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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Jaw: on floor.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

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"You've had your fun. [...]"

That line is particularly infuriating.

in some way it is the key to understanding the situation - the government people live in another world, and things look differently from their perspective. Like it is not a useful reporting and public debate about government's abuse of power, it is a fun some pests have at the government expense. It is a reality distortion field of Power.

Thank you. This is an important point, and one that I haven't seen nearly enough of on HN lately. It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble. In many ways, they are working from an entirely different set of first principles than those used by most of the HN-reading world. As such, it is difficult for "us" to understand why "they" do what they do, and very easy for us to come up with our own (usually incorrect, or at the very least, incomplete) explanations for their behavior.

Of course, the converse is generally true: the laughably incorrect explanations that "government people" always seem to come up with for "our" behavior often are the result of them interpreting events, statements, etc. through their lens- a lens informed by a completely different set of optical principles than the ones that we are used to using (to abuse the figure of speech a little bit).

In other words, when you read or hear about a "government person" doing or saying something head-deskingly stupid, the odds are very good that the statement or action made perfect sense in the context of that government person's world. It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid, or even ignorant- just that they're not living in our world, and so have dramatically different motivations, constraints, first principles, etc. etc. Their actions may be perfectly follow an internal logic- but it's not our logic, and so we have a hard time making sense of it.

And all of this goes double or triple when we're talking about military or IC people. The classified nature of their work, with its attendant organizational, cultural, technical, political, and psychological distortions, makes their "bubble" look more like a bathysphere.

I remember having a conversation in a pub with a junior Whitehall civil servant a number of years ago. Only half jokingly, he quipped that "of course the civil service runs the country", noting the relative powerlessness of parliament.

Interestingly enough, the more senior (and experienced) civil servants that I have had the opportunity to talk to have been very careful to emphasise that the department answers to the minister.

Of course, the relationship between the civil service, ministers and the media is an unnatural, strained and stressful one -- I do not envy any of these parties, although I think that the media has the most (effective) power out of these three, given the proportion of central government activity (60-70%?) that is driven by whatever happened to be in the headlines that week.

Well to a large extent the civil service is meant to "run the country". The political leadership is meant to set the rules and directions, but they don't do the day to day grunt-work, and the civil service provides the continuity between governments and a lot of what they do indeed does span different governments without much interference from the political leadership.

So his "joke" might have been a sinister indication that they are sidestepping political control, or just pointing out the realities of who does the actual work.

I suspect that he was just pointing out the realities of who does the actual work, but making a joke from the double meaning of the phrase "run the country".

This is useful for trying to understand other people. You should always try to figure out how/why a person came to their particular worldview.

But in a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", it is The People who have final say.

(edit: yes, I am aware that this particular incident happened in England, not the U.S....)

They wield and apply real force [in the wide sense - from crude violence to making citizens pay taxes, etc..] to the real people outside. The only known practical approach here the human race has so far come up with is to have their application of force be a subject to the strictest formal control possible. Unfortunately, we see erosion of such control, and unfortunately there is no reversal of the trend on the horizon...

Watching "Battlestar Galactica", 3rd season beginning. Cylons trying to live peacefully with humans they occupied on New Caprica. "Either we increase control or we lose control" ...

Is the golden wall.[1]

It isn't power, it is the illusion of power and the attempt to keep it up that corrupts.

Is all the lies you have to tell people about the things you claim to control and all the fakes you have to pull all the fucking time, just to make people think that you genuinely have some clue about what is going on so that you can retain authority.

But you never do.

No one can.

For all the technology in the world, nobody can do more than the amount of time they have and their ability to comprehend, and after a while the amount of information becomes a hindrance and you wish you could plug the flow, and you would in a moment, apart from the fact that if people thought you were not watching it for even a second, forever trapped in watching it with far too much to understand, that you wouldn't know what was going on and you can never let that happen.

[1] I nicked this phrase from Harry Mulisch, from his book "The Discovery of Heaven". Is a good book.

Mmm. Or rather, it's all fun to them being as they make the rules and can never ultimately lose the game. They seem to forget that for the rest of us it's not quite so discretionary.

It will indeed, sadly turn out to be the truth unless the reporting on Snowden's material turns to change current policy - something that is not at all certain.

Unless I'm misinterpreting this, those are paraphrases and not quotes. There's no feasible reason to believe a government official is overtly villainous or foolish enough to say something like "You've had your fun."

Remember that the people executing these commands (civil servants) are probably well aware of just how absurd and futile they are, and likely to make that clear with dark humour. On the destruction of the hard drives:

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

This bleak humour is typical of British public servants, and not at all unlikely, e.g. on leaving office after 10 years, a treasury secretary for the Labour government left a note for his successor:

'I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-n...

These off-hand comments don't materially change the story any in my view - the important points are that the government insisted on shutting down reporting as much as possible, and destroying any materials in the newspaper's possession.

They visited a newspaper office to destroy evidence - that's the important point here.

It does sound exactly like the type of goading comment a government official would make to a journalist off the record.

All of this controversy aside, do you have any real reference point for what a conversation between a government official and a journalist sounds like, let alone a goading one at that?

Yes; take what happens at the local politics level, and amplify it up several orders of magnitude.

What a reporter puts in quotation marks is being represented as a direct quote. What's written out in the context of a sentence is a paraphrase or summary.

I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

Would be a direct quote.

The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it.

Would be a paraphrase.

Are you done spreading FUD yet?

I'm not quite sure the editor of one of the most important newspapers of record right now is into "paraphrasing"

There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on.

That is, by definition, paraphrasing the meeting. I'm not accusing Rusbridger of mischaracterizing the interaction, I'm clarifying that this is probably isn't a direct quote. Note that this is an op/ed.

I'm pretty sure it is a direct quote. He didn't say, 'he said something to the effect of' or something else. He just quoted the official directly, and in the same vein as what the previous commenter pointed out, you wouldn't expect the editor of one of most important newspapers in the world to not know how to use quotes.

That is, by definition, describing the meeting. Paraphrasing is when you say in other words, generally shorter ones, what somebody else said.

What's your evidence that it's not a direct quote? Aside, of course, from your personal disbelief that a government official would say something ridiculous.

Double quotes imply a direct quote, not paraphrasing.

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

Not sure about villanous, but I have yet to see an action for which government employee would be not foolish enough to do it. There was time, long ago, where I would say "this is too foolish, no government employee would ever do such thing" - and I was proven wrong so many times that I gave up and never would say such thing again. For example: can you imagine senior government employee would be so foolish as to blatantly lie to Congress while testifying, and knowing there are many people that know it is a lie? Yet it happened in the last year not once, but multiple time with multiple people. And, surprisingly enough, nothing happened. So maybe it's not them that they are foolish - maybe it's us that are foolish enough to tolerate them.

While twirling his nefarious mustache, no doubt.

EDIT: If you must downvote me, go ahead, but I'm not making a statement here. I'm joking. I think HN could use it these days.

I can well imagine that the quote is accurate, although it would have been said with a certain sense of dark humour and sympathy, not at all as unkindly and aggressive as it appears in print. As such, it fits in very well with the culture of the armed forces - particularly that of a senior NCO who has gone on to work for the Security Services. (And who is used to being given bonkers orders by his C.O.)

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