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> Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies.

Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays.

Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody.

From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.

Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government. Which Andreessen may well.

No, not even then. The government and the nation are not the same thing. The oath of allegiance is to the nation and the Constitution, not to the government, and it specifically includes the proviso of protecting the nation against "all enemies, foreign and domestic". If there are traitors here, they are the ones who violated the Constitution, the ones who helped conceal those violations, and the ones who saw all this happening and said nothing.

> Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government.

While I don't buy into the "Snowden is a traitor" argument (as traitor has a specific Constitutional definition for a reason, unlike any other crime), you can certainly be guilty of espionage even if you also provide information to the American public.

E.g. The Soviet spies who got information on American nuclear weapons development programs were clearly guilty of espionage; note that this is true even if they didn't actually manage to get the information to their Soviet case handlers.

But if they leaked those same nuclear weapons programs to the American public (and by extension, the world public) in addition to their Soviet case handlers they'd still be guilty of espionage.

Snowden is the Manning case all over again. You can make an argument for whistleblowing for information he revealed showing crimes committed against the American people. For literally all other information (stuff that doesn't reveal crimes, stuff that reveals the NSA doing its literally assigned security mission, etc.) it's illegal espionage, whether the American public happened to be CC'ed or not.

If I give secret information to Bob, and Bob gives it to the enemy, that could land me on the hook for giving it to the enemy. Bob may not be at fault, either, since I'm the one that signed the secret clearance agreement with the government, not him.

I think this is all besides the point, though. Unless I'm missing something big, Snowden's crimes are all conditions of his having a security clearance.

The terms of his security clearance cannot be allowed to nullify his oath to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, can they?

That might make you in violation of your security clearance agreement, which might be a crime. But it doesn't make you a traitor.

Agreed - one might think Snowden misguided, but his reasonings seem to hold up given certain prior assumptions (e.g., allegiance to the constitution).

I would also be quite shocked if other major Powers didn't have a really good idea of what exactly the NSA is doing: they probably know better than most publics. Spies are gonna spy on spies, and that should be expected. The question is the limits on the spying the law & polity have put in place. I agree with Snowden that the polity of the US has a right to understand the scope of what's being done in their (our) name (specifics I think are quite fine being kept to trade secrets).

> That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise.

I've been as confused as Andreessen about the fact that there's been such a huge outcry (which is great per se) after decades of complacency. For those of us who found the NSA to be despicable before Snowden's leaks, I feel like there was just a feeling of resignation that people just didn't care (even in tech circles like HN). It was a similar feeling to thinking about climate change in the late 90s/00s. I considered what you're describing as a potential cause, but I ruled it out because of the HUGE disparity between the reaction to this and the reaction to the warrantless wiretapping scandal of the 2000s. Wasn't that spying on American citizens as well? Why do you suppose that was essentially ignored by most people while this has become such a significant issue for so many?

I think the difference is that people could rationalize that warrantless wiretapping would never happen to them -- it was something that only happened to "criminals" -- whereas the new revelations show that the NSA is indeed spying on all of us all the time.

(I'm not saying I agree that warrantless wiretapping is not a problem -- just that I can see how it might not grab people.)

Wow that's pretty shitty of people, but I think you're probably right. This makes a lot of sense.

One of the revelations has simply been the capability level. The estimated computing and storage capacity of the NSA has long been treated as something of a growing constant in privacy equations and concerns that were waved off as tinfoil hat syndrome ten years ago happen to be absurdly commonplace.

And that is a reason that foreign countries should be concerned about doing business with american companies. There are questions as to whether major players were complicit or were infiltrated, but it was foolish not to expect infiltration at a minimum.

Anyway, fuck Marc Andreesen. He's on the wrong side of history if he thinks that the massive surveillance apparatus recording us through our social media apps should have been kept secret so that his portfolio would continue performing as expected.

That is the psychological profile of a traitor and he deserves a sound kick in the balls for using his influence and media reach to say this sort of nonsense.

I wouldn't accept investment money from him after this.

That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_.

You may have assumed that. I have always thought of the NSA as harvesting whatever signals they can pick up, not just analyzing known vectors like numbers stations or military radio traffic. I mean think about it, how are you going to find new hostile communications patterns if you don't do broad-spectrum data collection? It's not like you can just spider al-qaeda.com and follow the links you find there; for that matter foreign government signals traffic for espionage purposes isn't necessarily going to be hosted on government websites. I doubt that (for example) Russian spies check in with Kremlin.ru weekly, don't you? Ideally, you would not want to depend on any .ru address.

I don't think there are spies everywhere or anything like that, but the fundamental nature of espionage is that participants don't wear uniforms and instead employ informal and ad-hoc methods of communication - exactly the sort of patterns you look for in metadata analysis.

>That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies.

Respectfully, I don't know how you could be surprised they were spying on everyone if you followed NSA news. We've had a consistent stream of leaks for _decades_ indicating that the NSA consistently expanded their capabilities to whatever the technology was capable of. Do you remember ECHELON? William Binney? AT&T fiber taps? Warrantless wiretapping? What else would those massive datacenters be for?

"What else would those massive datacenters be for?"

Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt.

Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.

Most of the shock over the NSA revelations is not to those of us who kept tabs and trusted the disclosures, but to the huge number of people that refused to accept that they could be true.

People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything.

But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it.

People are blind to it.

I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA.

Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan.

The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised.

The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter.

And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe.

Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.

> [...] the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to [...]

I really fail to see which part of the Snowden revelations does directly help foreign agencies. They probably knew most of the things he disclosed years before, because it's their job to know in contrast with the average citizen who has other things to worry about.