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Comment by dimino | Hacker News Reader

Almost everyone I talk to in person thinks Snowden is a criminal. These people believe the US government was caught doing something it shouldn't have, but Snowden himself is a bad guy to these folks because he's seen as betraying his country.

I think HN is much more pro-Snowden than the general population is, but I think the general population doesn't deny the value of exposing what the US government did. I live in DC however, so there's certainly a pro-government feeling in this down, possibly more so than many other places in the US.

Edit: To add some support for my anecdotes, here's a somewhat recent poll I found from April 21st citing 64% of people hold a negative opinion of Snowden [0].

[0] - http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde...

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Would this be the same population polled in 2010 when 41% of them could not name the vice president of the United States in an open-ended (not multiple choice) question? [0] Or last September when 64% of them could not name the three branches of government? [1] (35% could not name a single one)

My favorite poll is this one: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/03/16/americans-privacy-stra...

Buried near the bottom is, "60% believe it is acceptable to monitor the communications of American leaders."

Raise your hand if you think it's good for a healthy democracy for the executive branch to monitor the private communications of congresspeople, senators, and federal judges?

[0] http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-s...

[1] http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-know-su...

Hah, I don't think anyone would disagree with you if your thesis here is "most people are generally uninformed".

That being said, technically speaking yes, it probably was a different set of people polled, just considering how the nature of polling works!

What you're not understanding though is that people actually seem to separate the content of the leak with the act of the leak. All it takes is a quick Google of "NSA spying program polling" to see polls affirming that hypothesis (folks disapprove of Snowden, but also heavily disapprove of the NSA spying program).

Snowden himself has been known to beg folks during his interviews to stop caring about him or what he did, and focus on the content of the information he released, and I'd agree. So what if folks don't like Snowden?

Eh, to be fair, the vice president has very little power and doesn't seem to be of any great consequence.

> These people believe the US government was caught doing something it shouldn't have, but Snowden himself is a bad guy to these folks because he's seen as betraying his country.

That logic should scare the living hell out of people.

Why? I myself am not over the moon about what Snowden did, though I recognize the necessity for it, and don't hold any personal grudge against him for it.

I just don't trust people to accurately asses whether or not something is "leak worthy", and I don't want to create a safe path for folks just because they thought what they were leaking was important for the world to know. It ruins the concept of holding government secrets, something I think benefits the US and other governments more than it harms them and the people they serve.

I think it should be a huge risk, and carry dire consequences, in general, when you release classified information. In this specific case, perhaps the fact that the US courts, congress, and the US people have all collectively been appalled at what the US government has been doing should exonerate Snowden, but only in this specific case. I would not like any kind of precedent to be set, for the aforementioned reason.

I hope Obama pardons him in his last days in office, or offers him a deal where he is allowed back in the US without serving any jail time.

What's wrong with my logic?

I don't think anybody here is advocating for thoughtlessly dumping all state secrets in the open.

The thing is, when given the power to eavesdrop into anyone's life without consequences, it takes a rather uncommon kind of person to do what Snowden did in order to make the public aware of what is going on.

Because the most common behaviour when receiving that power would be to exploit and abuse it, regardless of whether we are talking about an individual, an institution, or a whole government.

So I am not worried about Snowden, I'm worried about the thousands of his ex-colleagues who are still sitting on their desks every day.

> I don't think anybody here is advocating for thoughtlessly dumping all state secrets in the open.

I am. Why should a state have secrets? Rulers ought to be in power under the consent of the ruled. If the ruled don't even know what the rulers are doing, how can we be giving them consent for something we don't know about?

Because the state can't function without keeping some secrets, particularly in times of crisis or peril.

Times of crisis and peril is pretty much the entire history of the US. The US has been in constant war since its creation.

This is not a good reason to be having secrets.

A "zero secrets policy" is still not tenable. There are enough legitimate government uses for secrets. For example:

* Police are investigating a crime and have not made all details of the crime publicly known. Under questioning, a suspect independently corroborates these details, which he would not have known unless he was the perpetrator. The prosecution now has a stronger case.

* Three high-ranking members of ISIS are in fact CIA informants. They meet their CIA contact biweekly in a falafel shop in Mosul. The identities of the informants, their contact, and the falafel shop are all state secrets.

* A defense contractor is building a secret weapon that is decades ahead of competing powers. The design and specifications of this weapon are state secrets.

* The government maintains a health insurance system for the disabled, poor, and elderly.

* The military is performing operations somewhere in the world. Their exact order of battle and battle plan are secret.

* The military is planning an amphibious assault on Beachhead B. Using a ruse, they convince the enemy that they are instead landing at Beachhead A.

There are reasonable and good-intentioned debates to be had about state secrets, but to say there is never a legitimate purpose for them is the practical equivalent of anarchism.

> * Police are investigating a crime and have not made all details of the crime publicly known.

This isn't exactly the same as the government itself having secrets, but a secret police can generate a lot of problems, as you're doubtlessly aware.

> * The government maintains a health insurance system for the disabled, poor, and elderly.

These are not government secrets either. The secrecy is for people who are being served by the government, not for employees of the state.

> * Three high-ranking members of ISIS are in fact CIA informants

> * A defense contractor is building a secret weapon that is decades ahead of competing powers.

> * The military is performing operations somewhere in the world.

> * The military is planning an amphibious assault on Beachhead B.

These are militaristic problems created by having a state in constant war to begin with. These are webs of lies that have to be perpetuated due to initial lying.

As an outsider, it's really amazing how blind US citizens are to their own country's incessant war-mongering. They breed war with lies and have to maintain that war with lies.

So are you a pacifist, then?

I'm not sure. Maybe. But I certainly don't believe the US's warmongering is defensive.

I never said that it was, but as recently as the 1940's, the US had a clear-cut moral imperative to engage in war, and that required the US government to hold secrets. (For instance, in my analogy of the amphibious assault, Beachhead B was Normandy and Beachhead A was Pas-de-Calais.)

If your theory of government doesn't allow for all the good things the US government has done in the past century, it's not a credible theory of government.

The possible precedent of not punishing leakers is far preferable to the actual precedent of giving the government a way to shield all of its wrongdoings.

I understand this sentiment, but I doubt you'd continue to hold it in the event of a leak that was much less beneficial for you in particular.

Consider for a moment the fictional scenario that all US tax documents were leaked, or perhaps only the tax documents of folks whose names started with Warren B. We might (in this fictional scenario) find out about some very significant tax evasion on the part of Warren Buffet (just a hypothetical example, almost certainly not true), but how might Warren Beaufort feel?

To provide another (completely fictional) example, what about if the medical information of all federal US employees gets leaked. The US public is shocked to discover the huge misappropriations of funds towards unnecessary procedures for US congressmen/women, but at the same time Joe Normal, who works for a middle school, loses his job because it's revealed he has AIDS and the parents petition his removal from the classroom.

I don't want to give these folks who might have access to this data any hope of exoneration or leniency if they use their privileged position to reveal secrets.

>who works for a middle school, loses his job because it's revealed he has AIDS and the parents petition his removal from the classroom.

Once again, blaming the leaker is blaming the wrong individual here.

There is already a cost to society of people not seeking treatment for mental health issues on the possibility the info might be leaked, not because the leak itself is a feared occurrence (in reality it is rare) but because of how irrational society reacts (especially when mental disorders are treated as moral failings).

If I send my kid to visit his dad, knowing full well his dad is going to abuse him, am I at fault for sending him anyway, or are you exclusively arguing that his dad would be at fault, and I would carry zero blame?

You are not guilty of child abuse. You are guilty of endangerment. The father is guilty for child abuse. That said, the responsibility a parent has a child far exceeds the responsibility in most other relationships. Also the analogy is quite distant.

Consider a closer analogy of report a number of child abusers to the police. One of these abusers is a father who abuses their child. Enough info is made public during the trial that the child is shamed for it (even though we can agree they should not be shamed for it). Are you guilty for shaming the child? Say another child is taken from their parents, both of whom had abused them but stopped and placed into foster care where they are abused again. Are you guilty for their continued abuse?

My analogy was designed to demonstrate the responsibility of an actor who has knowledge of a consequence of his/her behavior, whether or not the actor is in control of the consequence itself.

In the event of a shamed child, I am indeed responsible (not guilty, that has a legal connotation that's undesired here) for a child's shaming if I am the one who acted, and the result of which was the shaming, regardless of other outcomes. Had I not acted, the child would not have been shamed. Therefore I am the responsible actor in the child shaming (not exclusively, obviously).

You're apparently mixing both morality and legality, as well as what is happening vs. what ought to happen [0]. I am explicitly speaking in the realm of what is happening. You are responsible for the shaming of the child, the beating of the child, or the exposure of Joe Normal's loss of his job. Whether or not you were acting morally is an issue I'd like to address, but only once we've agreed on the premise that an actor is considered responsible for all direct consequences of his/her action.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Then given that we are responsible for the actions our governments take, and since all governments have taken actions that have caused children to be molested (such as putting a child in a foster care), even if those actions were reasonable given the known information at the time (removing the child from a parent who was giving them meth and putting them in a foster care home that was safe by all indications), we are all responsible for child molestation.

Am I missing anything here?

Because Snowden told the public what they're own government is doing - things they shouldn't be doing. Operations that people would have considered Orwellian a decade or two ago. Things they've blatantly lied about [1]. Another user in this thread, jordigh, covers why this has been important in the past.

[1] http://rare.us/story/nsa-chief-i-didnt-lie-to-congress-about...

You're not really addressing what I wrote -- specifically, the general precedent of allowing state secrets to be leaked without severe punishment seems harmful to any nation state.

It makes sense to me that the default reaction to the release of state secrets is that of disapproval. From there, we can of course move further away from acceptance or closer to it depending on the specific scenario, but most folks aren't taking a close look at Snowden -- I'd even argue that they probably don't need to. What matters here is the info he released, not really Snowden specifically.

> specifically, the general precedent of allowing state secrets to be leaked without severe punishment seems harmful to any nation state.

And is it also harmful to the citizens of that nation state?

What are our rulers doing that they don't want us to know about? Why should we not know everything that they are doing?

There's no way to notify your population of an action without also notifying your enemies of that action. No argument exists, to my knowledge, that a nation-state can be successful without hiding some information from other nation-states, and therefore from its people, given my first sentence.

It's one reason we elect representatives, in fact.

How about the nation state stops having secrets that are making enemies for itself?

Considering there has never been a time in human history where a nation state has not had any opposition from other nation states, I suspect your suggestion is literally impossible.

I guess what you are saying is that nation states are not a good governing structure for progress, into the future? Who are our enemies? The enemies of my country are not necessarily my personal enemies. In fact I quite like many people who come from 'enemy' territories. There is a disconnect between the reality I experience in my everyday life and the one put forward but my/our government/s.

Switzerland has been mostly without enemies for most of its existence.

So about those swiss bank accounts, then...

The commenter lives in DC, of course people there revile snowden, his exposure briefly threatened their daily lunch at the government trough.

Honestly, the fact that it's only 64% raises my opinion of Americans slightly. The barrage of propaganda you have to put up with there is truly remarkable, and especially considering the rivers of bullshit that streamed out of every single major media outlet in the wake of this, the fact the over one in three Americans still thinks he's an alright guy, with one in ten considering him a hero, speaks volumes for their resistance to it. Nice work, America.

I get the impression that the general population doesn't actually fully understand what the government has done.

Watching through the John Oliver episode with Snowden [1], that's pretty clear.

To sum up the interviews with people they did in the episode:

- When asked if people knew who Snowden was, they often either had no clue or confused him with Julian Assange. They often associated him with Wikileaks, even to the point of believing him to be leading it.

- They often saw his actions as damaging the US and its troops in the Middle East.

- They near consistently had a negative view of him.

- When given a simple to understand explanation of what he revealed (the government can see your dick pics), nearly all of them were surprised, had no idea that it was true (and exactly what Snowden had shown us) and shared the view that the government shouldn't have that kind of power.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M

I guess this is kind of where I'm at with him. Although I don't really think he's a "bad guy". What he did was treason and it was "wrong", but I think in this case the ends justify the means. What he exposed was far worse than how he did it.

You do realize that the crime of treason is codified in the United States Constitution, and that what Snowden did in no way meets the criteria enumerated there. Careful throwing the word "treason" around like that, it can make you appear ignorant.

It's likely he'll see the charges of "Aiding the Enemy", "Illegal disclosure of Classified Information", and "Unauthorized removal and retention of Classified information". That said, Treason isn't as hard to apply as people are making it out to be.

“If you think that one, Al Qaeda and similar groups are the enemy for purposes of treason; two, his actions assisted them in operations against the U.S.; and three, that was his intention,” Harrison said, “then the argument that it was treason is pretty good.” - John Harrison UVA LAW specializing in constitutional law and history.

People are celebrated for treason. Like George Washington.

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