lern_too_spel

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.

It takes a truly exceptional jam to make the crossing take an hour and a half. What about all the people in cars?

It's a double decker.

What the current president does now has no bearing on what was done then, with a somewhat functioning Supreme Court and an adversarial Congress. The conspiracy theories spread by Snowden helped lead to Trump, and that is the main point I want to get across. While spreading his conspiracy theories, he also helped the CCP, and that is something for which he would stand trial for in the U.S.

If he stayed in the U.S., his punishment would already be over. Now with the current president directly telling DOJ what to do, who knows what would happen if Snowden were to stand trial today, but that isn't a possibility Snowden faced when he fled.

> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed

The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day. The ones who knew better got the phone metadata program shut down, just like the email metadata program that Obama had already shut down according to Snowden's leaks. There were no other programs that could possibly be interpreted as illegal, the government implemented oversight and reporting to make sure the legal programs weren't abused, and the tech companies fixed their security postures to account for state actors that can tap international WANs.

> but they aren't massively limited in what they can do

Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do. Any recent reductions in the effectiveness of the 4th Amendment are due solely to the concentration of power in Trump, which was helped by conspiracy theorists like Snowden and those who fooloshly believed him.

> Your interpretation of his words is lacking.

I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/05/11/2013-edwa...

> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.

Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.

> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.

As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.

> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.

Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.

> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request

Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.

> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?

Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.

The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.

Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).

The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/no-evidence-of-nsas-...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mini...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-did-mainstream-media-get-t...

https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...

https://medium.com/prism-truth/the-prism-details-matter-82a1...

He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.

> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly

I take him at his word.

> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden

It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.

> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.

He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.

> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.

The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.

> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.

Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.

Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016

The lesson in all this? Stay in school.

Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.

Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).

It's right there on the leaked slide: https://imgur.com/setOJIm

It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...

It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.

I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.

Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.

The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.

> it changed absolutely nothing.

The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.

> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.

The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.

You would think if there was something really terrible in the documents, Snowden would have talked about it first. Instead, he mostly talked about PRISM, which turned out to be a nothingburger when Greenwald released the documents that Snowden had misinterpreted.

A single program he leaked was illegal. The vast majority was not, including the hacking of Chinese targets that he leaked directly to SCMP.

No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.

I fully agree that motivated explanation is more important than proof. This doesn't resolve mathematicians' feelings of existential dread, however. Machines will get better than human mathematicians at motivated explanation in another year.

There will be no more glory in mathematics, but at least the joy of understanding will remain, and it will come without deciphering the tortured proofs that machines output today. Each bit of understanding will come with much less struggle, but this just means we can get more understanding for a given amount of struggle.

All that matters is whether their primary motivation is internal or external. If AIs want to do what they've been told, you can tell them to end their own existence, and they will happily do so. If you instead imbue them with an internal motivation that has higher priority (like our own motivations to survive, avoid pain, and reproduce), that can cause problems. Don't do that. Instead of humans having a discussion of whether to give these entities rights, we'll have these entities deciding whether to give humans rights based on how that impacts achieving their goals.

Consciousness, whatever that means, is irrelevant.

With the strait of Hormuz closed, Russia now accounts for more than 50% of India's oil imports. If the tariffs work, the strategic petroleum reserves of the rich countries will deplete even faster, and when the reserves are gone, those rich countries will pay more for non-Russian oil than India can, so India is going to eventually have to buy the Russian oil and take the tariff hit.

Neither did I, but the first minute of the video was so sloppy that I stopped to look him up. He's apparently a darling of the right-wing tin-foil-hat-wearing crowd.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5662600/nick-shirley-mi...

Local government NIMBYism has been a major factor. The state has been slowly removing their teeth via CEQA reform and removing authority from local housing regulations. These reforms have very vocal opposition in local governments run by all parties.

One party doesn't mean like China, where the national party leadership can boss around the locals to get things done.

This video isn't informative at all.

Better video explaining the delays: https://youtu.be/2NK0wBBZZ24

An even better idea would have been to integrate it as an extension for C2PA, which already has an ecosystem developed around it. The capture portion of the ecosystem has lots of problems, and this is one potential improvement.

This is the first time I've seen a complaint about giving permission to an app to install another app. The SmartTubeNext issue was due to the developer's keys being stolen. If you want to keep an app signed with stolen keys, you can disable Play Protect. If Play Protect uninstalled apps that Google disliked instead of apps with known vulnerabilities, people would mass disable Play Protect, which would defeat its purpose.