Kill the Snowden interview, congressman tells SXSW | Hacker News Reader

Kill the Snowden interview, congressman tells SXSW

news.cnet.com

216 pointsjoesmo90 comments

I wonder much campaign money intelligence sector crony corporations have donated to the dear congressman.

EDIT: To whomever downvoted me for this comment, I looked this up on opensecrets.org. The answer is that the congressmen received a total of $20,500 in his last election cycle from defense/aerospace companies, another $10,500 from defense electronics companies, and yet another $6,000 from miscellaneous defense companies (total $37k). While those are not dominant contributions for him, they are significant. And that is a real problem when you have to ask yourself, would this person be making this statement and taking this position if they weren't receiving that money? We simply don't know the answer. Their financial support means he has a vested interest in keeping the funding flowing to these companies, which means not curtailing intel budgets.

Couldn't it be the case that the senator is actually a human being who honestly believes that Snowden is a traitor? I don't personally believe that Snowden is any such thing, but I can understand people who do. I also find it a bit hard to accept that all politicians are purely financially driven automatons.

There may also be a selection principle at work, where those politicians who honestly hold positions that benefit the defense industry get defense industry dollars.

He might sincerely believe that.

Of course you're right, he's a human being. Human beings tend to get embarrassed and angry when it is revealed they didn't even try to do their job well. He's a member of the intelligence committee. He is responsible for oversight. As a result, I think pretty clearly there's an element of "Don't listen to this guy who made me look bad. Maybe I'm lazy, but that guy is a traitor."

But the congressman is supposed to uphold the Constitution, which includes free speech. That's what rubs me the wrong way. Because he (apparently, please correct me if I am wrong) signed this statement as a member of Congress, and not as a private citizen, it makes a difference.

He's not enacting a law to prohibit anyone's speech. He's simply requesting that SXSW use "discretion" in its own speech. Although this isn't the best analogy, it's like a concerned parent writing a letter to a magazine asking them to refrain from publishing borderline obscene content. When TV/radio personalities get their shows cancelled over inappropriate comments, that's not a violation of free speech. In fact, it's an affirmation of free speech--the network doesn't want to tarnish its brand.

My point is that to do it as a private citizen is one thing; to do it as a Congressman is quite another. It's all in how he signed his name.

The fact that he may be honest in his beliefs does not make him less of a terrible person, quite the contrary. At the very least a duplicitous person can change their position.

> I also find it a bit hard to accept that all politicians are purely financially driven automatons.

They're not "purely financially driven automatons" - but it does require a lot of money to get elected/re-elected, and like most humans they want to keep their job.

POliticians don't only say things for money. There are plenty of voters out there who like to be pandered to, and with a sense of crisis in the air over Ukraine this is an easy way for a Republican politician to appear tough in contrast to the President.

It really scares me that $37k is the cost of something like that.

$37k is just an expression of interest, and does not constitute anticipated future payments.

aka speaking gigs, consultant's fees, a board seat, or a job as a lobbyist.

Politicians in the West are astonishingly cheap compared to the budgets that they control. It's a sign that it's fairly hard to directly steal money and they have to be subtle about steering contracts.

We're almost at the point of someone Kickstartering a politician, but not quite yet. Howard Dean came close to this.

I thought about this idea a few years back when kickstarter was really starting to get going. I even made a note of it in evernote somewhere, for future reference/consideration.

Campaign donations poison the political pool by acting as a filter to remove candidate of strong conviction, in favour of those whose policy is easily bought for donations. With campaign budget being a factor in probability of election success [1], there needs to be a way for politicians to get funding without donors expecting an influence on policy so as to even the playing fields.

Could the masses fund politicians via something like kickstarter? I don't know enough about the laws, whether it would be viable, or even if it was, whether it would be enough to break the status quo. Regardless, it's definitely an interesting thought.

[1] http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/0472099213-ch8.pdf

I wouldn't read too much into five-figure bribes, those are probably for tax purposes. This particular congressman's position more likely comes from his personal opinions and the types of people he golfs with.

In general donations (bribes) don't dictate political support for defense contractors. That support is a given, for two reasons. First, defense contractors are also large civilian employers. Second, contracts are a form of subsidy, to maintain what they call the "defense industrial base."

A congressman saying that an interview should not take place really tells us all that we need to know about just how much an interview should take place.

I can think of no stronger endorsement of an interview.

I didn't even know it was happening, and thanks to him I can now watch it live :)

I didn't know about this either until now. This is a great example of the Streisand Effect in action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Unless he's a complete idiot, of course the Senator knows that calling for denying Snowden publicity is actually just going to get Snowden more publicity. That's irrelevant as long as making such a call gets him more publicity for his anti-Snowden credentials too.

>Unless he's a complete idiot

Possibly...

well, he definitely got himself on the incumbents-whose-challenger-i-will-financially-support list

Maybe he's a Wikileaks supporter, cleverly drumming up attention for the speech.

That would be quite clever. Remember he's a politician.

For the life of me, i cannot find a link to a live stream. Are you talking about seeing it in person, or is it available online somewhere?

http://new.livestream.com/texastribune/events/2823117

That sounds good for the current situation, but it generalizes badly; for example, let's make the head of KKK the keynote speaker at my event, or make an interview with him the centerpiece. Good event? Maybe not.

Why should a congressman care about this?

The notion that the congressman is always wrong is about as wrong as the notion that he is always right.

I read mostly as a struggle against government imposed censorship. If government doesn't want to talk about something it should be talked about (very narrow NS exceptions allowed)

I really have trouble with the national security argument: can you think of a case where we'd have a secret that admitting the existence of something would seriously harm the nation (ie, talking about the fact we have nuclear missiles, not the details of how to build them) AND which experts in other nations would be unable to guess we were working on?

It seems that it's only used to cover potentially illegal things that the administration/military/etc don't want to talk about with the public, rather than because it would actually harm the nation to talk about them (except, of course, that people might tell them no).

Yes; specific military plans. Study the details of the Normandy invasion for one of the clearest examples in history. Specific capabilities of military hardware is another example.

Mind you, I don't disagree that some unsavory things get hidden behind that curtain. I wouldn't even disagree that the majority of things hidden behind that curtain in modern times may be unsavory. Unfortuantely, the solution isn't as simple as just removing the curtain.

I read Derpderpderp's comment to be referring to the existence of plans, not the specifics. The existence of the Normandy invasion plan was hardly a secret. It was unavoidable that the Germans would be able to tell a major offensive was being prepared. And one very clear candidate was for the Allies to take the more direct route and hop across the channel. The exact specifics (where paratroopers were being deployed and when, which beeches were to be hit etc) are important secrets and my reading of his comment is that they should remain secrets. But the actual existence of the plan was obvious and should not be secret.

The militarily valuable secret is that the Normandy plan was that that was the one the Allies were counting on. There were other plans, for example the plans for the invasion of Sicily surreptitiously delivered into German hands by Operation Mincemeat. Or plan to attack from Norway using Edinburgh as a staging post as part of Operation Fortitude was another candidate. But the existence of the plan is the

You do lose some military information. If the enemy knows you have the capability to track someones movements based on his phone number, they are likely to take mitigating measures. But without revealing this capability, its impossible to have a democratic debate on the appropriate safeguards necessary.

Most street level drug dealers were operating under the assumption that the government could track cellphones. Osama bin Laden apparently went to great lengths to avoid being associated with phones used in communicating details.

I would call cellphone tracking an open-secret: everyone that would benefit from the knowledge already had guessed it, but the government was denying it to the citizens for their own benefit.

The system I have in mind will require all information to be open unless the order to be kept secret unless signed by a randomly selected federal judge. The government should make the case to keep stuff under the lid.

After all the judges go trough a lot of vetting and rigorous confirmation process so probably they do have enough clearance to be kept in the loop.

But the person that keeps the information secret should not the one that makes the rules what is secret.

I'm having a very hard time finding that claim in Crito's comment. Are you sure he's saying that?

Right or wrong, he is afraid of something, something that is clearly journalism. He might be over-blowing an non-issue (out of cluelessness, or possibly intentionally: I see Franck Underwood of House of Cards fame doing that very well) but Snowden tends to focus on actually issues, not who slept with whom politics.

Absolutely. But in this case, the congressman is clearly wrong.

> Pompeo, R-Kan., said he was "deeply troubled" by the scheduled video appearance of Snowden, whom he described as lacking the credentials to authoritatively speak on issues pertaining to "privacy, surveillance, and online monitoring." Snowden's "only apparent qualification," Pompeo wrote, "is his willingness to steal from his own government and then flee to that beacon of First Amendment freedoms, the Russia of Vladimir Putin."

Right. If history has shown us anything, it's that a guy on the House intelligence committee has no idea at all what's going on in the NSA.

What a dumb quote. Disregarding for the moment the wording, "willingness to steal from his own government" combined with the fact that he worked for the NSA absolutely gives Snowden the credentials to speak intelligently on these topics.

Exactly. If Snowden is not qualified to speak on this subject, then who is?

> that beacon of First Amendment freedoms, the Russia of Vladimir Putin.

This seems like a weird way to say freedom of speech, when talking about a foreign country. The first (and so far only) amendment to the Russian constitution is about term lengths for the president and Duma.

The first amendment covers more than freedom of speech, and Russia isn't exactly great at any of the other things it covers.

>whom he described as lacking the credentials to authoritatively speak on issues pertaining to "privacy, surveillance, and online monitoring."

That's a good thing, given that all the people with credentials giving "authoritative answers" have been bullshiting us.

Snowden was literally the catalyst for taking this entire conversation up another order of magnitude in interest. It's questionable this topic would even be at SXSW if not for him, much less headlining it. The congressman's suggestion is laughable.

because, you know, being a former NSA contractor with national security clearance doesn't provide any authoritatively to speak on issues pertaining to "privacy, surveillance, and online monitoring."

It's amazing that politicians spout this shit and expect the people to buy it. Actually, sadly, it isn't. :/

Who is he pandering to?

He's in congress. So aside from his financial backers, he just needs to pander to the Republicans in his district who make it out to the primary. Because in most seats, the winner of the primary + the way the seat leans determines who wins the seat.

Thus he only needs to appeal to a small niche. And how any of us feel about it is irrelevant. Understand that, and you understand the polarization of politics in the USA. Understand the polarization, and you understand a lot that is wrong with this country. :-(

Grandstanding attention whore accuses SXSW speaker of being a grandstanding attention whore.

This is one of those times I wish someone with detailed knowledge of national politics could comment on this rather odd move. Why is a Congressman from Kansas making a public comment about a speaker in an event in Texas? Is he cementing his base? Pandering to his donors? It's not like SXSW is going to go, "Oh, you're absolutely right congressman, why didn't we think of that sooner?" so what's he really trying to achieve here?

BTW good on SXSW organizers for involving Snowden in some way. I suspect that if you polled the participants you'd see a 90%+ Snowden approval rating.

To a decent extent, statements like this are designed to get himself some ink on a national stage, and throw his name out more on the national spotlight. He knows perfectly well that the chances of SXSW listening to his request are somewhere between slim and none, but at the same time, he can use this to help any claim he wants to lay that he's tough on terrorism and national security. Wouldn't be surprised if he's planning a move for senator or governor in the near future.

I think you underestimate the extent to which SXSW has gone mainstream. There are likely a lot of conservatives who deplore Snowden's actions participating in SXSW.

Congressmen like Mike Pompeo sit in the House of Representatives, which governs the whole US.

Rep. Pompeo is on the House Intelligence Committee. He most likely honestly hate what Snowden has done and represents a part of the country which is very anti-Snowden. This is easy grandstanding for him.

He's misguided, in my opinion, but that's "why".

I think the congressman knows he can't single handedly stop Snowden from speaking. But he can do his part to contribute to an atmosphere of pressure against Snowden speaking to nudge the probabilities in his preferred direction.

So credentials aside, surely the story of Snowden has a public interest element, and is an interesting tale regardless of 'authoritative.'

Besides which, in a democracy, anyone can be credentialed enough to serve in government.

I'm pretty sure that Mr Pompeo's action could be seen as chilling actions in terms of the first amendment.

PS: I'm watching cosmos, Mr Tyson just said "... prosecuted anyone who dared have opposing opinions to their own." He is talking about the catholic church and galileo, but it seems fitting now.

> Mr Tyson just said "... prosecuted anyone who dared have opposing opinions to their own." He is talking about the catholic church and galileo, but it seems fitting now.

I don't think the US government is hunting Snowden because he "dared have opposing opinions [to theirs]," but rather because he stole state secrets and released them to the public. (I'm not saying whether that's a good or a bad thing here, just that that's why he's not the US government's best friend at the moment.)

In this case I think that distinction is artificial. For both Snowden and the government, there's an integral relation between their actions and their opinions.

There is a relation, but Snowden is not in trouble for his opinion. It's like if somebody has an opinion that robbing rich people is OK, and acts on it, and gets arrested, the arrest would not be for an opinion but for the robbery. The robbery was without doubt related to the opinion, but the opinion is not the base for the prosecution, the specific criminal action based on it is.

This is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Remember "Plame affair"? Compare motivation behind actions of leakers, measurable damage to identifiable people, importance of leak in the eyes of public, political significance of leak. And next compare what has happened to Libby to what can happen to Snowden. And tell once again that Snowden is not persecuted because he is an enemy.

You seem to believe that a person who believes robbing is okay in general, and a person who believes that they themselves should perform a particular robbery have no differences in opinion.

On the contrary, I believe that nobody can be prosecuted for saying robbery is OK, but one can be prosecuted for actually committing the robbery. That's the difference - opinion vs. action. Snowden's problem with the law is not opinion but action.

That seems to not be "on the contrary" at all. You don't seem to believe differences in action reflect differences in opinion.

No. This is like if I witnessed the police commissioner bludgeoning someone to death with a diamond-encrusted poker, took the bloodied murder weapon as evidence to show to media, and was then accused of being a jewel thief who should face his crime.

You got lost in your metaphors. Revealing secrets which Snowden signed not to reveal is a crime by the laws of USA, and this is what he is prosecuted for. Showing evidence of a crime, on the contrary, is not a crime and you can not be prosecuted for it (though you might be prosecuted for tampering with the evidence and obstructing justice if you take stuff from the crime scene and bring it to the media). It does not matter in this case if you condone his actions or not - the law does not say "it is forbidden to reveal national security secrets unless you really-really want to and guys on the Internet are OK with it".

The parallels are more apt than it first seems... both people have their lives threatened by powerful vested interests. Both have threatened the legitimacy of the vested interests.

Yes, proximately Snowden broke the law (and so did Galileo), but ultimately the real reasons was a difference of opinion.

Compared to Snowden, Galileo was treated much more leniently. The worst he got was house arrest, he was friends with many influential personas of the time and had opportunity even after conviction to continue his work, communicate with others, receive visitors, etc. I doubt Snowden would be allowed the same if he ever returned in the US.

> Mr Tyson just said "... prosecuted anyone who dared have opposing opinions to their own." He is talking about the catholic church and galileo,

Did he? I was hoping he'd be a bit more informed on that subject. Galileo wasn't prosecuted for simply having an opposing opinion, but for insulting the pope.

It's a popular myth that he was prosecuted for his heliocentric model, but that's not true; there were plenty of other proponents of a heliocentric model at the time, but they were smart enough not to insult the pope when he didn't accept their model despite its inaccuracies.

This is off topic, but I should clarify: The Cosmos episode hardly mentioned Galileo. It focused on Giordano Bruno[1], who was imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake by the Catholic church. There's debate whether he was killed because of his scientific ideas or his religious ones, but it's not as if either makes it OK.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Fair enough. I'm less familiar with the Bruno case, and there's no denying that the church did or supported a lot of really attrocious things.

It's just that the Galileo case often gets trotted out as an example, when the church was actually remarkably scientific in that case (they didn't accept Galileo's circular orbits because they didn't match the observed positions, caused by elliptical orbits).

It is good thing that Pompeo is concerned about SXSW's speaker's credentials. Because obviously that is why we have our government. But I'm a little surprised to see that Pompeo doesn't think that Snowden can contribute to a thoughtful and informed discourse.

Hey at least he didn't say "kill Snowden" ... you see they're making progress :-)

Just another example of the Streisand Effect.

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

Kill the congress. We are tired of incompetency.

working as an Analyst at NSA is not 'credentialed' enough? He's not a Intelligence State loyalist so he must be silenced. That is what this is about. Nothing more, nothing less.

Apparently they got used to violating the Constitution so much, that freedom of speech doesn't concern them either.

probably wiping their asses with it as we speak.

"Snowden, whom he described as lacking the credentials to authoritatively speak on issues pertaining to "privacy, surveillance, and online monitoring.""

.... wow. I can't believe the gall of him to seriously say that. Of all the people on this planet, Snowden fits that criteria best.

The congressman clearly isn't in Kansas any more on this one.

I think the Snowden-in-Russia interviews are interesting to the extent that they show how Russian "active measures" actually work[1]. You can see it in the letter Snowden (and his handlers) recently sent to the European Parliament[2]. It's pretty clever the way they have been able to send thousands of troops into southern Ukraine, all the while fomenting distrust (and distraction) among NATO members with Snowden.

1. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

A live signal presumably to his location, at a scheduled time? Even though they can't do much with it (barring a World War instigating invasion), you think the powers that be would be salivating over the potential intelligence they could get out of it.

I presume it will be a live stream over the internet. Deploying decoy streams originating from Russia that have the same data characteristics as the real stream (encrypted of course) would be a way to make it harder to find the real origin.

"Pompeo, R-Kan., said he was "deeply troubled" by the scheduled video appearance of Snowden" - yeah I'm sure he can't sleep at night.

Besides, don't US politicians at some point vow to protect freedom of speech?

That he is troubled and would recommend for Snowden not to speak at SXSW does not mean that he would not fight for Snowden's right to speak there or anywhere.

Perhaps he would not though, that depends on his beliefs.

Is he running for re-election or something? Seems like a quick way to get some press coverage, although of the Streisand effect kind rather than the 'we should listen to this guy' kind.

Is he running for re-election or something?

He's a member of the House; he's up for re-election every national election cycle.

Given what I know of KS politics (I have friends and family who live there, some of whom are very politically minded), his taking a tough-on-Snowden stance will probably play very, very well to the people whose votes he cares about. For his purposes, little else matters...

It’s a pet peeve, and I shouldn’t care that much but… Could we kill ‘virtual’ when used as ‘mediated’? Virtual is about not being real: it applies to stories, dreams, projects. Skype (or whatever cryptographically more relevant version Snowden will use) is as real as a phone, or a TV interview, and I don’t remember anyone describing a phone call or radio as ‘virtual’.

Like anybody's going to care if the congressman approves of the interview.

It's sad to hear that the opinions of the leaders are so off from the opinions of the citizens but that's precisely the reason for the leaks.

Sounds like an (accidental) great endorsement of the interview to me.

Oh sweet, prior restraint.

They should have killed the Snowden interview anyway because of all the stuff going on with Russia and Ukraine right now. Snowden's voluntary exile to Russia looks even worse to the general public and will overshadow anything he actually says during the interview.

sigh

How many times do we have to go through this.

Snowden is not in Russia by choice. He is there because the US government cancelled his passport, and demonstrated what would happen if he tried to go elsewhere by forcing the landing of the Bolivian president's jet based just on a suspicion he might be on board.

I think it's pretty likely this was deliberately done just so they could say "Look! He's in Russia, what a hypocrite!"

The fact that Snowden has to go to Putin's Russia to escape the US and find freedom of speech should make people realise just how weird the situation is and iust how terribly the US and EU have behaved.

The UK detaining the spouse of a journalist for 9 hours, and the courts saying that was fine, was appalling.

You missed the worst bit, not only did they detain him they did so under terrorism legislation on the basis that the information he might have been carrying might be useful to terrorists.

The fact that the courts backed this interpretation brings all the terrorism legislation into (further?) disrepute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com