Years ago, when I interviewed at places that did USG-related work, the stuff I heard about that I didn't have to sign an NDA to hear, scared me enough that I knew Snowden-scale stuff was entirely within the capabilities of the US Govt. I didn't realize they would use it against us just blatantly in direct violation of every law put in place to prevent it, though.
I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
Transparency is the key. Governments love secrecy because that allows them to do whatever nasty stuff they want while pretending to be righteous at the surface.
Just look at past secrets that have been disclosed recently and think: should those things really be secret? I say absolutely no.
The mentality of keeping things secret to hide your real intentions, or to not upset people too much (or they will panic!), or to keep other governments on their toes so you're ready to take them by surprise in the event of a conflict (how has that worked so far? The real threat actors will know anyway what naughty stuff you're doing to make sure they'll be the losers if the need arises - like when you just urgently need more cheap oil) is something we, all peoples of the world, need to overcome as soon as possible.
You may argue the situation in the world right now proves that governments need to be ready for conflict all the time, and secrecy gives them more power to take enemies by surprise... but you're mistaken, it's exactly the opposite! The whole China/Russia animosities are due to the West patently doing things, like keeping military bases in every weak country[1] that will let them around China and Russia, that clearly shows they have every intention to escalate to a war with them at the earliest sign of trouble, yet we lie without hesitation about it... like we're the peaceful people who keep trying to convince evil governments to change their belligerent ways. Perhaps if we stopped putting weapons pointing right at them, right at their neighbourhood, they would be better persuaded that war is not a possibility?
We do the same with climate change by the way... we want everyone else to change, or we won't do it alone, forgetting that we're the ones who pumped 90% of the CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of industrialization, while some countries that are now considered "climate villains" have been on it for only a couple of decades... hypocrisy at its worst.
I think you completely misinterpret the situation with Russia and China.
Russia and China have the objectives of their own. For Russia it is to expand their empire that in their own mind rightfully belongs to them. They didn't attack Ukraine because of US actions but because they seriously believe that they have some kind of right over Ukrainians lands, or even more seriously, that Ukrainians don't exists.
If US would have been in Ukraine, or moved in rapidly when the situation became dangerous, there wouldn't be war at them moment. We see this clearly play out in far east, where China has ambition to overtake Taiwan (what they like Russia with Ukraine believe to belong rightfully to themselves). They clearly would have already attacked if it wasn't clear that US will prevent them doing so.
I'm certain that they would have done it, had US backed away from Ukraine. I'm also certain that what led Russia to believe that they could pull off Ukrainian invasion, was the US departure from Afghanistan, not that they did it but how they did it by letting Taliban completely humiliate them without any response. Russia believed that US is weak, not interested, and it would possibly have been like that, had Ukraine not managed to pull off very strong response.
US is there to fill the vacuum. If it was not US, it would be China (or it could Russia possibly). If not today, then eventually it would be one of them. I prefer US because it is more predictable and rule based and in the long run more favorable for the people.
No, you're misrepresenting it. Your rationale is that Russia is an evil empire trying to expand its borders to its former glory, and that's why it attacked Ukraine... a primary school level of simplification.
You ignore that Russia's number one fear after the collapse of the USSR was for another military invasion from the West, as had happened several times over the last few centuries... that Russia's border with Ukraine is its most "porous" border, easy to cross for whatever purpose, including a military invasion... that NATO's whole purpose since it was founded has always been to counter Russia, so the Russian's fears that NATO is an enemy are absolutely correct... that Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution caused Ukraine to go from a neutral country (or a buffer country as most people call it) to being actively hostile against Russia, which was the trigger for the Crimean invasion in 2014... that the US and UK, as guarantors of the Budapest Agreement with Russian and Ukraine, should have immediately intervened to defend Ukraine when that happened, but did absolutely nothing, giving Russia confirmation that it would be able to keep Ukraine out of NATO by force, which is really what it is trying to do currently... and finally, that every country has its motivations to do the things it does, a lot more complex and subtle than "being evil and wanting more land", and perhaps trying to understand what those motivations are, why their culture has evolved the way it has and how it is likely to react to your actions, would go a very long way to avoiding stupid conflicts like this. But yeah, it's so much easier to keep parroting the news and thinking of the whole story as a black-and-white, villain VS hero story.
You can both be right at the same time. It is true Russia was invaded several times over the last few centuries. It is also true that Russia have invaded and annexed many countries over the last few centuries. Evil empires also get invaded once in a while.
Sometimes, when everyone else is hostile to you, it can make sense to consider that maybe... just maybe... you might be doing something that triggers their anger. Like, what possible reason might the countries of Eastern Europe have to hate Russia? What possible reason might Ukraine specifically have to hate Russia? Does "Holodomor" ring a bell?
It is ironic that the countries of Warsaw Pact were more likely to be invaded by Warsaw Pact than by NATO.
> trying to understand what those motivations are, why their culture has evolved the way it has and how it is likely to react to your actions
But when we do exactly this, you call it "parroting the news".
Anthromorphizing, just another symptom of the human mind’s inability to really comprehend things as complex as geopolitics. We’re not meant for this, people! Technology has complexified our simple and beautiful world.
We’re not meant to understand any of that. It doesn’t mean a few people devoting their lifes to it can be familiar with a fraction of the actual depth of such complex subjects.
It's much simpler. People in Ukraine, and everwhere in Eastern Europe compare the future that Russia offers them, and the future the West offers them. I'm sure some are swayed by high minded theoretical ideas, but not many.
They choose the West. We all know why. Money you could say, but it's more something like "a better life". And yes, the Holodomor is part of this. That came from the east. Something else starting with "Holo" also came, but from the West.
But if Maidan proved anything, it's that the West offers Ukrane a better life, in the mind of Ukranians, a better Future. It's not really about history. And, of course, this government will not let that go.
You can say the same about everyone from Estonia to, really, even Turkey (I mean, at this point they're seriously insulted by the West ... but not nearly insulted enough to choose Russia's side).
And Russia is afraid. They're "locked in" with impossible to defend borders. They're not friends with the West ... and they're not quite insane enough to imagine China is their friend either. So the idea that Putin initially defended, that without a "buffer zone": countries that will fight or at least obstruct the west, Russia cannot avoid losing large amounts of territory very quickly if it comes to an open conflict, from either side. And they cannot really project power over the sea, without approval from either Europe or China either (or if the Arctic melts, with US agreement). They're fucked, or at least, you have to admit there's a logic there.
You could have made your point without accusing anyone of parroting „the media“. Russia has agreed to the borders of Ukraine in 1993 and from then on 2 more times. They have onesidedly broken the agreement and attacked a peaceful neighbour, no commitment to not joining NATO has been granted. These are facts you can easily look up, no need to come up with made up security concerns which have been no problem a decade earlier.
It's worth noting that the agreements that guarantee Ukraine's borders also guarantee Russia's access to their black sea military bases in the Chimera.
Nothing like this has been granted to Russia. It was a time limited lease, like HK from China. Russia also unilaterally broke these agreements in 2014.
Well, Russia is an evil empire trying to expand its borders to its former glory. If you haven't understood this by now then it's not meaningful to continue this discussion with you.
Even if we adopt the moral relativism and stop calling Russia "evil"... still, the fact remains that it is an empire trying to expand its borders to its former glory.
Well, they are evil, we just can't ignore that. If calling to murder millions of people is commonly tolerated public discourse then what else are they?
Your rationale is that Russia is an evil empire trying to expand its borders to its former glory, and that's why it attacked Ukraine... a primary school level of simplification.
Disagree. Replace "evil empire" with "Old-school imperialist power" and you have a 90 percent approximation to the essential truth about that country (or its current leadership, in any case). For all its banality.
Though "evil" of course is not a misplaced word to use either, in regard to its actions.
You are completely right and I highly recommend to watch "The Putin interviews" by Oliver Stone to those who disagree. America is trying to drive Europe and Russia away, just to defend a collapsing empire. The sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline ($10B) began long before it was blown up and the Ukraine war has deep roots and consequences to Europe. The EU is just one of the Sauron's rings of power, it's not Europa.
You are full of you know what and so is Oliver Stone. What next, you quote Steven Seagal? I'm sorry, but Russia is a genocidal Nazi state. If you have not realized this by now then you haven't paid enough attention.
There are many, many explanations for i.e. why didn't China attack Taiwan (yet) and while the U.S. finger in the region helps in some ways, supporting Taiwan proclaiming independence for example may actually not be helping to prevent war there. It seems to me like China is much more reluctant than Russia is to go to such a war, probably because apart from facing domestic nationalistic pressure to do so, there's little actual reason and China does not really want to have its (in Chinese memory) recent expansion of the middle class stopped by facing isolation. Even the Chinese government responds to popular pressure by simply adjusting its policy more often than deploying tanks.
With regards to Russia, Putin, (being a Russian neocon), is using the example of how Russians are sometimes treated in former Soviet countries with regards to citizenship, speaking Russian etc., as well as Ukraine say banning Russian language books or the Russian flag being banned at sports events, which actually helps his cause domestically. If we were actually interested in weakening his grip, we'd strongly oppose such policies imo.
Chinese are extremely risk averse. They will eventually invade Taiwan but only when the odds are extremely in their favor. The Russian invasion of Ukraine showed them that they need to prepare better. I wouldn't be surprised if their economy collapses/stagnates before this day even comes.
What does “suppressed in the public sphere” mean in this context? The books are either banned or not. People are free in Ukraine to read and posses Russian books. You can sit in a coffee shop in Kyiv with a Russian book, while speaking Russian to a friend and be perfectly fine.
What does “suppressed in the public sphere” mean in this context?
Information about the law is very easy to find. If the topic interests you it may be worth your while to have a look.
The books are either banned or not.
Or there's a greyscale. Like you know, most things in life.
Again, do yourself a favor and look into the law and what it does. I could explain, but you need to at least do some of the work yourself here rather than just speculate into the air about the state of things in some far away country.
I'm not being snarky. It just seems weird to me that, having been given perfectly sufficient context to answer the question all by yourself ("2019 law") -- the only impulse you seem to have is to sit back and speculate.
You have made a lot of incorrect assumptions about me, so I will stop participating in this discussion. For anyone else reading this please know that if you visit Ukraine you can bring with you a book in Russian or in any other language. Furthermore feel free to walk into a local bookstore and purchase a book in Russian.
It comes from it attacking Taiwan unprovoked, but there's no need for large U.S. presence for that to already not be attractive as it would be a huge blow for China in the economic realm and even include the Global South. On the other hand, Taiwan declaring independence on U.S. encouragement for example could be spun by China as protecting its stated red lines and acting out despite U.S. presence in the region.
You may not know this, but Russia enjoys some sympathy in the Global South because they see the situation as being at least partly provoked by the U.S. The same could happen over Taiwan, but it doesn't have to if cooler heads prevail.
Not from "what" but from "where" is the question. If there was no Western opposition to the attack, there wouldn't be no isolation.
The fact that Russia has received some sympathy shows how important is to express the situation correctly - Russia was not provoked by anything. They would have attacked either way because they consider these lands theirs and the people who live there at best as nothing. The thinking goes - those countries they attack will greet them as liberators or they are the worst enemies that must be eliminated (e.g. Nazis).
Now I can understand that some countries have strong anti-US sentiment, but reason for the whole war has a very little to do with US despite Russia's huge effort to make it appear to be the cause.
I am sure this is the case and that US history of coups in countries of the Global South has absolutely nothing to do with any potential sentiments there.
Thinking non-Westerners can't think for themselves isn't helping sentiments there either I'd imagine.
And these things had nothing to do with Russians sticking their noses everywhere and trying to implement their communist genocide over all the world? How many victims of communism is there? I mean, how many millions, sorry, tens of millions is there?
I wonder if historically governments were ever controlled by the people. It seems democracies that can somewhat control the government are extreme outliers in human history.
The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.
"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.
I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.
The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.
Pure democracy as you describe it, even if technically feasible, would still result in tyrannies and terrible outcomes. The biggest problem isn't lack of influence on the laws, it's lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy. And that problem exists whether it's x number of people influencing the outcome, or 1,000,000x. Every negative influence that politicians are open to, the masses are also open to (though scale may vary e.g. wrt corruption). The overwhelming evidence across the globe is that people are easily fooled, easily misled, easily manipulated, prone to illogic, prone to responding emotively, prone to selfishness, and can be corruptible, destructive and suicidal. They routinely will sacrifice advances to their own cause in order to exclude, punish and exorcise others.
No, technically direct democracy would lead to no better outcome, though I'm sure at some point in our history we'll try it.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Swiss model of lots of referenda, very strong regional (canton) govt and a seven person executive, but also.. Swiss women didn't get the vote at federal level until 1991. Some changes are hard to pull off through referenda, others less so.
> Swiss women didn't get the vote at federal level until 1991
To be pedantic it was one Canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) that the supreme court finally forced to let women have full voting rights, as in the rest if the Cantons, in 1990 [0]. So it was part of the state forcing this rather than through their direct democracy, which makes the issue even more interesting.
The other states were still slow at granting universal suffrage, Vaud being the first in 1959.
That's the other side of the book I guess. There are plenty more examples like this.
Imagine getting only men to vote yes to lose 50% of their voting power. Imagine getting a million farmers and their family's to vote for a drastic new way in ecological farming. Same issue, different times.
And yet, the Swiss women pre-1991 were probably more free than women in some communist country who technically had the right to vote decades earlier... but they were only allowed to vote for the Communist Party, because there was no other option on the ballot.
There is at least 1 place where it works in some extent for 800 years - Switzerland. Public votes few times every year on basically anything enough people decide to vote on (100k signatures needed in 8m population and you have a public vote). You want to ban mosques, or join Nato or have 6 weeks of paid vacation? Have a say. Also weak central government, and strong cantonal ones with their own rules and laws. THAT is true freedom in the hands of people, to decide on your lives, to have freedom to improve it or mess it up.
Every effin' politician knows it, yet they conveniently ignore it, or even outright attack it when they are spewing words like freedom and democracy. It doesnt matter if EU or US or any other place.
As another poster pointed out: Swiss women couldn't vote in national elections until 1991. Democracy isn't a perfect system, it is just that having a system with some democracy in it is the best we've come up with so far.
Any minority will never truly have a say. It doesn't matter if you can vote if you don't have enough numbers to make a difference. Your best bet would be that folks tire of voting on these - but that's only if you can get enough signatures. Hope you can work and get signatures at the same time and that you aren't in too poor health to do this.
It isn't 'freedom', it is just another way to be tyrannical and claim there is "freedom". It isn't like folks born in a country/region can just move somewhere else. Heck, folks fleeing actual war have some issues with this.
This so much. It works for us and there is no reason it wouldn't work for others.
Politicians here have a completely different role in society. They ain't hero's, they ain't badman's the are just smart people doing their democratic jobs.
And society talks about concrete topics and not politicians.
You've just made an anti-argument to your own claim.
As people are people, real democracy would not be worse than the status quo as we're already ruled by people with lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
But you can't for example corrupt the majority of all people. So real democracy would be at least in this point better.
By no means worse, but better in some regards is a clear win imho!
> lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
I'd love to agree with you but people in general are easily manipulated on mass.
Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything, making them even easily to manipulate. I'll include myself in this.
For real democracy to work it's more than giving all people the right to vote on all things. They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand. That I'd say is impossible.
The point of democracy is not that everybody is perfectly informed to come to the logically best outcome. The point is that it gives a people agency over their own future. If they choose to be ill-informed and pick bad candidates, they own the consequences. Democracy does not lead to the best outcome, but to the most fair one.
The only real value I can see with democracy is in being able to pull the lever and get a new set of dice to role if things go bad.
Beyond that it seems to be mostly mythology and nonsense. You either have smart good rulers or you don't. At least if we don't they only have so much time to do damage and we try again.
The idea democracy gives people agency over their future I would put in the category of mythology.
The most fair, yes, probably. The fairest? No. Though I’ll admit I’m stumped (though in good company I suspect) as to how to possibly achieve the fairest outcome. I suspect it’s a platonic ideal, barring a Star Trek reality coming to life.
Not having the solution ready doesn't mean it wouldn't exist at all.
Humans are very diverse in their abilities and society needs to account for that. Division of labour is key here.
Not everybody needs to decide on or be informed about everything. What is necessary is transparency, accountability and the resulting trust in those responsible.
Our societies are so messed up in that regard, we don't even consider that being possible anymore. But it is.
No. None of this stuff works without people. There's a reason we have representative democracies instead of true democracies. Why we elect people to make those decisions.
I'm not saying it's working but I don't think true democracy would work any better either because the underlying issue with democracy is you're relying on ill informed people, people who don't understand either the issue upon which they vote or the consequences of a vote either way, to make decisions.
People easily manipulated by social media filter bubbles and ridiculous slogans. Or in our current democracies just money.
I think democracy is probably the best we've had to date but it's showing its flaws.
> I'd love to agree with you but people in general are easily manipulated on mass.
It's even easier with single persons or small groups… Just given them a little bit money or alternatively aim with a gun at them or someone they love. This method wouldn't scale to a whole society.
> Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything […]
> They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand.
And you really think the "decision makers" are anyhow better informed, smarter, more altruistic and don't just think about their own well being most of the time? That's a very naïve stand, to be honest.
> And you really think the "decision makers" are anyhow better informed, smarter, more altruistic and don't just think about their own well being most of the time? That's a very naïve stand, to be honest.
At no point did I say anything of the sort, and I'm not sure how you've extrapolated that from what I've said.
I keep saying that what we are currently living through is a surprisingly accurate reflection of how democracy began. In the city state of Athens, all free men had the vote. The definition of "free man" just happened to exclude approximately 97% of the population.
Our governments have since figured out that you can merrily hand out the privilege, as long you remain in control of what is allowed to be put on the vote in the first place. I'm not alone with my view, btw. Lessig has made the same point in his "Country of Lesters" talk.[0,1]
> Electronic voting machines and vote counting machines are hackable.
Sure. And elections in general aren't malleable? In a lot of cases that's even simpler than hacking a distributed cryptographic system.
The problem with electronic voting is not the security. It's "just" the secrecy. That's the only hard problem.
> I wouldn't trust anything other than hand-counted paper ballots.
So you should stop trusting in any decision made in most parliaments on this planet. Almost all of them are made by primitive and completely nontransparent "press the button" electronic voting, which can be trivial hacked. But "voting" in parliaments is anyway just show for the dump masses. All the decisions are pre-made behind closed doors, of course.
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."
Direct democracy scares me more than a corrupt government. I can imagine a group of americans voting for $2,000 a month basic income, not realizing that the total is greater than our GDP. I can see racism creap in, denying entry to the US to foreign natioals.
Watching the UK vote on "Brexit", without an understanding of what that actually 'means' or if it's possible, shows the failure of democracy.
Whose corruption is better? Whose corruption is worse? The collusion of bureaucrats, politicians, media, corporate elite is WORSE than any corruption whatsoever resulting from direct democracy: in the case of brexit, people who voted for it face the consequences themselves. In the case of collusive elite, normal public (except bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, corporate elite) bear the brunt. Definitely, people don't mind taking their own medicine, than the ones prescribed by the collusive elite.
In 2020, the Presidential election voter turnout was the highest it's been in three decades, at just over 60%. But that's still 40% of eligible voters that didn't "lose" their voice in government, like losing their car keys. 80 million people decided to give up their voice.
In other countries, people really do lose their voice in government. Plenty of countries are under the jack-boot of totalitarian regimes that will torture and execute whoever steps out of line. We live in a country that is so far away from that, that all we have to do to change our government is mail in a form. And we still can't be bothered to do that. So any lack of government control is completely our own fault.
The government's still gonna do whatever it wants to do. But we also have the power to bring it to heel. The thing is, you have to actually do something with that power.
I think your takeaway is wrong. It isn't the government doing naughty secret things but the government doing so with support from a plurality of the people. The patriot act is a non-partisan issue that gets renewed every administration. Snowden and Assange should be locked up accroding to a majority of americans.
Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.
You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.
> The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.
Where do you think that fear comes from? It can be fabricated using real or fake events anytime the government wants to pursue a political or financial goal. Modern media is a government mouthpiece, even in apparent liberal democracies, and is used to sway public opinion in any direction.
This mechanism is also exploited by political enemies, to sow dissent and social unrest, crippling democratic systems.
The original fear of terrorism was very real, but they sacrificed theirs and their childrens freedoms for temporary security. The cowards let the terrorists win.
We live in the most information accessible time in history and in the US most people can read and write and are capable of researching topics on the internet. If someone is falling for fake information, it is not the media's fault, they can fact check any media themselves. It is because their ears are hearing the lies they crave. Even when you debate with people these days on many political topics they basically plug their ears and scream "fake news". They are more interested in winning culture wars than the truth. The immigrant family down the streer driving down home prices or having to attend diversity meetings at work is a greater concern than the FBI monitoring all their comms.
There have always been media and politicians that want to use fear to control the people. Why is now and why is the US special?
> There have always been media and politicians that want to use fear to control the people. Why is now and why is the US special?
The US certainly isn't special. We see the effects of disinformation in all countries. Increase in social tensions and belief in conspiracy theories, elections swung by social media campaigns, the radical right gaining power, Brexit, etc. These are all orchestrated in part by companies like Cambridge Analytica, foreign and local propaganda, troll farms, etc.
None of this is really new. What's made it special _now_ is the internet. It has given both local and foreign agents the reach and power to influence public opinion on an unprecedented scale.
> If someone is falling for fake information, it is not the media's fault, they can fact check any media themselves.
Really? Fact check it where, on the internet? If all sources of information are polluted to the point where it's either impossible or very difficult to discern fact from fiction, can we really blame people for believing what they read, hear and see?
But you're right that the average person won't even make an effort to doubt the information they're provided from whatever source they already align with. So, yes, education and critical thinking are crucial, but this is exactly what disinformation agents know how to exploit. Psyops and information warfare work, and they work better today than ever before.
> The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.
The modern state is far more freedom-restricting than any other type of state which came before, and this is due to technology. Historically there were many slaves who were freer than the “free” man of today. You’re also right that fear is the predominant feeling/force that maintains order in a modern state. See the book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...
> a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected
Except that's never been how democracies work. Going back to the first democratic greek city-states, to now, they all tend to operate on a number of different motivators, the last of which is law-makers changing what they do to fit the public interest.
Landed gentry and the aristocracy get priority, followed by merchants, and then the rest of the government gets its say, which often competes/clashes with other parts of the government. For the most part, anyone who gets elected got there through political savvy, money, and being exceptionally good at convincing people to trust them and give them power. So they're quite good at doing what they want despite what the people might want.
I agree that the people are often quick to give away their rights to secure their safety (or desires). But with transparency in government, people will notice the things they don't like (despite what they've given away or sold, including their principles) and can become outraged enough to reverse their previous acquiescence. You actually see this outside of democracies in most nations where people see enough bullshit that they eventually revolt.
I'm reading your comment as saying that if I don't think Snowden/Assange should be pardoned and set free, I'm implicitly supporting mass surveillance.
I wanted to provide a counterbalance to that view. Snowden is a complicated case - in my view it isn't as simple as 100% hero or 100% villain - but Assange is in my view relatively clear.
Wikileaks and Manning appear to have leaked anything they can. I don't support such a scattergun approach. Also, while some of their leaks pertain to surveillance (the vault 7 ones) most of them do not.
Then there's Assange. He was facing extradition to Sweden under a European Arrest Warrant for rape alleged to have taken place there, but instead skipped bail on the pretext it was all some US conspiracy. Until extradition was approved he was free on bail. Likely had he been extradited to Sweden he would also have been free on bail, and the burden of proof would have remained on prosecutors. I'm sure he would have had a fair trial.
Instead he made it to the Ecuadorian embassy and stayed until he made himself unwelcome. At which point he was arrested by the UK for skipping bail and has since been subject to the very extradition procedure that was his pretext.
I'm British, although I no longer live there. If you are the US government and you want to extradite someone legally I can't imagine a friendlier jurisdiction than the UK.
I'm also mildly irritated that the UN torture experts keep sounding off that this is torture. Not at all. Assange chose to enter the Ecuadorian embassy and in doing so chose to break the law by not attending court. He chose to remain there for a considerable time, making labelling him a flight risk so obvious as to be automatic. When he came out of the embassy, he was convicted and jailed of that crime. He has also remained there because he's currently subject to extradition proceedings and no judge is going to grant him bail. I'm certain living in a confined space in the embassy wasn't pleasant, but that was a choice. I'm certain prison isn't pleasant either (no matter what UK tabloids say) but that is a consequence. This is a far cry from what, say, the Syrian regime does.
I support encryption and anything that frustrates mass surveillance because I believe fundamentally that private citizens have a right to a private life and that invasion of that privacy should be specific and justified, including when it comes to electronic communications. I accept that law enforcement will sometimes be faced with a situation in which they cannot decrypt communications between two almost certain criminals and this may make their job harder, and I'm happy with that trade-off. In the end, all a pervasive backdoor does is target law abiding citizens, as criminals by definition won't feel bound to put their keys in escrow or whatever. They're already developing their own handsets and the police have shown themselves capable of targeting them (encrochat).
At the same time, if Assange is extradited to the US tomorrow then good riddance. I don't see that I have to support him in any way in order to object to mass surveillance, pervasive monitoring and mandated backdoors.
I kind of had this realization when reading about things the government did in the past, like air-drop LSD onto soldiers, agent-orange, psychic experiments, and other nonsense.
My first instinct was 'wow, those wacky 60's', but then it slowly dawned on me 'what's changed?'. Nothing, nothing has changed.
> we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
How does that help? For me the lesson of the Snowden affair has been that it does not matter whether we know what the government is up to, because they will do what they want to us regardless; there is nothing we can do about it.
This is what proponents of small government fear, and by extension why creating more organizations where a small group of people deciding for a large group is bad, because they can be corrupted. See for example any union that has existed for more than 10 years and how they are called "corporate unions", in an intentionally blind case of "no true Scotsman".
Also one of the reasons communism doesn't work - the mechanisms needed for it to be implemented centralize even more power to a central committee than with other systems of government.
I agree, the world-view really changes once you realize this.
When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points / IX's during the 90s that had just been called "some old police telco stuff, ignore it."
I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.
I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.
The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.
Very eloquently phrased. Some of the commonly accepted truths and geopolitics narratives are quite disturbing and actually very Orwellian in a genuine (and not clichéd) sense. Narratives around China and Russia, narratives around our own liberty are completed warped, and to speak out singles you out. There’s definitely a chilling effect about what is acceptable to talk about and what isn’t.
> It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.
He is completely correct. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia repeatedly tried to join NATO. It was rebuffed by the US - why? Instead of forging a new alliance, the west preferred to uphold old friend-enemy distinctions, and instead moved the NATO ever closer to Russia‘s border, ignoring its security needs and breaking old promises (as evidenced by the embassy cable leaks).
Then, Ukraine shelled the Russian civilian minority population for years after the manufactured coup of the 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It started to suppress Russian language and culture. The Azov Nazi army committed cruel war crimes. Guarantees regarding the black sea fleet were no longer trustworthy. Essentially, they „kicked the dog until it bites“ and then blamed the dog. Putin repeatedly and very clearly communicated his (reasonable) terms for peace, and still people act like he can’t be reasoned with. Instead the West decided to send Ukrainian men into a meatgrinder, probably until the supply of recruits is exhausted.
Prominent establishment people like John Mearsheimer have been warning that this would be the inevitable outcome of Nato expansion, all the way back in the 90s, and that it was the greatest strategic error of the west. They were ignored by the same people that lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction to start another war.
The US State Department has a lot of blood on its hands.
>> After the collapse of the USSR, Russia repeatedly tried to join NATO.
That never happened. You will no find no trace of that in State Duma transcripts, policy papers or any other contemporary source. I can show you a long trail of adopted laws and doctrines for countries that eventually joined NATO (or failed in their bid), but nothing of this sort exists for Russia. It's a hoax invented to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
>> instead moved the NATO ever closer to Russia‘s border, ignoring its security needs and breaking old promises
The start of NATO expansion talks were preceded by a treaty between NATO and Russia declaring the respect for third countries freely choosing their allies. The narrative that NATO promised never to accept Eastern Europe (and broke that promise) was invented much later and conflicts with personal accounts and written agreements from that time.
>> Prominent establishment people like John Mearsheimer
His infamous lecture that presents a totally warped view of the world is the single most damaging piece of propaganda related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If that's what you're basing your views on, then it's no surprise that you are totally off the mark.
Even left-wing Guardian admits as much, you can find easily find other sources: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...
The West offered the "Partnership for Peace" program at the beginning of the 90s a distraction simply because they didn't see Russia as partners, but as defeated enemies. Even if we concede for a moment that this promise never happened, lots of people, among them Joe Biden, admitted back then that this would be a move that Russia could never accept. I think Bidens words were it would create a "vigorous and hostile reaction".
You can of course claim that this does not justify the invasion, but then you basically say Russia can never have legitimate security interests that run counter to the west.
> The narrative that NATO promised never to accept Eastern Europe (and broke that promise) was invented much later
That has been claimed often but proven wrong by the cable leaks.
> His infamous lecture that presents a totally warped view of the world
This is just a generic ad-hominem. If you have substantial rebuttals, I'm eager to hear them.
I don't put much value into what the Guardian write on topics like these. Joining a major international organization is a huge undertaking that involves thousands of people from many institutions over many years. Countries that joined NATO or tried to (Ukraine, Georgia) have a long paper trail of adopted laws, policy documents, parliamentary discussions and other bureaucratic artifacts. Show me Russia's trail.
For example, here's Polish timeline:
* 31 March 1991. Warsaw Pact dissolved.
* 11 March 1992. NATO secretary general visits Poland and says that the door to NATO is open.
* 10 April 1992. Polish defense minister and chief of staff attend NATO Military Committee meeting for the first time.
* 1 September 1993. Polish president sends a letter to NATO stating that NATO membership was a top priority of Polish foreign policy.
* 10 January 1994. NATO summit in Brussels. NATO proposes partnership in exercises, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.
* 12 January 1994. Polish president meets with Clinton in Prague and accepts the offer.
* 2 February 1994. Polish prime minister signs partnership framework at NATO HQ in Brussels.
* 12 September 1994. First joint exercises.
* 26 January 1996. NATO invites Poland to individual dialogue with NATO.
* 8 February 1996. Polish ministers of defense and foreign affairs send a latter to NATO accepting the invitation.
* 4 April 1996. Poland presents a vision for cooperation with NATO.
* 7 May 1996. The start of one-on-one meetings between NATO and Poland within the individual dialogue framework.
* 8 July 1997. NATO invites Poland into the organization.
* 16 September 1997. Offical accession talks begin.
* 14 November 1997. Polish foreign minister accepts the invitation.
* 16 December 1997. Polish foreign minister signs the official accession protocols.
* 28 December 1997. Polish ambassador attends a meeting of NATO's North Atlantic Council for the first time.
* 2 February 1998. Canada becomes the first NATO member to ratify Poland's accession protocols.
* 17 December 1998. Polish defense minister attends a meeting of NATO defense ministers for the first time.
* 29 January 1999. NATO secretary general sends a formal NATO invitation to Poland.
* 17 February 1999. Polish parliament ratifies the North Atlantic Treaty.
* 12 March 1999. Poland becomes NATO member and the official ceremony is held.
And this is only a very superficial overview. Every major step was preceded by tons of discussions, minutes from meetings, transcripts from debates. If you printed it all out, you'd need a dump truck to move all those documents.
What's Russia's timeline? What policy papers were adopted, what agreements signed towards becoming a NATO member?
>> That has been claimed often but proven wrong by the cable leaks.
NATO allegedly assured Soviet leadership in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastwards. Multiple Soviet participants of those meetings have denied that. When the hoax first appeared, Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze gave a lengthy interview, in which he not only denies those claims, but points out that they are anachronistic and don't fit the timeline of events. In 1990, Soviet leadership didn't forsee collapse of Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself. According to him, the possible NATO status of countries like Poland was never discussed, not with NATO, not within Warsaw Pact, not within the Communist Party circles in Moscow. That was totally out of the question and beyond comprehension, there was no need to seek any assurances.
Before Eastern Europe started negotiating entry, NATO and Russia signed a treaty in which they agreed to respect the right of other countries to forge alliances how they prefer. That was in May 1997. Former Warsaw Pact countries were invited into NATO in July 1997 and official negotiations began in September.
So even if such assurance existed, Russia and NATO agreed in that 1997 to the opposite before any Warsaw Pact country started official negotiations with NATO.
>> This is just a generic ad-hominem. If you have substantial rebuttals, I'm eager to hear them.
There are many ways he manipulates facts into his narrative, but I'll give you one very clear and non-political example how he misleads his audience. He shows a map of Russian share in European gas consumption at 8:48 (https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4?t=525) and says that Eastern Europe is heavily dependant on Russian gas. It shows countries like Finland at 100%. While it is true that all of Finland's gas comes from Russia, natural gas makes up only 2% of all fuels consumed in Finland. This is not by chance, but by official government policy, which keeps Russian gas consumption low in order not to give Russians a way to extort Finland as could happen if Finland depended on Russian gas to a great degree. Other countries in Eastern Europe have pursued the same policy and have low share of gas in overall consumption, even if all of it comes from Russia.
Or if you want another example, then at 6:10 (https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4?t=370), Mearsheimer shows a map of Ukraine divided into red and yellow depicting Ukrainian and Russian language areas, saying how Ukraine is linguistically (and not only) "a badly divided country". That's extremely misleading. Ukraine is a bilingual country, where Ukrainian language is dominant in western part of the country and Russian language is in the eastern part, but there is no divide, because most people speak both languages and they inhabit a shared cultural space instead of living in parallel societies that don't mix due to language barriers. Here's a great map illustrating that, pay attention to vertical bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map12_b.png Purple bars represent penetration of Ukrainian language and blue bars Russian language.
In regions like Kharkiv, only 10% of the population speaks only one language, evenly either only Russian or only Ukranian, so there's no reason to paint it as Russian. Out of 20 people, 18 speak both languages, 1 speaks only Ukranian, and 1 only Russian. Does this look like a "deep divide" to you?
‘Russia was provoked into this war because of things that happened 30 years ago’ is such bullshit apologia.
NATO was a defensive pact against Russia- and just because the Soviet Union collapsed does not mean Russia is somehow now moral or benign. They are run by brital KGB thug who faked his country’s 9/11 so they could build some patriotic solidarity killing Chechnyans.
What reductionist drivel. Discussion involves making actual points with logic and examples, in this case that would be examples about why Russia's actions (killing tens of thousands of civilians when the year prior to the war only 21 people were killed over territorial conflict, mainly by mines) and motivations (launching a war of aggression against a neighboring country that did nothing in the immediate time frame to justify such a murderous ESCALLATION on Russia's part, there was no immediate need to resort to overwhelming force) and are not evil (even though their troops use rape, pillage, and keep authority over their own through violence).
You can categorize some motives as evil, but the definition of evil is quite relative. You could extend it to "disturbing the peace", which Russia clearly did.
Big fact is that is was not unprovoked. The war started in 2014 when the US forced Ukraine to pick a side. The best thing for Ukrainians would be neutrality. But the US did not allow that.
I mean, "no reason" is understood to mean no good reason.
Say you walk next door and shoot your neighbour dead. Many people, even when they know it's because he made friends with his other next-door neighbour when you demanded he only be your friend, will say that you killed your neighbour for no reason.
> "being evil“ is a child's explanation
Fair enough. It was because Putin is a good person who was lonely and wanted to be loved and appreciated by his closest neighbour. That neighbour made him sad by befriending other people, and Putin had no choice but to slaughter thousands in an attempt to regain the exclusive friendship of his closest neighbour.
I don’t know that I agree. At least personally, I think there is a big distinction between a bad reason and no reason. No reason means random. A bad reason you can at least seek to understand - what caused this person to make this decision? We’re they abused? Mentally ill? Etc etc.
America would be a better place if it had more people furious that America is turning into Russia, and fewer people trying to justify that it's not quite as bad.
There's no comparison at all. The vast majority of the people who died in Iraq were killed by other Iraqis in a sectarian conflict. Yes, it was sparked by the US invasion, and they definitely should be blamed for both invading in the first place and for fucking it up once they did, but American soldiers did not, with very very few exceptions, go around indiscriminately killing civilians and leveling cities block by block WW2-style, like the Russians did in Bucha, Mariupol, etc.
At an individual moral level maybe it’s worse for a soldier to kill civilians directly, than to kill them indirectly by overthrowing the government and destabilizing the health system. But if you’re comparing nations I think you have to look at a macro level, not at the level of individual morality. “Team America: World Police” foreign policy has a much higher aggregate body count than Russia’s territorial expansionist foreign policy.
Yes. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst leaders in history and the neocons legitimately thought they could create a free market utopia in Iraq (lmao), check out Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They fucked up horribly and made Iraq worse because they were incompetent morons who fired the entire army and didn't bother to make sure people actually had basic services. Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire and is going to war in Ukraine for that reason, per his speech on February 22nd before the war.
It's like the difference between a drunk driver who runs over 12 kids and a school shooter. Both are bad but one is worse
It was a war done because Cheney and Rumsfeld hated Hussein and justified it with bullshit aspirational nonsense that didn't work. It was out of charity in the same way communist revolutions are, and in practice it was an atrocity.
Funny, that sounds like the Ukrainian public’s opinion about Zelenskyy before the war started. Dismal leader with rock bottom approval ratings and high levels of corruption. Still, that definitely doesn’t justify foreign invasion.
One was an electorate in a democratic country being disillusioned about a leader they freely elected. The other is and a genocidal dictator who murdered the previous dictatorial leadership to get to power, gassed civilians and launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands. Not sure how those two "sound alike" to you. Care to elaborate?
“Whataboutism” is only a thing if the comparison is in bad faith (i.e. irrelevance or significantly different scales of atrocity).
Directly comparing one unjustified, illegal and unjust war (Iraq) with another one (Ukraine) isn’t whataboutism, it’s a legitimate criticism of hypocrisy.
> It's important to remember that they invaded Ukraine for no reason,
That's extremely reductive. The situation is a bit more complex than that. I don't think they were right to invade -- not remotely -- I think it's abhorrent. But there is a little more historical context with the US and other regional tensions than Putin rolling a 1D6 and deciding that meant "hey, I'm bored, let's invade".
If it's more complex, why not add details of that complexity to the discussion instead your vague comments? You know, add know depth, knowledge, or detail instead of just saying 'but it's more complex'? Perhaps because they details don't justify a war of aggression? Because the details paint the aggressor in a starker light than your incredibly lacking 'a bit more complex'?
Hey ROTMetro, nothing of the kind. I dunno, you sound kind of hostile about it.
All it is that I read up on it last year. I've forgotten most of the details -- I'm not really interested in geopolitics and war, and I'm very interested in accessibility, botany, programming, science fiction and lots of other things, so the boring stuff gets crowded out pretty easily.
I'm sure it's not hard to find the same or similar sources that relate the geopolitical context of the Ukraine Invasion.
Amnesty International, the UN and Human Rights Watch documented very well how Ukrainian extremists and paramilitary organizations tortured and put people randomly into detentions after the allegedly USA friendly government was installed in the Ukraine in 2014. Here are some money quotes which I found interesting:
September 2014:
“Members of the Aidar territorial defence battalion, operating in the north Luhansk region, have been involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.
The Aidar battalion is one of over thirty so-called volunteer battalions to have emerged in the wake of the conflict, which have been loosely integrated into Ukrainian security structures as they seek to retake separatist held areas.
In the course of a two-week research mission to the region, an Amnesty International researcher interviewed dozens of victims and witnesses of the abuses, as well as local officials, army commanders and police officers in the area and representatives of the Aidar battalion.
Our findings indicate that, while formally operating under the command of the Ukrainian security forces combined headquarters in the region members of the Aidar battalion act with virtually no oversight or control, and local police are either unwilling or unable to address the abuses.”
“On the pro-Kyiv side, Amnesty International has particular concerns about Right Sector, a volunteer militia created by a pro-Kyiv nationalist political grouping .2 Former Right Sector prisoners detailed a horrifying spectrum of abuses, including mock executions, hostagetaking, extortion, extremely violent beatings, death threats and the denial of urgently-needed medical care. Using an abandoned Pioneer camp near the village of Velykomyhailivka, near Dnipropetrovsk, as an ad hoc prison, Right Sector has reportedly held dozens of civilian prisoners as hostages, extorting large amounts of money from them and their families”
“On 24 June 2016, a number of IDPs, together with a ‘self-defence’ group in Odesa, seized a communal building after numerous attempts at obtaining support from the regional authority to solve their housing problems.143 OHCHR notes a worrying tendency to resolve pressing socio-economic and political issues with the help of voluntary battalions and paramilitary groups.”
“In most of the nine cases Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch investigated, pro-government forces, including members of so-called volunteer battalions, initially detained the individuals and then handed them over to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), who eventually moved them into the regular criminal justice system. Some were later exchanged for persons held by separatists and others released without trial.
In three cases detailed in this report the SBU allegedly continued the enforced disappearances, keeping the individuals in unacknowledged detention for periods ranging from six weeks to 15 months. One individual was exchanged, the other two simply released without trial. With regard to two of the individuals, there is no record whatsoever of their detention.
The June 2016 UN report noted that the cases of incommunicado detention and torture brought to their attention in late 2015 and early 2016 “mostly implicate SBU” and specifically mentioned the SBU compound in Kharkiv as an alleged place of unofficial detention.
Based on the research findings detailed in this report, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch believe unlawful, unacknowledged detentions have taken place in SBU premises in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Izyum, and Mariupol. We received compelling testimony from a range of sources, including recently released detainees, that as of June 2016 as many as 16 people remain in secret detention at the SBU premises in Kharkiv. Ukrainian authorities have denied operating any other detention facilities than their only official temporary detention center in Kyiv and denied having any information regarding the alleged abuses by SBU documented in this report.
Most interviewees told Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch they were tortured before their transfer to SBU’s facilities. Several also alleged that after being transferred to SBU premises they were, variously, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and threatened with rape, execution, and retaliation against family members, in order to induce them to confess to involvement with separatism-related criminal activities or to provide information.“
“Members of extreme right-wing groups also conducted forceful and discriminatory actions against the Roma community. On 18 April, members of C14 extreme right-wing group forcibly confined Roma people at the main train station in Kyiv, checking IDs and searching personal belongings.128 Also, following threats to forcefully evict Roma residents, members of C14 burned down a Roma camp in Kyiv on 21 April. The police were present, but did not prevent the attack from happening”
“Since the beginning of 2018, members of radical groups such as C14, Right Sector, Traditsii i Poryadok (Traditions and Order), Karpatska Sich and others have carried out at least two dozen violent attacks, threats, or instances of intimidation in Kyiv, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, and other Ukrainian cities. Law enforcement authorities have rarely opened investigations. In the cases in which they did, there is no indication that authorities took effective investigative measures to identify the attackers, even in cases in which the assailants publicly claimed responsibility on social media.”
Yes, amnesty is certainly flawed and disliked by the USA. They are even banned in Russia. But you're dismissing the reports from Human Rights Watch and the office of the UN for human rights which I linked above. I think the UN's reports are "useful".
So, what do those NGOs have to say about Russia? Ukraine didn't start this little affair, remember. No amount of gaslighting or blogspam is going to change that.
I think you are arguing in bad faith. The UN is an intergovernmental org, which by definition can't be operated outside of government control (it consists out of member states' governments!). And neither Das Erste is an NGO. Das Erste is legitimized through public mandate by the people in Germany.
> So, what do those NGOs have to say about Russia?
Nothing good, but you could click through the links if you were genuinely interested.
>I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive
I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.
Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away.
It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that.
We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too.
This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down.
There's so many of them and they're so hyperbolic and wrong. Take good old @witte_sergei, claiming here during the huge gains Ukraine had last year that the "scale of Ukraine’s defeat at Lyman will become clear in the coming days": https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1575975278652043264
That's just one of them, this guy was on an absolute tear during this period. He deactivated his account to clean it up a little because it got a bit too obvious and hard to hide at one point.
Their strategy seems to be to just flood every channel with all sorts of ridiculous things to make people think "I can't make sense of this stupid conflict, it's too complex" and tune out. It's not a bad approach within Russia and it certainly strikes a chord within a few people in the west. It's just that if they don't clear their tracks when they're wrong you can pretty easily identify them for as pro-Kremlin trolls
I originally wrote something along the lines of "... is pretty far from under Kremlin control" and decided to simplify it before hitting send :) Oops, fixed now.
> A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. It’s the space around politics and think tanks and national security. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. It’s a vague description but that’s because of the nature of this unspoken expectation.
More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly.
Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.
Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse
The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system.
The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp.
The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clearly better about the US is, people being able to talk about it. But that only has meaning if it is done and actually leads to changes. Else it is only another layer of deception.
There is still a great difference between mainstream media and politicians avoiding certain topics and police activly supressing knowledge about historical events and rewriting history as they see fit (tiananmen square).
And completely banning Winnie Pooh, because some internet dudes made a funny picture.
Even beyond the war crimes; just the wars themselves. The WMD thing in Iraq is nice because not only was the war flimsily justified, but that justification itself was a lie.
However, a lot of the other wars are just bizarre. Taking Afghanistan - the costs, suffering caused and damage to the global economy are completely absurd. Nothing was achieved. There isn't any reason for someone in the US to even feel better after that debacle. The decision makers had to know that was what they were triggering, they did it anyway and many of them are still treated like reasonable choices for leadership positions.
That decision making was worse than anything Russia or China did, it was just pointless killing and destruction.
The cost of one party is the profit of the other. What was that money spent on? Weapons, ammunition, vehicles, food and clothes and other stuff for the soldiers. Someone sold that stuff, and those people needed these wars.
Guantanamo Bay is thousands of times smaller in magnitude than putting millions of your own citizens in concentration camps. It's also reprehensible and should be closed, no one disagrees on that
Maybe, but now we are discussing scales of evil and not whether evil is actually done. Moral superiority is effectively lost.
Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).
It pains me to say that, because I strongly align most of my values with US ones in this world, but this is fucking horrible and cant be ignored or marginalized. All done for profit of few since day 1.
> Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).
The hundreds of millions of people who lived under Soviet communism (entire Eastern Europe, South East Europe, Central Asia) are fucked badly for generations.
There are NOT millions of people in “camps” in China, that’s a bizarre claim made by some so called researchers like Adrian Zenz. 1000s or 10,000s at most. And do you even know what the rationale for these so called “camps” are for?
Do you have any citations for that dismissal? Multiple researchers have the Uyghurs on the order of a million people, plus something like half that number of children separated from their families into boarding schools, and the primary reason for the decline in camp population being the preferential switch to forced labor programs rather than giving up on the genocide.
This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by calling it hand wavy and pseudo intellectual but this is the exact attitude I’m talking about. It goes, “Everybody knows [something] [something]” and that’s usually a big warning sign for me; I know because I had to examine some of my own beliefs that way and it was painful to realise that most of it was talking points I had unfortunately picked up from so called thought leaders.
It’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to discuss Russia because a lot of that is actually true, but why don’t you hold America to the same standards? Also regarding the concentration camps thing, this is another narrative. Can you describe to me what you think is going on in China? I’m genuinely curious. My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay, because you know, they had terrorist attacks where there were hundreds killed in stabbings in Xinjiang but you probably don’t know about that right? It seems all that people know is the pictures of lots of Muslims sitting in blue overalls behind wired fences, which has been deliberately used to evoke comparisons to gas chambers and the Holocaust, by ASPI. But when I say this, people often have a knee jerk reaction which is along the lines of: “How can you support genocide or another Holocaust, you’re evil.” Which is the exact problem because the whole premise of the discussion has been completely warped by so called accepted “truths“ and people manipulating our emotions in a classic appeal to pathos. Could the world really be this cartoonishly black and white and good and evil, where my side is morally righteous and our adversaries are morally despicable? This is exactly what Orwell described in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
Regarding the concentration camps narrative, just Google ASPI and you’ll realise that about 70% of this narrative originates from them. Not only that but they’re literally funded by the military industrial complex (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Thales) and their plan worked because Australia recently bought billions of dollars worth of crappy missiles from the very companies that sponsor this so called “think tank”. It’s most definitely NOT a conspiracy theory and it’s very revealing that these think tanks can be this brazen. If you want to get to the root of this, just search for the origin of common narratives like this one and you’ll find it’s just a handful of sources all repeating the same misleading points. You’ll be shocked at how easily narratives can be seeded in the media.
>My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay
Guantanamo Bay isn’t for US citizens though. You can’t be arrested in the US for being Muslim and be sent to Guantanamo bay.
They aren’t in any way similar because it’s not used against citizens, which is strictly what China’s concentration camps are for.
The military has claimed they could keep a citizen there indefinitely, but they haven’t yet and if they did it would get challenged in court pretty quickly.
Politicians leverage anti-China rhetoric to get votes while mainstream media use it to get an audience.
Just write "China bad" and automatically get 2x more views and clicks.
When was the last time you read something positive or even neutral on China in the mainstream media? I can't remember the last time. Probably before Trump.
1.4 billion people and not a single positive thing happens in China, according to Western media.
Show a Chinese person being happy? Must be CCP propaganda.
You didn't automatically say "China bad"? CCP shill.
Show a Chinese company having international success? Must have stolen the tech.
Social media app that US teens love to use? China must doing mass surveillance on Americans.
This sort of black and white demonizing of China creates extremist views. You can see these extremist views on China all over HN, where one expects users to not be easily deceived. I was wrong.
People are so concerned and fearful of pro-China propaganda that they don't even realize they've been drinking propaganda from the other side as well.
Mainstream media gets more views and clicks by generating fear, anger and saying "China bad":
* Your view of China turns negative over time
* Politicians need your vote in order to advance their careers
* Politicians say "China bad" to get your votes
* Media quotes politicians saying "China bad"
* Your view of China turns even more negative
* Politician's approval ratings are down
* Politician says "China bad" to distract you
* Your view of China turns worse
Because of this endless cycle, it's career suicide for a US politician to not be anti-China. Any US politician objectivity on China has been lost since 2016.
And it's not like there are alternative media since the media landscape has consolidated into a handful of powerful conglomerates.
I know some will accuse me of being anti-western or pro-CCP below. No. I'm not. I'm anti-extremists.
The fact that even people on HN are convinced by the good (western) vs evil (China) narrative shows you how effective this sort of thing is.
> My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay ...
Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!
This makes no sense. The conflict started in 2014, you point to an article from 2014, how does that show years of bombs? In addition Russia no longer keeps up the lie that the 'little green men' that invaded Ukraine were just ethnic Russian Ukrainians already in Ukraine. They admit that they invaded with Russian troops. Soldiers will often have their service in 2014 hyped in online obituaries when they are eliminated now. Ukraine was responding to an unannounced invasion by it's much larger neighbor with the weapons is has at hand (weapon's that Russia also has and uses). What a non-point made with non-evidence trying to place blame on a country that was invaded. Do you also use 'how she was dressed was asking for it' as an arguement?
> there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life.
> Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power.
How do you know that this is true without mind reading or lie detection powers? I'm not being sarcastic. You see these people talking and have somehow arrived at the strong belief that they do not believe what they are saying. How?
First, it’s because I noticed myself and others doing this through observation and intuition. Secondly, it’s because there are literally accounts and articles where these people say out loud what they’re doing. E.g The Tucker Carlson example wasn’t me just surmising something, I read it in an article where acquaintances literally said he held no outrageous views privately and was literally doing it to rile his audience up. Same for other Republican politicians who appear “rabid” and “crazy” in the Twittersphere to rile up their constituents, and then clock off work and behave completely normally, like flicking a switch. My impression is that the left thinks they’re morally superior for not supporting so called Republican crazies but they’re being played like a fiddle too, since they ALWAYS fall for this rage bait theatre and think that lambasting conservatives is actually constructive or achieves anything.
Ah yes, Tucker Carlson who was dropped by Fox News for managing to lose them $750m after refusing to reign in his messaging on Dominion, and then during discovery his personal messages and recordings include such explicit gems found in court filings as:
* "Now this guy may be a child rapist," he says, "I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her."
and
* When the show host describes 14-year-old girls at Mr Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he says: "If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario."
and then
* Mr Carlson refers to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as "the biggest white whores in America", he calls the journalist Arianna Huffington a "pig" and says that Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton are "anti-man".
Yes I'm sure that guy who has day in and day out pushed "extreme" narratives for so long is just a totally well-adjusted person. You know, just like Bill O'Reilly who proceeded him ... what's that? He went down for sexual harassment in the workplace? [2] Total outlier. Definitely all an act.
Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections.
The only incorrect part of that is that it played an important role in his winning the election. But that part isn't necessary for the whole thing to be very bad, in my view.
Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.
I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny.
Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.
The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly.
It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that.
That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.
Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?
There was a ton of discussion about those claims but it largely stalked because the leaked emails didn’t show anything significant. You can still find Bernie die-hards claiming a conspiracy but they’re generally ignored because there’s no evidence that he did anything but lose fairly.
when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?
Trump openly asked for help from Russia on national TV. I don’t see how the existence of some degree of Russian collusion is debatable given that it was done in the open.
I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump
won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.
no, I also believe he misspoke, but the point was, "we" take trumps jokes at total face value, as to actually believe he asked the russians, where if you watch the video, and know anything about how trump talks, you know he was not really asking them to do that, but making a joke. Something he often does. It may have been a stupid joke to make, all things considered, but it was one nonetheless.
If you can suspend blind faith in the media narrative and out-of-context clips, and smear campaigns, and see what the man said, you'd see that too.
Trump is a moron for many many reasons, but not what they accuse him of
i brought it up as such to hopefully be able to spark the idea that saying words does not mean that the words without any context means exactly what they are at face value.
Whether it was delivered on, is irellevant, if I made a joke asking putin to hack into a US aircraft carrier to find surveillance of their toilet facilities, and it happened, would it logically follow that they did it because I said so?
also, facts are facts, let Hillarys emails speak for themselves.
we had to hear nearly every single day from the talking heads and top democrats how they had seen mountains of evidence of direct collusion, and yet it was not presented. Did you read the müller report? I did.
edit:
and isnt it also entirely possible that if russia did "respond" to trumps "ask", they did it to make "you" believe he colludes with them, to hurt him?
Makes a fun sound bite but given the context was he was speaking about a program for people to navigate voter suppression, do you really think he has a secret voter fraud plan and accidentally revealed it like that Politicians speak a lot and I know I myself can mix up words sometimes and I don’t speak nearly enough.
> OK, trump wanted the TRUTH to come out, he wanted facts exposed to the american people, that admittedly benefitted him, but still, facts relating to illegalities to his political opponent.
That’s just clearly false.
> Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails
So basically Trump solicited a third party to commit a crime on his behalf. As far as I know that makes you an accessory. Also Russia later also hacked the RNC so the lack of release of anything incriminating there leads a reasonable person to conclude I think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party. Notice how especially pro-Putin right wing media has been since that time period.
The Meuller report is pretty thorough. If you haven’t read it at least find unbiased analysis of what it shows.
> Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails
Emails that were deleted in a crime, that should have been public record. so while he may have been soliciting a crime (he didnt, and there were never charges, also, if you knew ANYTHING about trump, you knew he joked when he said that. but regardless), he wanted the truth to come out
> think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party.
yeah you think, but you have no evidence, its entirely possible there was nothing there, and we have some evidence to point to that, regardless of how criminal the RNC may have been(and they are for sure every bit as bad as the democrats), in that Trump has talked plenty about how he put great effort to not having any digital copies of important stuff that COULD be hacked, and in addition to that, invest in "cybersecurity"
One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If you were a spook of a geopolitical adversary, one of the most effective things you could do to undermine the US would be to undermine their (hugely powerful) intelligence apparatus. There is a reason a a lot of US-critical media comes out of Russian and Chinese state sponsored media.
While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.
Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.
> parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive
That was out of left field. What about people who believe it was plausible that Russian intelligence services were behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta emails, that the intent behind those leaks was to interfere in elections, and that such leaks had a non-trivial influence given the election was so narrow? That seems like a reasonable set of beliefs to hold, not "absurd official lines". I don't have access to the evidence behind the set of claims, but it strikes me as highly plausible.
Many of these "spook-adjacent types" (why not just call them "NPCs", wasn't that the lingo as of a week ago?), don't believe such attempts are primarily trying to skew the outcome in favor of Trump, they believe a general effort is being made by Russia and China to weaken confidence in elections, liberalism, democracy and the West broadly. Not because Russia and China are intrinsically evil, but because they are rivals, and as rivals have found an effective tool capable of undermining from within. The DNC/Podesta email leaks being only one of the more visible outcomes of these efforts.
I thought it was pretty widely believed before the snowden leaks that the US (and in particular the NSA) did warrantless surveillance of US citizens. What was lacking was credible evidence; anyone who claimed it was widespread before snowden could easily be written off as a conspiracy theorist.
It would have been a big scandal if Snowden revealed that the NSA was not doing what he said they were doing. That is, it was well known that the purpose of the NSA was to do exactly that.
> Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience.
You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens.
It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage.
Everything in the above comment is propaganda by someone who wants you to not look at the evidence because it would instantly discredit their position. If you want to know what Snowden actually did - go look at a random sampling of the documents, and tell us what you see.
In the last ten years technology has increased substantially. In the last five years AI has advanced significantly.
That is worth really letting sink in.
I try my best to avoid every kind of online discussion on these topics that I reasonably can avoid. Some might even see it as paranoia. But I assume that every single thing I post online (or say on the phone, send in text, or write in emails) is traceable back to me directly, that it is being captured and stored by multiple agencies and countries and that it is all fed into AIs that are at least as capable as GPT-4.
Imagine a Gov-GPT where you can ask it: "Tell me everything I need to know about John Smith" and the AI can related his job history, credit score, recent emails at home and work, his phone calls, his purchases, his political opinions, his spiritual beliefs, his likely weaknesses ... all smartly formatted in a succinct essay that we know and love from ChatGPT.
My question is, if we aren't there already, how long until we are?
Just an example, if you're into the Google ecosystem (which kids are, right from the school days) - it knows almost everything about you, more than your ex-friends and spouse - and combined with Bard or AI, very well... you can now imagine.
Indeed. I guess that whole DUAL_EC_DRBG random-number-generator story - the NSA backdoor deal with RSA is essentially true? No confessions yet it seems, however.
TIL that the Arab polymath al-Kindi invented frequency analysis & wrote the first cryptanalysis book ‘Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages’, in the 9th century.
If you're interested in this sort of thing you'd probably like David Kahn's The Codebreakers. It's pretty much the authoritative source of what's publicly known about the history of cryptography. I believe he had some trouble getting it published at first, actually, because he made what was considered sensitive material more accessible.
I think people would be surprised and sickened to know just how cooperative the big tech companies are with the intelligence agencies. Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems. Yes, Telcos have had to this as well, but I don’t think many people know that Microsoft has proactively done this.
Xbox live is mainly built on a custom VPN protocol. The only part they don't encrypt is their chat in order to allow "lawful intercept". This is a custom protocol to allow this at the level of TCP and UDP called VDP so that you can't really forget to flip the 'don't encrypt' flag for surveillance.
They also switched Skype to using a centralized system for signalling when they acquired it. It's still decentralized at the protocol level, simply Microsoft whitelists their own nodes as supernodes.
Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.
Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.
The article you've linked to doesn't seem to implicate them in particular. Apple, Google and dozens of other then-popular companies were also forced into positions of security compromise as well.
Because of the name, however, it was speculated that the key would allow the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to subvert any Windows user's security.
Not only is that poor "proof", how do you propose a public key be used to subvert any user's security?
We have a crisis of morality in tech and society at large. When the ends justify the means, and the ends are in fact unending pursuits of power, then no amount of deception, deceit, collusion is off the table. And yes, people who work at FAANG et al are complicit.
There are enough examples of what happens if you as a tech company don’t cooperate with intelligence that I don’t blame them. There is nothing you can do against people with guns, gag orders, and secret courts when they show up and tell you to do something.
Though yes, Microsoft is a particularly grossly sycophantic player - their strategy clearly is to be the IC’s best friends because it will get them IC contracts and probably help protect/benefit them in many other aspects.
Or people care, but they don't care in the direction that GP wants. I want US spy agencies to spy on non-American living outside the US who have information that affects national security without being slowed down by too many procedures. I don't want them to spy on Americans, but the government actively works to prevent the agencies from doing this, so it's working as intended.
"I want US spy agencies to spy on non-American living outside the US who have information that affects national security without being slowed down by too many procedures"
Do you also want other national agencies to spy on US citizens without "being slowed down by too many procedures"?
No?
Well, if they did not do it before, because of "friendship", then they surely started doing it.
Further increasing the amount of illegal hacking for everyone.
I actually do believe, there should be some restraint with hacking each and everyone because of "national security", because that can applied to everything. There should be a real reason, a actual threat.
China and russia might have had no restraint like you. Agencies in EU countries actually did.
"There is no law that prevents countries from spying on each other, so I don't know what you think is illegal here. "
Depending on your definition of "law", is there a law preventing agencies from going somewhere else and killing and stealing as they see fit?
International law is kind of complicated, but the basic idea is to not interfere with each other to keep the peace.
And activly hacking foreign computers is considered interfering.
How would you consider the act, if a foreign agency would hack the Phone of Biden?
Probably hostile?
Well yes, that was how it was considered in germany, when it became known that the NSA did hack the phone of Merkel. The reason why we are still allies is merely, that russia and china are indeed worse. And that is the reason, why the US is still kind of "the leader of the free world". But keep on doing Guantanamo stuff, hack every friendly nation, say "fuck the EU" and other countries might decide one day, they might as well stick with china then.
Some african and asian states made that decision already.
Hacking into computers on foreign soil, sounds quite interfering to me, or would you be OK with me giving it a try at your computers/network?
"> is there a law preventing agencies from going somewhere else and killing and stealing as they see fit?
Yes, the laws of the country they go to"
Same with hacking. It is not legal, to hack computers here in germany.
And sure, Merkel wasn't surprised, nor was me, or anyone in IT security. But the general population was. They assumed naivly, ally means respecting the other party.
> would you be OK with me giving it a try at your computers/network?
I wouldn't be OK with it, but I wouldn't call it interfering either if you don't actually interfere with my actions after gaining access.
> Same with hacking. It is not legal, to hack computers here in germany
Then try to enforce those laws on other countries, and see how far you get. If the US sent an agent into Germany to kill someone, the killer would be held liable.
> They assumed naivly [sic] [emphasis added], ally means respecting the other party.
> How would you consider the act, if a foreign agency would hack the Phone of Biden?
Well, mostly they do not seem to care that much. Politicians have probably the worst opsec of all people. Mrs. Merkel was a target, but so was President Macron recently:
But I do believe the US government regulary makes an outcry because of russian or china hacking. And into NATO doctrin was a passage included, that makes physical strikes against hackers possible. So they do care.
Increasingly so, yes. In general, hypothetical kinetic responses to non-kinetic actions is a somewhat dangerous direction in my opinion, given the current geopolitical turbulence.
youtube has radicalized jihadi terrorists and white supremacists, facebook has manipulated emotions and played a role facilitating genocide in myanmar, tiktok is controlled by a genocidal regime, instagram depresses teen girls…
though this isn’t much new I suppose, how many times has nike been caught using child labor? how many waterways has nestle depleted, how many animals have been tortured for cosmetics… how many bison were slaughtered to spite the natives, how many whales for lamp oil…
we seem to always find something or someone to exploit
Microsoft is also responsible for the Orwellian (and as far as I know still secret/closed source) PhotoDNA, which is an incredible tool for censorship and surveillance.
A lot of people are dead or in jail because of that software, and not just “predators”.
How do we know that’s PhotoDNA specifically? It seems odd to single that one product out as if there aren’t many people who could use open source tools to build surveillance systems. China doesn’t have a shortage of CS majors.
It's only used to match on known child sexual abuse images. If you're someone who has collected any of these, then you deserve to be locked up in jail. No excuses.
You have no evidence that it has “only been used” that way. There is NO technical reason it is limited to CP. It can just as easily find tank man or pics of feds murdering children at Waco.
Kind of an older article, but illustrates the situation pretty nicely.
Microsoft has also done development work in recent years to enrich the data with more identifiable information and to make the data easier to process for surveillance.
“Companies interested in the contract included Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle”
and
“The deal was considered "gift-wrapped for Amazon" until Oracle (co-chaired by Safra Catz) contested the contract”.
So pretty much every single large cloud provider went after this, though Google did eventually bow out early. Other than winning the second round of the bidding (and not actually going live), is there something Microsoft did specifically that warrants being singled out?
Companies only grow if they are allowed to otherwise they are legislated out of existence. I imagine that growth is actually encouraged if they are bearing fruit.
Azure and AWS have so much money coming in from the government that I doubt either company is going to find anything but jelly in their backbones when it comes to government demands for data.
>Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping you from ignorance is that constant stream of classified knowledge. It’s hard not to feel superior, not to say things like “If you only knew what we know” all the time. I can understand how General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, comes across as so supercilious; I only saw a minute fraction of that secret world, and I started feeling it.
This really well describes the feelings I was getting around the time of the revelations, as I scrolled through the secret documents, it's like a different world out there.
Hackers can hack. But these agencies can do so much more.
Intelligence agencies have the law behind them, can force you/the hardware suppliers (so called "interdiction")/software providers (PRISM etc) to play ball and force you to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) at the end of the day.
Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply).
The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.
Again, it's just a different world out there. Would love to know what their capabilities look like nowadays.
To take what you've said a little further, intelligence agencies have the "law" behind them, but once you become aware of everything they (all of them, worldwide) are doing, you get a completely different perspective on the "law" itself.
Being involved in these activities can also diminish your ethical base, which I guess explains some of the crazy law-ignoring/law-breaking activities within all governments.
In the USA the law about unions have neutered them enough that what you say is true, but in Europe where they have sector level unions and sympathy strikes, unions give people material power over their conditions
Yes, agencies have all these capabilities, but at the same time they rarely sway the practical course of history. When the "euromaidan" demos in Ukraine forced regime change, and the Russians hacked and leaked all US/EU diplomatic chatter around it, the contents were utterly banal and predictable. There was no grand conspiracy or execution, just a bunch of interests scrambling to react.
Intercepting communications gives them a leg up, but that's about it.
People love to assume that the CIA/NSA/etc are all powerful all knowing cabals running the entire world, while also believing that government is inherently incompetent.
Anybody who’s been in a large organization, even one that’s highly selective or difficult to join, knows that they’re as a rule chaotic, dysfunctional, and reactive with no coherent or coordinated planning. They’re also composed of individuals who usually run the gamut of moral and honest to deceitful and self serving - but the “sociopathic puppet master genius” is more of a fictional archetype than something that exists in reality.
This would be my take too. From all the past leaks of cables, the perhaps most hilarious revelation is the overall humdrum, including the speculative, often incorrect, and sometimes rude chatter between diplomats and intel people.
He claimed that he was actually jailed in retaliation for not playing ball with the NSA before 9/11. Idk if what he did specifically is something you’d usually be charged with insider trading or fraud for, which would seem to me the best indirect evidence of who’s story is right.
The whole situation was a mess. One of the things Nachio was accused of was inflating the share price by making statements that growth would continue when it didn’t. However, the reason it maybe didn’t is that the CIA blocked the lucrative contracts that Qwest was otherwise eligible for in retaliation for Nachio not going along with their request for illegally wiretapping everyone (he asked for a court order). Suddenly statements that would have been reasonable looked not so. However, he did also engage in insider trading but it’s less clear if that’s again just the CIA keeping an eye on him and helping the prosecutors get him through dual reconstruction (ie yes he did wrong but the government went about figuring that out illegally).
Of course a lot of this is just conjecture and we may never know what happened from the government side.
Or that others weren’t doing it but the CIA helped point prosecutors in the right direction using information that is illegal for the government to have.
Yeah I’m saying if that were the case it would be evidence for his story. I legitimately don’t know though the details of his actions and the extent to which they are unusual or not.
>Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply). The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.
>Afterwards, Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in. He also wrote that "the government argued that, since the 'inspection' of the data was to be carried out by a machine, it was exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment."
So true. And don’t forget that these agencies answer to an elite group of people that benefit from specific world orders that promote various industrial complexes transnationally.
And people that get too specific get daphnied, lombardied, assanged or jfk’ed.
Or maybe not, but you won't find out because all media above a certain threshold is in a spotlight, and has been since before CIA bragged about its all encompassing media operations 50+ years ago.
I remember this info being somewhat widespread when the internet was still new, but wikis, forums and blogs are slowly being disappeared from search or drowned in noise while clownish conspiracies have conveniently smoke-screened all attempts to create an alternative to the status quo.
I often wondered what could be the reason that triggers the “dead internet” theory. And muddying the information we can share freely means we cannot share freely anymore.
Serious question, why are the Snowden leaks so revered and not the reporting of James Risen several years earlier? Risen exposed operation Stellar Wind which was the grossest abuse of spying apparatus approved by the Bush admin over the express objections of their own DOJ. Risen also appeared in court for every summons about his activities and was dutifully defended by the NYT until he was ultimately exonerated.
I think because one day everyone woke up and heard about PRISM, including a lot of the tech companies, which had to go into damage control to deny their involvement. It was big news with brands that every American was familiar with.
That explains why Snowden was a big deal, but as soon as we all figured out that PRISM wasn't what he claimed it was (and Greenwald stupidly believed without running the docs he was given by experts) and instead just a data integration project for processing communications from targeted foreigners, Snowden should have become a smaller deal.
> Serious question, why are the Snowden leaks so revered and not the reporting of James Risen several years earlier?
Because, historically, the US Press is compulsively deferential to the NatSec state.
It's the same reason the press twistered themselves to report the Mark Klein revelations as a warrantless wiretapping issue - instead of the NSA live cloning internet backbone traffic in a room custom built by AT&T for the purpose.
That the US press was loudly silent over US Gov's revenge campaign against - not only James Rosen but also James Risen and other journalists who outed NatSec wrongdoing - is for me one of US Journalism's most defining (non)actions.
by the time we got to the point where PotUS candidates were pausing their campaigns so they could return to DC to vote in favor of amnesty for AT&T,
99% of the coverage was about the ancillary warrantless wiretapping issue; NSA's bulk collection of US citizen's data was soundly ignored. Every bit of this process was stunning to witness.
Not to diminish anything he did, risen pushing the NYT to eventually publish was really cool, but delaying that push himself until he could monetize it in a book always bothered me. I always thought snowden, hale, and the "insider" whistleblowers were looked at kind of differently; they faced prosecution. Really wild what has become of bill binney and kiriakou; they aren't like snowden IMO either.
IMO because of the impact they had in the media. I would argue Snowden revelations put privacy and data protection questions on top of the list across the world, for instance.
2004, far less Internet connectivity to sustain awareness and outrage, and less impact.
Our lives weren't nearly as completely mediated by online services.
"Total Information Awareness" made a splash in the news around 2004 also, but then faded.
Also, Bush's team was busy outraging everyone so many other ways, like blowing up Iraq for oil money, and making up nonsense legal defenses for kidnapping and physical torture of civilians.
I don't think that's it. I think it's more that the public was just more accepting of this kind of thing closer to the wake of 9/11. But regardless, that may explain the muted reaction when the story broke, but not why everyone seems to have forgotten about it. I honestly have a hard time understanding what it is that Snowden even exposed given that the PATRIOT ACT was public record.
Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.
> If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't.
The thing that was pretty apparent from Snowden's leaks is primarily that they don't need to. This fear that "NSA can crack cryptography" is the wrong fear. First, as others have noted, there are legions of other researchers evaluating and attempting to break widely used crypto-systems. There is no reason to believe the NSA has some unique brilliant minds that aren't available elsewhere.
More importantly, though, why bother with a "frontal assault" on breaking crypto schemes when endpoint security is a million times more hackable. That is, usually at some point someone wants to view the encrypted data that is being sent, and at that point it needs to be decrypted, so why not just try to hack at that point (which is exactly what they do). As an example, just look at all the stolen cryptocurrency heists. All of these heists resulted from stolen keys or from implementation bugs, not from cracking the crypto schemes that protect cryptocurrency in the first place.
What I dislike about this comic is the subtle implication that torture is an effective means of information extraction - it suffers from the car keys phenomenon of how people think about torture.
Basically: if I threatened to hit you with a crowbar unless you gave me your car keys, you'd give them to me, because a car isn't worth anything.
Same story with an ordinary person's computer: they just don't have enough worth hiding that can't be repaired later, compared to serious injury. "Oh no, someone got my credit card! I'll have to argue for some chargebacks from my bank after I report it was stolen" rather then recover from a shattered knee-cap.
Take this as an anecdote, but I have a friend that works at the top of a large quantum computing program at a well known company and he related once that the government is making it very difficult for them to retain talent in the field and make progress. The government feels it has to be at the forefront of quantum tech because of the possibly game-changing encryption capabilities. It was a bit chilling to hear but not at all surprising.
As a participant in the "digital underground" since the early 80's, we were very aware of "ECHELON", "5 eyes", and other spying programs. The "Snowden revelations" are not really anything new, living a life around digital communications 20 years before most people ever heard of the internet it was clear very early that surveillance is just something the government is going to do. And yes, they definitely would consider it top-secret info if they did create a quantum computer capable of cracking modern encryption. We wouldn't know about it unless someone leaks it, but I don't really care if anyone leaks that info - they either already have it or will have it first so it's fair to just assume that they do have that capability.
I find odd enjoyment in observing how one arm of the government is pushing for quantum surveillance abilities while another is urging everyone to quickly adopt PQC.
Some cyphers maybe. But it's highly unlikely that all or even most in use are compromised. There are many cryptography researchers who aren't part of the NSA. Other nations for example. And banks obviously trust some cryptography.
I recall reading that government agencues forced the NIST to relax certain crypography standards so that they could still be reasonably broken with super computers.
I have a vaguely related question about Signal. People say it’s secure and encrypted but it was widely publicised that Sam Bankman Fried’s Signal messages were inspected by authorities. How did this happen?
There were cooperators in the same chatroom, a participant in the chats gave up their phone at an airport, or he volunteered it (probably not this). Same way it was obtained in all these cases: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22signal%22+AND+%22encrypt...
Signal protects your messages while it's on the web, on the way to your recipient. During this time, it is encrypted - but while on your or the recipients device, its plain text (as you can read it).
There are many ways to get to those messages, like getting access to your unlocked phone/unlocking your phone, if your signal is not password locked (and if they can't break that password), or doing this with your recipient.
How? Is it exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities (e.g., processor vulnerabilities), software vulnerabilities (e.g., apple's webkit vulnerabilities, google chrome + search JS vulnerabilities), or Wifi/Bluetooth vulnerabilities?
The only way I can think to intercept prior to encryption would be Key logger, so this would require an already compromised device. Alternatively the government could force a vulnerability state (e.g., the Perseus text message of doom). Is this also your understanding?
I prefer to point out: if only “interesting” people encrypt their messages, then encrypting your messages becomes a signal that you are interesting. As a boring person who thinks the state shouldn’t be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on anybody, I have a responsibility to encrypt my boring brunch plans.
I think “I’m not that important” is basically either the result of someone not thinking very hard, or it is a dishonest anti-encryption position. Embedded in it is the message that only certain types of people ought to be worried about the scrutiny of the state, and that the person holding the position is happy to take advantage of the fact that they aren’t that sort of person. Force them to face that position head-on, I think.
> What about as a boring person who does think the state should be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on people?
Sure. Not everyone has to agree with me. I think it is unpopular to be happy about intelligence agencies spying on us. So hopefully I can win over some of the in-between people by causing them to fully face their position. But if someone just fundamentally disagrees with me, I think this tactic won’t work. Coming up with arguments for people who fundamentally disagree with you is pretty difficult.
> And that person doesn't have to be anti-encryption, just anti-bad opsec.
I’m not sure I follow here. But in general, for example I don’t think it is reasonable to expect non-technical people who aren’t, like, spies to have perfect opsec all the time. So, like journalists and activists, they will inevitable slip up sometimes, anything we can do to mitigate that is good.
That's the thing; for someone who thinks "eye of Sauron" is acceptable, they don't think it means "writ large surveillance of everyone", they think it means "targeted surveillance via warrant of a credible threat to American interests domestic and abroad."
So you really have a disagreement on terms, not on merits.
I’ve presented one possible rebuttal to the “I’m not interesting, so I don’t need to encrypt my communications” position. “It is OK to spy on some people sometimes” is a different position, so a different rebuttal would be necessary.
It isn’t really clear to me if you are actually trying to make these arguments in and of themselves, or if you think they add light to the first point. So, I’m not sure how to respond, sorry.
I don't think you're being clear about what "eye of Sauron" means, but I think that's on purpose, as the argument in favor of the concept of using surveillance via warrants undermines your larger "right to privacy" point.
Ok. I guarantee I’m not that clever. I’ll avoid that particular phrase in the future. I was just being informal, but yes, I can see that it is misleading.
I think we should have lots of encrypted communication out there, to make it a normalized day-to-day thing, and to make bulk surveillance more difficult.
You are right that “eye of Sauron” evokes a different idea, which is more like investigating a specific known target. If done correctly that could be OK in some cases.
The government can do whatever it wants in a non-democratic system. People in this case must use any means to organize themselves to overthrow the government cannot openly violate the rights of citizens because the mechanism of overthrowing the government through protest or votes work
We got a campaign of "Let's tear down the unelected and unaccountable government agencies," and millions of Americans voted for it. It largely didn't work.
I didn't follow the Snowden story because I don't have the background to evaluate the claims, but there is something I recall that hasn't been discussed yet.
Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.
>Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor.
This is a bastardized version of events. Snowden had a number of jobs that required high level clearance from 2006-2013. He supposedly took the final Booz Allen Hamilton job because it had a great deal of access to data, but he had long since passed the security checks necessary to get the job.
You can argue that there should be more checks done upon switching jobs, or that people with clearance should face more periodic checks to their current status, but there was no real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks.
So, was Snowden a visibly active protester against government surveillance before getting the job? If so, did the government fail to notice or did they notice and not care? How extreme should such activity be before it become a "real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks"?
First, you're missing the point. Snowden passed his security checks in 2006, when no one considers him anti-surveillance. That's why he had no real reason to fail any checks.
Second, some coworkers afterward the leaks said they thought Snowden had started to act disgruntled towards the industry, but he was never a "visibly active protester against government surveillance." He was an active cog in government surveillance from ~2006 til 2013.
You're kind of right that he seemingly only took the Booz Allen Hamilton job to get access to data, but every other detail you're way off on.
Basically, few people are able to escape the "Snowden good, US Gov bad" groupthink and really see what happened with Snowden. The guy was a massive traitor that made the US much, much less safe for probably a very long time. Remember US Gov actually DOES care about your rights. The CCP and Putin do NOT. He made the latter much stronger.
The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.
By your comments on this thread I am assuming reading comprehension and complex critical thinking are not your strong suits. And that's okay. Do realize that there are people who excel in these areas in which you are so clearly lacking.
I suppose this is supposed to make Snowden look bad. It doesn't.
The author is James Clapper, who Snowden's revelations proved lied in Congressional testimony about whether the NSA was collecting information on millions of Americans. So when he says that "multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts [...] were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned [Snowden]," he's talking about the Congress that he lied to about these programs. How are we supposed to trust that Congress can conduct effective oversight when the intelligence community lies to them?
(We shouldn't.)
Snowden embarrassed the intelligence community and they won't forgive him for it. Americans (and others) should take that into account when they read or listen to the intelligence community's criticisms of Snowden.
I haven't heard many criticisms of Snowden that fall outside of:
A) He's a Russian plant, HE IS IN RUSSIA!one!11
Which is easily disproven because he could have done a lot more damage from the inside and it's the US that forced him to stay in Russia, Snowden was provably en route to Ecuador when his passport was revoked.
"But he doesn't criticise Russia"; well, he can't leave and it's not his fight, his fight was for the soul of the western world (primarily America, though as a Brit I am glad he revealed what he did); Russia is very well known to be corrupt, there's nothing more to be said on that.
B) He put lives at risk!!two!2
Also very easily disproven as he only gave uncensored data to two Journalists whom had a track record for ethical disclosure (even to their own detriment).
And honestly, those put at risk by what was actually leaked deserved it. In the sense that yes, running massive surveillance networks against your own citizens should be dangerous and if anything they got away with it very very easily.
I literally just posted a dismissal of your claims in a sibling comment.
You owe it to yourself to think critically about what you think you want out of intelligence services, being secretive is one thing, not permitting any oversight is not ok and being in direct violation of the law is also not ok.
It's not a hypothetical situation, people were using these tools to stalk women for crying out loud, you can't defend that. Those tools shouldn't have even existed in the first place, it was a flagrant violation of authority.
The reason in the UK police are charged with harsher sentences than ordinary criminals is because they have authority and an enormous capacity to do harm. So do these agencies.
There isn't a system in the world which isn't subject to abuse, every police force in the world for example suffers from it. Some people such as yourself take that to mean they need to be torn down, the rest of us just think it means there needs to be more controls to minimize those abuses.
It's not as though MOST of the activity of these agencies is stalking women, and it's profoundly disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
> Some people such as yourself take that to mean they need to be torn down, the rest of us just think it means there needs to be more controls to minimize those abuses.
Yeah. some oversight would be nice.
Shame that this is exactly what I am advocating for and not at all for tearing down intelligence services… Shame that this is not happening and this was the entire problem.
But where are the countless, or at least fragmentary, stories where they did much, or any good?
Secrecy and transparency and democracy just don't mix well, imo, if you want an absolute state that's fine.
I can also agree that some rare situations may require absolute secrecy for some services, but that then must be limited and fully disclosed for later oversight, control and consequences.. 10 years is already a lot, 20 years absolute max, in my opinion. But almost nothing ever is, except what's leaked, that is shocking.
How is anyone to say what most of the activity of these agencies are without any oversight. That’s why the leaks happened in the first place, it was the only way to say ‘hey we need more controls on this stuff’. Unless you’re suggesting that was going to happen anyway somehow?
Yeah he should've martyred himself when those who actually ran these programs got away with it completely. And it's amazing that you attack Russia for being what it is, an authoritarian country ran by its intelligence agencies... While using the exact same rhetoric that is always used to justify authoritarianism. Actually, you might very well be surprised by how much you'd agree with the Russian government if we go by your last sentence.
I hope you realize that all of this was justified because of the war on terror. It had nothing to do with Russia. They weren't going against a super power (which you could at least argue might justify the means), they were trying to find boogeyman terrorists that may or may not have existed in the US. If as you said they did their damn job, they wouldn't need to cast such a wide net like they did with their surveillance. And we would also have had more example of said surveillance actually saving lifes or leading to results.
What we do have instead is countless example of suspects being listed as at risk but nothing being done since the lists are so huge and impossible to act upon. it's not even a form of survivorship biais either; authorities are very very happy to announce that they thwarted some terrorist plot before it happened. Its just that it happens very rarely.
This is such a ridiculous take. The fact that Snowden did not somehow martyr himself enough for you has no bearing on the important information that he leaked. He could have easily kept his mouth shut and enjoyed his cushy job in Hawaii like so many others do. Instead he threw it all away and is now stuck in Russia. Now you’re saying that we shouldn’t look at anything he revealed because he’s not willing to speak out against Putin and get thrown in the gulag?
What would be a sufficient level of martyrdom for you? Should he have set himself on fire on the steps of the Capitol?
He didn't just ran to Russia, he went to China first.
It would be lot more believable he did it for the greater good, if he only took documents related to internal spying (and not bunch of other stuff) and if he didn't take the documents on joyride through territories of biggest ideological enemies of his home country.
But now he has to live in Russia, which I guess is punishment enough.
> The materials Manning had leaked were embarrassing; the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance.
Dang, sounds like they should have cast a finer net or something eh?
> he had appointed himself as judge over what he had seen, and then, without conducting an investigation or calling out wrongdoers, was going to bring about justice in ways that multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts - which were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned him - apparently were unable or unwilling to do.
And yet the American people, who ostensibly hold the reins here, weren't uniformly enthused about what they heard. This is an insider with immaculate insider mentality griping about a whistleblower whose complaints in the previous paragraph apparently went miles overhead. What an eye-roller.
> the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance.
Good, maybe this will incentivize intelligence agencies to not abuse their power knowing people will whistle-blow and reveal secrets. When you remove all other methods of accountability, this is what happens. Intelligence agencies did this to themselves.
Maybe, but more likely, if history has anything to show, is that they just become more draconian in their methods as well as increased ability to identify and go after leakers.
Exactly. They talk about how he ruined their ability to spy on bad guys, but never mention how they were missing that ability to spy on citizens and friendly foreign governments. Maybe if they had stuck to spying on bad guys, Snowden would still be using his intellect today to help them.
He was flying to Ecuador and his passport was revoked when he was in Russia. If you speak out against the war in Ukraine in Russia you get shot, and he has a wife and kids now. He's done his part imo
Just a few tabloid rags like The Washington Post [1], The Guardian [2], and The Atlantic [3].
> That doesn’t mean he has to pledge allegiance during that period. Regardless it’s not what an American patriot does. That narrative is untenable now.
Pledging allegiance is required to obtain Russian citizenship, which grants him additional protections from the United States. It is also required to obtain a Russian passport, which is required because the United States revoked his American passport, made him stateless, trapped him in an adversarial foreign country, and would do everything in their considerable power to intercept him should he try to seek asylum elsewhere.
Sure, the timing makes for awkward optics, but I'm going to cut the guy some slack not only for what he's been through, but for having his reputation falsely tarnished as well.
> Russian citizenship, which grants him additional protections from the United States
Protections he apparently didn’t need for nearly a decade, but did once Russia was executing its genocidal war. Your “he’s merely scared of America” narrative doesn’t hold water.
> trapped him in an adversarial foreign country
No one made him travel and his passport was revoked before flying to Moscow, evidence elsewhere on the thread. He trapped himself!
> timing makes for awkward optics, but I'm going to cut the guy some slack
Russia is systematically raping and murdering Ukrainians while Snowden is giving his oath to Russia and you call that “awkward optics?”
>Protections he apparently didn’t need for nearly a decade, but did once Russia was executing its genocidal war. Your “he’s merely scared of America” narrative doesn’t hold water.
Protections he couldn't get for nearly a decade, but did once the law was changed and he was able to do so [1].
>No one made him travel and his passport was revoked before flying to Moscow, evidence elsewhere on the thread. He trapped himself!
He could have (and in hindsight probably should have) stayed in Hong Kong. Regardless, it's unclear when he knew his passport had been revoked. Even if he had known beforehand, he thought he had documents for safe passage to Ecuador.
>Russia is systematically raping and murdering Ukrainians while Snowden is giving his oath to Russia and you call that “awkward optics?”
Please reserve this emotional tripe for Reddit, where it belongs.
His passport had been revoked before he got on the plane. He got on the plane to "Ecuador" on a temporary travel document from Ecuador, knowing he was never getting off anywhere but Moscow.
I am not nearly as convinced as you that he was a Russian asset from the beginning. I think it’s also likely, absent more info, that he just had no other options than to align with and kowtow to Russia after he was in the US’ crosshairs.
But I don’t think you deserve the downvotes as I believe we need to be more cognizant that Russia/China/etc absolutely run their own intelligence operations and destabilizing the US + interfering with the US’ offensive and counterintelligence abilities is obviously gonna be one of their main goals.
I didn’t say he was a Russian asset from the beginning. I just said he was probably a traitor from the beginning. That may be quite complicated but he ended up a Russian asset.
What’s the reasoning then? As far as I can tell he thought he was doing the right thing at the time, even if you might think he was naive or misguided. Surely the support for his actions indicates to you there are people out there who would have done what he did if they were in his position no?
I guess, to me being a traitor has connotations of deliberate intent to do harm due to some kind of external loyalty. While he certainly betrayed the IC, besides him ending up in Russia (which realistically is like one of a handful of countries that would take a guy like that), I’m not aware of any signs he was acting on behalf of anybody except himself
It seems either like his goal was treason, and going public was a bargaining chip to avoid being extrajudicially disappeared somewhere or whistleblowing was his goal and doing it in an adversarial country with loads of confidential documents that have nothing to do with any possible NSA wrongdoing was a bargaining chip to avoid US prosecution.
The latter seems far more likely to me as an observer, but in either case, both public revealation AND harm to the US were on the table.
> As far as I can tell he thought he was doing the right thing at the time
That’s what he said, that’s not necessarily what was actually true. I no longer believe him given his subsequent actions.
> Surely the support for his actions indicates to you there are people out there who would have done what he did
If you’re suggesting that there could have been genuine patriotic whistleblowers, I agree. But Snowden’s actions have proven he’s not genuinely patriotic but a supporter of a genocidal regime.
> to me being a traitor has connotations of deliberate intent to do harm due to some kind of external loyalty
That’s not what the word means. Betrayal of country can occur for any number of reasons, for instance ego or greed are often involved.
You have to move past this idea of trying to reduce people to their most digestible easy to grasp form. It's limiting you and your understanding of the world.
Your assertion makes no sense. Snowden gained nothing from going to Russia, except for protection from the US government. He went from living in Hawaii on a very decent salary to living in a country in which he has no family, can't speak the language well, and can't travel internationally. Snowden has been very clear and consistent from the beginning about why he did what he did, and his reasons are justified.
If you're going to criticize Snowden for living in Russia, you'll have to propose a better course of action. There are very few countries in which American dissidents are safe. If Snowden had gotten to Ecuador, they would have turned him over by now, just like they did with Assange. EU countries wouldn't have protected Snowden - they wouldn't even give him a visa to allow him to testify in person about US spying on Europe.[0] If you want to see just how subservient the EU is to the US on these issues, recall that when the Americans thought Snowden might be aboard the Bolivian President's plane, they successfully pressured the Europeans to force the plane to land and to submit to a search.[1] They were willing to humiliate a foreign head of state just to hand Snowden over to the Americans.
If you go down the list of countries that are capable and willing to shield someone on the US' enemy list, you end up with a very short list. You can't blame Snowden for saving himself after handing over the documents to journalists. He's in one of the few countries that can actually shield him.
> When he voluntarily became a Russian citizen, swearing an oath of allegiance to Russia during their war of aggression against Ukraine I couldn’t maintain that view.
Does everyone who becomes a naturalized American citizen automatically support the Iraq War, the bombing of Libya, drone strikes throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, the supply of weapons for the war in Yemen, America's support for Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, and everything else the US does? Snowden has been forced by circumstance to live in Russia. Becoming a citizen of the country you live in generally makes sense, as it affords you more rights and permanent status. That doesn't make Snowden a spy.
Exactly. Anyone who doesn't see this is deluding themselves. The biggest threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere are functional democracies their citizens can point at as an example of what they could be instead. That's the reason why "patriotic" Russians hate Poland so much (because it succeeded after freeing itself from their rule) and why they absolutely had to prevent Ukraine from following in that same path no matter what. NATO is just an excuse, the real reason is democracy and rule of law. "Patriotic" Russians can sort of accept democratic US (but they'll do anything they can to harm it), elements of democracy in Germany France, Italy(but they'll do anything to corrupt it) because they consider Americans, French, Germans "different people". They absolutely flip however when they see, what they consider "people like them" (Polish, Ukrainians, Czech, Latvians etc.) buid democratic societies that despite their faults succeeded hugely in bringing up the quality of life and improving the rule of law, and general wellbeing in the region.
What many people in the West don't realise is that "patriotic" Russians have this very twisted mix of national self depreciation and self glorification. Self depreciation, because they are conditioned to believe with all their hearts "democracy cannot work here". Why? Because they consider their own nature "too bad for it" (too criminal, corrupt, short sighted and so on). They think only "rule of a strong arm" can keep them strong therefore safe. Therefore all attempts to establish democracy in Russia is a western plot to make them weak. Their national self glorification comes from racism and xenophobia. They fear other cultures and people so much they cannot feel safe unless they enslave everyone in a 500 km radius around their borders. The country is in absolute ruin, but the majority of the population "feels good" if they can think they rule over others and those people have it worse. This "patriotic Russian" mindset is a cancer on human condition similar to what took over people when they voted Hitler into power in Nazi Germany. This way of thinking wasn't rare 200 years ago, but the majority of the world moved on. Russia didn't. Why? Why could Germany largely "fix" it's madness that was Nazism and Russia can't? The difference is that Germany was defeated in war and it was forced to do it against it's will with force. Many Russians to this day consider their Soviet history "glorious".
It is such country Snowden decided to escape to. Russians no doubt love it, but they'll never trust him. Don't be surprised if he gets visited by the serial suicider. Living there he knows very well he will be alive only as long as he is useful. That usefulness can span various things. Giving confidential info, teaching them how US systems and procedures work internally, but there will come a point in time when they'll extract his entire "practical knowledge" and then all he will have is his face and name. When this time comes expect to see him in more and more tv interviews that glorify Russia and diminish the West. This way eventually he will burn through any credibility he has left in the West. Then he will be killed and Russia will accuse US of doing that.
He isn't stupid, he must be aware of how this works. He couldn't "compromise his ideals" to work for NSA with the knowledge he had? So now he is working for people a thousand times worse. Is he feeling better? The whole idea is silly. No one in Russia believes it.
If he really wanted to expose NSA to the US public he could've done it in many different ways without committing treason by handing over information and devices to FSB.
Personally I think he was an operative for a while. He either realised he is going to get caught, or his handlers decided he can't provide them with more value in his current position so they steered him into doing that entire "expose". Perhaps one day we'll learn how did they get to him in the first place.
The revelations… meh. We all knew it was happening.
What I found particularly interesting was he had a distinct look, and either he was a trend setter or following a popular trend amongst young men as I saw it everywhere at the time amongst professionals. I would have thrown away my glasses and gotten a haircut immediately if I had been in that lane.
Snowden released an uncinscionably large amount of state secrets far beyind what would have been required to raise flags about surveillance on American citizens. Then he sought asylum in the USAs greatest political enemies?
He is a traitor.
The Snowden revelations had profound consequences on the standardisation process, because mass surveilance was thereby proven as a real and present attack that has to be considered. Undue influence on standardisation processes by the NSA was also a relevant point. Later protocols and standards started to take both into account. All those are in scope for RFCs, there are quite a few about standardisation procedures, circumstances, etc.
I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.