with a diva-like character too), which leads them to making these irrational own-goal “strategic win” protest moves, which might really just be them hitting the big red self-destruct buttons on their chest.
Almost like it’s daddy issues writ large, and they want to do anything provocative just to get attention. Which kind of leads them to seemingly gauge their success by the question: “how much have I been oppressed today?”
I think Snowden is remarkable for having avoided this common pitfall, leading to him having a longer shelf life.
I don’t know that much about this it’s just a theory.
The upvote data isn't public, of course, but you can do much the same analysis by looking at the posting history of submitters and commenters. That is public, and what I can tell you is that on topics like this, the private data and the public data nearly always point in much the same direction.
(That's not true in every context—for example, voting rings are a thing in terms of people wanting to promote their startups and whatnot, and we've put a ton of work into combating that over the years. But none of that analysis yields anything significant when it comes to a topic like the OP.)
Tons of past explanations on these points can be found via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... although you have to scroll back to find the interesting ones.
But I'm a little sad that I had to know the extra special secret click spot (on the link showing the age of the flagged item, which item was folded away and fully hidden other than the grayed metadata/title) to even see it (it==your reply) at all. Well I'm not sad for me, because I did know how to click there, expand the post, and read your reply, but it's a pity that your reply won't be seen by more people.
I do understand however that maybe you've chosen the right tradeoff here of giving the targeted info to the poster who probably was sincere and can benefit, versus showing it more widely which would be a frequent enough occurrence that it might become a distracting portion of the site content. So, I defer to your judgement; just sharing thoughts here. Thanks for what you do.
HN is clearly the vitally exposed artery of all Western media!
aforementioned topics aren't "flame war" topics, generally the people who know about the NSA pissing on the fourth amendment aren't in favor of it
Besides, I haven't seen all Snowden files as neatly organized as here. These documents should be copied and reshared in perpetuity.
You can see the ongoing work here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox