What Snowden really revealed | Hacker News Reader

What Snowden really revealed

aljazeera.com

239 pointskostyk54 comments

I think this was well written and I enjoyed reading it.

It brought some interesting information to my attention that I was not aware of (e.g. the porn habit blackmail scheme) - there have been so many articles about the leaks that despite them being important to me, I've made a conscious decision not to read them all.

I really like the quote (that I can't find a source on) that he "defected from the American government to the American people."

Edward Snowden is one of my heroes. This is something I find that I don't say very lightly or very often about anybody.

Using your powers to acquire sensitive information in order to blackmail political opponents is certainly nothing new - just ask J. Edgar Hoover.

Is there something special about "newness" when determining what our response should be to a particular "bad thing" (generically: evil)?

It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".

My take is this: just because some humans who were born before me were unable to recognize, or if they were, oppose, a particular bad thing makes no difference whatsoever. There is no statute of limitations on opposing evil and doing good. Wrongs can—and should—be corrected no matter how much time has passed since the discovery and the subsequent correction.

It might also be a subtle hint to read up on history.

In the specific case of Hoover, the public did react. When Hoover died, ending decades of quiet terror, his 3rd in command was passed over for promotion to the top job. In retaliation he started leaking a lot of dirty laundry to the press, which caused a huge reaction that ultimately ended with the resignation of the president, huge shakeups of all spy agencies, and a giant crack in faith from which we've yet to recover.

One disgruntled spook with a fistful of secrets paralyzed all "four" branches of the government of the most powerful country in the world for over a year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

> It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".

While I can't speak for Sharlin or tptacek, when I point out that things have happened before, my intent is to prompt people to stop being merely outraged. It is all very nice to say that wrongs should be corrected, but it is entirely useless to waste that outrage on complaining at a local watering hole.

Articles and comments like this have, at best, some vague hope that Congresspersons will notice and wish to pander to those particular constituents by authoring a bill. What kind of lackluster plan is that? Near as I can tell, most people are outraged because it makes them feel like they are similar to the other outraged persons and, action proving truth more than word, entirely disinterested in changing the status quo.

Speaking of history... I notice a great deal of arm-chair anger all around me combined with a strong lack of faith that anything can change. Most of my friends, even those with some political engagement, consider things like protests (peaceful or otherwise) completely ineffective and keep any kind of moral change limited to their personal lives. Do you have an idea of how common this kind of situation has been in the past? Is it a natural step in a growing anger, or is our situation somewhat special?

Slavoj Zizek seems to mention this issue in some form or other quite often. He argues, as far as I understand, that a big difference between 'us' and previous generations is that we seem to both disapprove and accept the status quo to an unprecedented degree. I've also heard others claim that we are a 'silent generation' that just kind of tries to be different in the private sphere, and leave it at that.

I don't know if this is true, but I do know we often consider our situation unique when even a cursory look at history shows that it isn't.

It's really hard to accurately gauge this kind of thing. If you go too far in the past, then the percentage of literate people drops too fast for us to have first-hand accounts of what people really thought of their contemporary policies. The accounts we have available are accounts from those who were affluent enough to bother with literacy: precisely the groups that would contest the power of the state. If you stick to the last few centuries, you simply don't have enough data.

I'm a liberal, which to me, includes being a meliorist. This means, roughly, that I believe that things get better, and that this is especially true over the long run. I think that the present day society is better than those in the past. So that's the context in which I say, "Yes, we can do something."

The silence of our generation comes, in part, from our multiculturality. Too many of "us" feel like we're irreconcilably different. Race, sex, industry, level of education, socioeconomic status, etc.: we see more ways in which we're different than in which we're the same. So we retreat behind facades of private domains, where the differences can be muted by not seeing them, and in a vicious cycle, reinforces our inability to come out into the public sphere and engage. We spend our days traveling from our private homes, along roadways where our interactions with others involve cursing and frustration, to private businesses, and so many of us need to be back home to sleep soon afterwards for another day of work. If your neighbor went on strike, would you even know or care?

I realize I didn't really answer the question, but I don't really have an answer.

I certainly did not intend to imply that it's somehow less morally reprehensible if it has been done before. I guess what I meant was that people should pay more attention to history - more people should realize that abuses of power like this will happen; there are way too many who still believe that surveillance is all right because the powers that be can be trusted to do the right thing.

I am trying to understand what its "newness" has to do with anything. Most crimes are not new, but we still prosecute. It sounds to me like you are suggesting that criminal justice is (or should be) based on how it would look as a CSI episode. (Sorry, simple blackmail is too bland a plot we can't prosecute, the audience will just sleep through it. Make it more fresh, have a twist at the end, something 'new').

What I meant is that abuses of power like this ought not be surprising - there are too many people who think that the powers that be can be trusted to do the right thing wrt surveillance.

"If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public."

- http://boingboing.net/2013/12/24/edward-snowden-declares-vic...

At this point, it may well be impossible to shut down the NSA. I imagine every opposing politician gets visited by some agent at some point, showing him records of his own wrongdoings.

Imagine every politician ever be forced to choose between the end of his career and opposing the NSA. How can we get out of this mess?

Order some armed body to take over all NSA sites and burn things to the ground. Reason being in the set of (libel|slander|extortion|treason).

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

This is exactly why that amendment exists. Instead, the vast majority of the individuals with the guns are far more upset that about protecting bigotry than protecting their rights. And the liberals on the side of rights, are generally less inclined to actually use guns.

I know a lot of those individuals with guns, and would say that's more a media caricature than reality.

It boggles my mind how quickly people who know absolutely nothing about guns and have almost no knowledge of the lives of gun owners are nevertheless so extremely willing to put forward ideas about such based on nothing but prejudice and ignorance.

Liberals are always on the side of increasing state power. eg. State run health care, mandatory state run schools (ban homeschooling), outlaw guns (increase state monopoly of force), mandatory vaccines (state dictates control over your health). Your positions are false and absurd.

Ironically, if citizens actually did that then the government officials would classify it as terrorism and use it as an excuse to crack down and demand new powers.

And politicians need to learn not to be so pusillanimous. What do you think would happen if a politician came to the media and revealed that some spook had tried to blackmail him for proposing an anti-surveillance bill? It would cause the bill to pass and the politician to be reelected. It would be like surviving an assassination attempt -- and if you could prove it you would become practically beyond reproach, because anything anyone ever said bad about you again could be attributed to the blackmailers.

> would classify it as terrorism

It is terrorism. By definition: the use of violence and/or intimidation for political goals.

Perhaps you could argue that terrorism is a constitutional right?

There are at least 11 definitions of terrorism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorisma

> It is terrorism. By definition: the use of violence and/or intimidation for political goals.

That's what I'm saying. They've defined terrorism to be "political violence" and declared it to be unmitigated evil -- it's sleight of hand. Is a riot terrorism now? Is a revolution? Were the US soldiers who killed Nazis in WWII "terrorists"? It's propaganda. They're hypocritically condemning political violence while engaging in it. They're equating violence by foreign radicals against a country's people with violence by a country's people against its own corrupt government.

It's putting George Washington, Malcolm X and Osama bin Laden into the same category for the purposes of collective condemnation. The only way it makes for a useful method of categorization is if you're already in power and want to disenfranchise anyone without the political power within the existing system to make change, regardless of the legitimacy of their position.

I'm sure there are subtle ways to make this threat without making this threat. Like spread a rumor that it already happened and let people see the results.

There isn't a lot of room between saying it in a way that makes the threat clear to the politician and saying it in a way that doesn't make the threat clear to the New York Times reporter listening to the recording.

Also, the NSA could just kill you and make it look like a heart attack. As could the mafia, Goldman Sachs, Ted Bundy or AT&T. Doing the right thing is the right thing even if bad people aren't going to like it.

The real reason they're collecting everything is not to fight terrorism, it's to provoke terrorism. More terrorism means more power to them.

Actually I think that would get them shut down pretty quickly, right now. Politicians would be scared of the NSA. But if the NSA could pass the information to a different law enforcement, who then build a parallel case, they could knock out their opponents without making themself a target.

This would require a good amount of coordination and risk. These politicians are pretty well connected. And I think that if one politician was threatened, they'd likely bring in many others for support. As much as politicians may hate those of the opposing party -- being blackmailed by the NSA would likely go too far and would be the quickest way to have congress shutdown the powers of the NSA. No one in congress is so naïve to think that the NSA blackmailing a politician could never happen to them.

That thought has crossed my mind, but I think the advantage of being well connected might not be enough.

A scenario: Imagine a powerful politician being approached by some shady guy in a trenchcoat who does not officially work for anyone. Shady guy produces some kind of material that, at best, is deeply embarrassing and personally damaging, and at worst, embroils said politician in a scandal that would cause professional damage, possibly even result in legal issues that this politician's power isn't enough to withstand.

Considering such a scandal is there to expose, said politician is probably not a paragon of virtue. Would this politician not bend to will of the shady guy? Even if he knew that shady guy is NSA, he could probably not prove it and exposing this knowledge would cause the damaging material to do it's job and only cast suspicion on the NSA.

I think the reason why the NSA could easily use information to blackmail politicians is that secrets are by definition kept hidden to as few people as possible. As such, these collectively powerful individuals can still be privately vulnerable, and are likely to opt for keeping their secrets over fighting some 'faceless' organization.

The idea of shutting down the NSA is destructive: their charter is to listen to foreign traffic, and to secure domestic traffic. That's what they kick ass at. That their abilities got co-opted for unapproved purposes was NOT the NSA's doing. The problem came from outside the NSA, and was likely out of their control.

Under what definitions of "foreign" and "domestic"?

Actually, no. Snowden was the only one willing to sacrifice anything to reveal the truth to the public - and he wasn't even an official NSA employee. We can gnash our teeth and pull our hair about how the agency was "co-opted" but the fact remains that precisely zero of the NSA's ~40,000 employees stepped forward with anything like this. So what can we infer from this? Many things, of course, but that the organization was whole-sale "co-opted" is rather a stretch. 40k people doing something horrible for 12 years and a trickle of ineffective attempts to do something...

There is, perhaps, a more "innocent" explanation - or at least one that reflects better on the rank-and-file at the NSA: that it took someone like Snowden, not just idealistic and willing to sacrifice, but his intelligence and unique collection of technical skills, to make something like this happen. The NSA is a frightening adversary, the best funded, best equipped, most sophisticated intel organization on the planet. One could be forgiven for thinking twice before burning them... But is that fear enough to keep 40k people quiet for 12 years?! I'd say that we can only infer that the rank-and-file are massively in favor of the steps the NSA is taking, and probably mostly for noble reasons of wanting to "protect" us all. And what we can infer from that is that clearly the NSA selects for loyalty over principle, every time. Well, maybe they failed that once.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's such an inevitably fail-prone approach to protection, as it requires massive numbers of people to keep a secret in perpetuity. And now the big reveal: it has materially damaged us all. American technological trustworthiness is (rightly) at an all time low. My only hope is that this failure has been dramatic, so memorable, so horrible, that it will spur all computer technologists to learn more about security, the details of cryptography and random number generation, and to stop assuming that US authorities will show anything like common sense when it comes to restraining themselves and their power. They are drunk with it, self-righteously drunk with it, and we must work to take that power away in every possible way: politically, technologically, and indeed, philosophically. I mention philosophy last, but it's really the most important: are we a nation of principles, or are we a nation that takes shortcuts, sacrificing principle for pride of protection? In addition to testing for technological prowess, we need to test our intelligence staffers for high ethical intelligence: they need to be willing and able to rebel against illegal orders just as Snowden has done.

What Snowden _really_ revealed is that the goal of the terrorists has been achieved. The 2996 souls who lost the lives on 9/11 were unfortunate collateral damage.

The hysteria since and "hollowing out of our democracy" is the goal of a terrorist.

This is not to say things weren't peachy before the attack, but the US has lost so much moral standing, respect & power since due to our government's actions.

We should have kept calm and carried on, we did the complete opposite.

> The hysteria since and "hollowing out of our democracy" is the goal of a terrorist.

Exactly! "we will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms" - George W. Bush (9/12/01)

It's a pity he (and/or Obama) didn't actually follow through with that promise.

I wonder, at what point would NSA start manufacturing threats. It seems like clear progression of their behavior. Because you can't constantly cry wolf, you have to fight a straw-wolf from time to time.

>>I wonder, at what point would NSA start manufacturing threats.

I have no reason to believe this hasn't happened already.

> I wonder, at what point would NSA start manufacturing threats.

The FBI have been doing that for years.[1,2] Sadly enough, to expect other agencies to refrain from similar activities would be a fallacy.

1: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/terror-factory-f...

2: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-in... (also linked from the heading of first article)

They have FBI doing that for them, and ATF [1], and who knows who else. I think many of these agencies are starting to ask for funding specifically for these sort of "operations", where they not only try and convince people to commit crimes, but give them all the funding and resources they need to commit them, too.

We've gotten to the point where the government has to manufacture or invent crimes in order to arrest people. Even the War on Drugs isn't enough for them anymore. They need more. I'm actually really curious what will happen when the War on Drugs will end. Because that would leave a huge hole in their plan to criminalize just about everyone.

Will they start sending SWAT teams to people's homes for pirating movies? Will they start arrest people on the street for pissing them off somehow? I don't know, but I'm really curious what would happen. I certainly don't expect them to just lay back and ease up on the arrests, if the War on Drug is over.

[1] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-ro...

> Will they start sending SWAT teams to people's homes for pirating movies...

This happens already.

When government institutions aren't victimizing everyday people for engaging in nonviolent behavior, such as duplicating ones and zeroes, they're not growing. Paychecks aren't increasing. Power isn't consolidating. Terrorizing modern humans is often par for the course to any indoctrinated group/cult. It's easy to be trained and then divided against an enemy. Breaking down Grandma's door over a Britney Spears album, threats and extortion of exorbitant fees over crap people wouldn't otherwise purchase, at 250000x per unit, locking people into cages for consenting behavior like the trade and intake of chemicals, and on: power a mafia and warlords can only dream about. Corporate law won thanks to an oligarchical system of government.

The only temporary hope for pawns being victimized is when SWAT/militia shoot only the family dog but not other members of the family.

Drone strikes on civilians manufactures a raison d'etre for the whole military-industrial complex.

Such is the case for decades. They call that tentacle the CIA.

Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much.

A bit of context. Please.

The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been going along like this for 240 years or so. There is nothing new about the abuse of power or removal of freedoms (unfortunately).

So what's changed? First, internet companies are tracking every freaking thing you do online. They figured out that the average Joe will give up his privacy for free email, and they're having a field day with it.

Governments trump companies, and since the data is already collected, every government on the planet is wanting a piece of that action.

Second, there is no ever-changing Congress looking to score points with the folks back home. Instead, there's a static political system that fears looking bad -- and it's grown a perpetual fear machine built up around terror that can make it look really bad.

Folks do this issue a great disservice when they focus only on the U.S., or only on the NSA. Look guys, if the U.S. and the NSA disappeared tomorrow, you'd have the same problems you have now -- you just wouldn't know so much about them. This has nothing specifically to do with them. (I'm not making excuses, only pleading for context).

The tech community brought this on themselves. We are the people to blame. The trade-off of tracking data for free stuff was too good to be true. In fact, instead of the tracking data being almost worthless to the average citizen, as it turns out this data is much too valuable to give up under any circumstances, at least in the aggregate. Until that leaky bucket is fixed somehow, nothing changes.

There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can.

TL;DR - Google doesn't use this data to kill people or rig elections.

No, but once the instrumentation is in place to collect it, by Google or anybody else, it's fair game for various governments to use it to do just that.

What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law?

You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the other end of the transaction)

You could even take all government influence out of it and still have problems. Companies could just buy up each other, pay for illegal data transfers, and so on. That's kinda the point here. A tiny little piece of data like my email to Aunt Claire this morning is almost completely worthless. Almost. But zillions of pieces, accumulating day-by-day? The value, in both monetary and intelligence terms, just keeps going up. Every day the economics of getting that data, by hook or crook, changes in favor of it being lost. And once it's lost, in most cases it's lost forever. There's no "going back" to having the data private again. That's an unsustainable system.

The spying goes far beyond webmail. Most people haven't agreed to have their phone calls tapped, or backdoors put into networking hardware and encryption standards.

My comment wasn't specifically about Google or webmail. That was simply an example. It's the principle of trading private information to another service in return for something that doesn't scale. Whether it's software, network infrastructure, web apps, etc -- the specific type of trade or vendor involved is not the point.

"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" -- Preamble of the declaration of independence

It is going to be very difficult to motivate people to change something... until a big part of population is starving I believe...

This is one of the clearest explanations of the situation that I have read.

> We have sacrificed our freedoms and morals in order to make war on those abroad

There are unperceivable powers that be. Possibly and even likely without what we consider morals. Bear with me. When you had enough wealth and can own or have anything, what's next? It's human nature.

The thing is, I don't think we have sacrificed anything. No one ever gave the NSA explicit authority to do the things it does. It's just that they did do them snyway.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"

Seems to me this problem can be solved by turning to our founding fathers advice as well. For starters, abolish the production of porn and the other filth that Muslims hate us for. Then, if that doesn't work. Drop a few nuclear bombs on the Middle East. Turn the whole area into a parking lot. This could be accomplished in two months.

What's wrong with this logic is the presumption that the intelligence community would share any effective results of their work with the public. That would be just plain stupid. Rather than an endless argument over disclosing and justifying results, it is far simpler to simply say there aren't any. Yeah, image takes a hit but those people are much less concerned with image than with doing what they have been chartered to do.

Anyone to whom any of this (other than the capabilities) comes as any surprise at all is naive indeed and probably has no memory of the hostile spy era that spawned and justified it.

The article is hosted on the same site that cooperates with terrorists, regardless how you feel about Snowden, pro or con: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/al-jazeera-still-promoting-gun...

If you are concerned with that then you should be just as concerned that the USG was providing arms to Syrian "rebels" and weapons to Mexican drug cartels in only the most recent examples of supportin terrorism.

The USG is basically a terrorist incubation machine.

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