I read three quarters of the book over the weekend, and for anyone remotely interested in anything surrounding Snowden (whether the motivations of a whistleblower, a dive into three-letter agency corporate structure, or Snowden himself) it is excellent, and heartily recommended.
There's a point where he talks about metadata, how the NSA is able to justify their "bulk collection" by not considering data accessed until someone actively _looks up_ something from their wide capture net, and that metadata isn't just a byproduct of bulk collection, but the downplayed gem itself. It was at that point I wished we had that information with Snowden's understandable and informative writing style, that I could recommend to people who have no or negative interest in Snowden. I love the book, but regret it's only going to reach the hands of the choir already preached to.
I am really curious why I got a down-vote or two. I was not being facetious.
Outside the classified materials Ed leaked and we all know about, he shares details about hotels he stayed at during training and his trips into what seemed to me as classified information about government building locations.
I was really curious if this is ‘common knowledge’ or if other readers felt he disclosed additional classified information.
As others have recently said, it seems like this site has changed quite a bit in the recent years from the site I once knew.
I just finished the book and I agree, it's excellent. Although I knew most of the facts reading it from the source in one cohesive work along with the background looks impressive.
> I would say sort of the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie on oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.
> I can't believe we label this guy a traitor. I never understood how someone who tells the American people/journalist's that their government is breaking the law is a bad thing.
I can give a few reasons for those genuinely wondering.
1. Ends can not justify means.
2. He fabricated auth keys to gain access to confidential material he didn't have access to.
3. He shared the information so-gained as soon as he could.
4. He shared it with geopolitical foes of the United States.
5. Many reasonable people recognize Wikileaks' objectives are well-aligned with Russia's and feel strongly they are collaborators.
6. My knowledge is limited here, but does Snowden claim he used any of the actual, legal whistleblower processes before escaping to Julian Assange? My understanding is that he did not.
In short, he could have been a whistleblower, but instead acted against the USA's interests, preferring to break into government systems and share the data with anti-US actors. In so doing he exposed truth it's good for citizens to know, but did so in a way that has had far-ranging, still-harmful effects on the USA today.
Regarding objections 5 and 6, Snowden distributed documents to the Guardian, Washington Post, and Der Spiegel - not Wikileaks. He did insist that these newspapers only publish information that is in public interest, and warn the government according to correct whistleblower protocol [1].
The Wikileaks legal team helped Snowden once he was already in trouble.
He also said that "Even the NSA admits that Russia wasn't my intended destination." [2] so objection 4 is also moot.
> Snowden distributed documents to the Guardian, Washington Post, and Der Spiegel - not Wikileaks.
That's an important distinction, thank you for making it.
Late May, Snowden fled to China. Days later, documents he stole were first published. Less than a month later, he and the Wikileaks legal team were moving him to Russia where he requested political asylum. Many people reasonably find it hard to believe that Snowden's introduction to Wikileaks personnel happened in that less-than-one-month timeframe. Like any journalist will tell you, though, the story is a very complex one.
I wish I could send a message to Ed, to encourage him. If the worst allegations his enemies can accuse him of are related to other people, that means his own life choices are blameless.
From Snowden's autobiography, Permanent Record, page 239:
"Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and an editor for WikiLeaks. The moment the news broke that an American had unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, she had immediately flown to Hong Kong. Through her experience with the website and particularly with the fate of Assange, she was poised to offer me the world's best asylum advice. It didn't hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong. ... after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with [Assange] again... Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation gave him a chance to right a wrong... he seemed, through Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me... That said, I was initially wary of Sarah's involvement. But Laura told me that she was serious, competent, and, most important, independent: one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange."
Details that are so personal, openly admitting his distrust and disagreements with Wikileaks, while still writing kind words speculating as to why they would help - this doesn't sound like a long-standing conspiracy and a clever cover story. It sounds incredibly believable.
I never understood why criticisms of Snowden weren't more succinct. Snowden was in Hawaii. He could have gone to Ecuador or Cuba, or some other non-extradition country. He decided to take the longest trip possible and ended up stuck in the Moscow Airport.
The funny part is that John Schindler claims that Snowden in Hong Kong, in private, had drinks at the local Russian consulate.
If you're responding to this part of my response, please don't quote me out of context. This response contains a complete idea, and is particularly susceptible to looking at only parts of it, but that would be argumentatively lazy on your part, and I won't respond to anyone who does this.
"The ends justify the means" is a perfectly legitimate argument, by itself: we should be choosing our actions based on the results we expect from those actions.
The problem with "The ends justify the means" is that it is almost never correctly applied; people rarely look at the complete ends of the action they are trying to justify.
An example of this is eugenics: if you kill people with genetic disorders, yes, the ends are that you have fewer genetic disorders. However, that's only part of the ends: the complete ends includes a huge amount of suffering, death, and grief. The ends can only justify the means if the ends are desirable, and in the case of eugenics the ends aren't desirable, they're horrific.
In the case of Snowden, the complete ends are a public that's much more aware of our government spying on us, and so far I've come across no compelling evidence of any significant downside. So looking at the complete ends, I don't see much problem with saying that the ends did justify the means in this case.
Note that this is a valid ethical argument, but it's not a legal argument at all. Of course, "the ends cannot justify the means" isn't a legal argument, either, so there's really not a legal discussion occurring here.
> 2. He fabricated auth keys to gain access to confidential material he didn't have access to.
Given the entire problem Snowden was trying to address was that access restrictions were being improperly used to hide information from the American people, this is exactly the point of why he did what he did.
> 3. He shared the information so-gained as soon as he could.
a) This isn't true, he took steps to make sure that it was released by reputable, trustworthy journalists. b) I'm unsure how this makes him a traitor.
> 4. He shared it with geopolitical foes of the United States.
a) This is a necessary side effect of sharing with the American public, and I'll point out that you're very much treating the American public as a geopolitical foe if you don't acknowledge that fact. b) Any serious threat to the US is sophisticated enough to get around surveillance with simple, freely-available tools. Pervasive surveillance mostly affects the innocent.
> 5. Many reasonable people recognize Wikileaks' objectives are well-aligned with Russia's and feel strongly they are collaborators.
ALL reasonable people recognize that Snowden did not leak to Wikileaks. This isn't even an honest point, and you should be ashamed that you repeated it.
> 6. My knowledge is limited here, but does Snowden claim he used any of the actual, legal whistleblower processes before escaping to Julian Assange? My understanding is that he did not.
What on earth are you talking about? Snowden did not "escap[e] to Julian Assange". This is just a lie.
There were a number of people who tried to point out some of the same problems as Snowden through proper channels[1]. The results of this were that they were silenced, without producing any change. History shows us that the legal channels are a tool for surveillance organizations to identify whistleblowers and silence them before they can do any good, rather than a legitimate way to identify illegal activity by surveillance organizations.
> and I'll point out that you're very much treating the American public as a geopolitical foe if you don't acknowledge that fact.
This does not follow, as the logical conclusion of your statement is that the American public either has a right to all state secrets, or is a foe of its own country. The value of secrets is in their secrecy, and when that value is lost, harm is done.
> Any serious threat to the US is sophisticated enough to get around surveillance with simple, freely-available tools.
That is a big claim, can you give an example of a serious threat to the US which is possible with simple & freely available tools? It sounds like you know an easy way to defeat the US in information warfare.
> Snowden did not "escap[e] to Julian Assange". This is just a lie.
What I know is that Snowden escaped to China with data he stole in less than 3 months on the job, and less 1 month afterward was on a flight with Wikileaks editor and Assange's closest advisor Sarah Harrison, seeking political asylum in the bastion of political freedom, Russia.
> There were a number of people...
My question was about Snowden's efforts, as the topic is valid reasons why some may consider him a traitor. I'll interpret your response as, like me, you also don't know the answer to my question.
> you should be ashamed that you repeated it... What on earth are you talking about?... This is just a lie.
I find this rather unnecessary. People who disagree with you aren't enemies to be shamed and insulted.
> This does not follow, as the logical conclusion of your statement is that the American public either has a right to all state secrets, or is a foe of its own country. The value of secrets is in their secrecy, and when that value is lost, harm is done.
Could you provide some evidence of harm here?
> That is a big claim, can you give an example of a serious threat to the US which is possible with simple & freely available tools?
No, because that's not the claim I made. The claim I made was "Any serious threat to the US is sophisticated enough to get around surveillance with simple, freely-available tools."
GPG has been around for a long time, and I haven't come across any convincing evidence of a surveillance organization able to decrypt GPG-encrypted messages.
> What I know is that Snowden escaped to China with data he stole in less than 3 months on the job, and less 1 month afterward was on a flight with Wikileaks editor and Assange's closest advisor Sarah Harrison, seeking political asylum in the bastion of political freedom, Russia.
...which is not "Escaping to Julian Assange." What you said above is true, but saying he "Escaped to Julian Assange" is a lie.
> My question was about Snowden's efforts, as the topic is valid reasons why some may consider him a traitor. I'll interpret your response as, like me, you also don't know the answer to my question.
The answer to your question is in the part of my post which you didn't quote, so I'm just going to quote myself:
"There were a number of people who tried to point out some of the same problems as Snowden through proper channels[1]. The results of this were that they were silenced, without producing any change. History shows us that the legal channels are a tool for surveillance organizations to identify whistleblowers and silence them before they can do any good, rather than a legitimate way to identify illegal activity by surveillance organizations."
> I find this rather unnecessary. People who disagree with you aren't enemies to be shamed and insulted.
If all you had done was disagree with me, I wouldn't have called what you said a lie, and you'll note that most of your post where you were just disagreeing with me, I didn't call what you were saying lies. I only call what you said a lie when it is a lie, and it has to be very clearly a lie for me to do that.
Anyone can verify that Snowded did not "escape to Julian Assange." The locations of both people at that time are widely-known public information. So when you said that Snowden escaped to Julian Assange, what you said was not just a disagreement with me, it was unambiguously a lie.
I'm not insulting you. I'll grant you the same respect that I would grant any human being, but that respect does not include treating lies as legitimate points, nor does it include mincing words when you decide to lie to everyone reading your post. If you write something untrue and post it here and I call you out on it, that's not me shaming you, that's you behaving in a shameful way.
You don't get to lie and then accuse me of being impolite when I point out your lie. Politeness includes telling the truth.
I define lost value as harm, in the same way that if a person steals $1 from your pocket as you sleep, your body is unharmed, but you have lost $1 of value, and your trust has been violated, both harmful to you. I'm not privy to the specifics of how this loss has directly impacted the US, but it should go without saying that the loss of value is harmful to the secret holder.
> GPG has been around for a long time
GPG wouldn't have saved anyone from PRISM, though.
> The answer to your question is in the part of my post which you didn't quote, so I'm just going to quote myself: "There were a number of people who tried... the results of this were that they were silenced..."
This does not answer my question, "Did Snowden try any of these official channels?"
Please note: I am not a Snowden detractor. I recognize the multi-faceted nature of his story. My comment states the view against Snowden because I am able to express it, having engaged in good faith with some of his detractors. And I think there are some valid points there.
This, though, I think is not a good faith discussion. You seem to want a whipping boy to argue Snowden's heroism against.
I admit, strictly speaking, Snowden didn't flee directly to Assange, but to his trusted advisors & lawyers. Seems pedantic to me to require that kind of specificity, but perhaps that's what you needed to hear.
I am no liar. A lie requires intent to deceive. Late in my first comment begins an admission of ignorance and a question: "My knowledge is limited here, but..." Your response calls me a liar multiple times, dodges the question twice, literally calls shame onto my post, then shrinks from the charge that you're behaving disrespectfully. Your insults have been received and recognized as such. Have a nice day.
> I define lost value as harm, in the same way that if a person steals $1 from your pocket as you sleep, your body is unharmed, but you have lost $1 of value, and your trust has been violated, both harmful to you. I'm not privy to the specifics of how this loss has directly impacted the US, but it should go without saying that the loss of value is harmful to the secret holder.
Let me be more clear. I don't care if the NSA is harmed while the NSA is committing a crime against the citizens of the United States. I care if the citizens of the United States are harmed.
Obviously the NSA was harmed by Snowden's revelations, but that's not something I care about, nor do I think it's something that anyone else should care about. The entire point of the NSA is to protect US citizens, so if they are harmed while they are harming US citizens, good, they deserve it. They certainly haven't been harmed enough that it could be considered paying for their crimes.
> GPG wouldn't have saved anyone from PRISM, though.
Yes it would have. If someone wanted their communications to be private, and decided to communicate by sending GPG-encrypted messages over OnionIRC, how would PRISM have decrypted those messages?
> This does not answer my question, "Did Snowden try any of these official channels?"
Okay. That's a yes or no question, and the answer is "no"--I thought that was clear from what I posted, but you're right that it wasn't. What I posted is why he didn't try any of these official channels.
> I admit, strictly speaking, Snowden didn't flee directly to Assange, but to his trusted advisors & lawyers. Seems pedantic to me to require that kind of specificity, but perhaps that's what you needed to hear.
I'm not going to accept this backpedal. Saying that he "escaped to Assange" indicates a much stronger association between Assange and Snowden than there is actual evidence for. This isn't being pedantic, it's demanding that what you say be representative of the actual facts.
You continue to speak significantly more conclusively than is evident. So far you've only presented evidence that he took a plane ride with one advisor of Assange's, and no lawyers, and left out the very notable fact that the advisor is also a journalist. It should be utterly unsurprising that journalists who work with the head of a leak organization would also attempt to talk with the source of a major leak--this is pretty weak evidence of any collaboration between Assange and Snowden.
> I am no liar.
I didn't call you a liar. A liar is someone who lies consistently, and you've only lied once that I know of.
> A lie requires intent to deceive.
I don't think that adults need to make the distinction between "You knew this was false and said it anyway" and "You didn't know whether this was true and you said it anyway". You should say things that you know are true.
Your argument is purely semantic anyway. If you really want to argue that you couldn't be arsed to research before you made that claim, then I'd say that isn't better than lying no matter what you call it.
> Late in my first comment begins an admission of ignorance and a question: "My knowledge is limited here, but..."
Please quote yourself in context. You said, "My knowledge is limited here, but does Snowden claim he used any of the actual, legal whistleblower processes before escaping to Julian Assange?" It's clear that what you're admitting ignorance of is whether Snowden followed legal process, not whether he escaped to Julian Assange.
> Your response calls me a liar multiple times, dodges the question twice, literally calls shame onto my post, then shrinks from the charge that you're behaving disrespectfully. Your insults have been received and recognized as such.
I'm not sure which question you're claiming I'm dodging. If you can enlighten me, I'll be happy to answer.
As for the rest of this complaint: if accurately describing your behavior casts you in such a bad light that you consider it an insult, maybe behave better?
Quite frankly, Edward Snowden is the only person I can think of that is “beyond reproach”.
He put his life on the line to let other people (us) know about what was happening. He gave us the option to choose our fate. That’s more than anyone in the government did for us.
I consider Snowden the gold standard of government whistle blowers. Manning tried to do a good thing but was sloppy and trusted Assange a bit too much. I admired Assange during the early days of Wikileaks, but I really can't stand his grand standing. Before Snowden, people like Thomas Drake tried to address similar issues but got nowhere.
If the people in power don't like people like Snowden shining a light on their crimes, maybe they shouldn't be committing those crimes to begin with. There needs to be proper congressional oversight of these things. When that doesn't exist, it becomes the duty of the individual people involved in the government to inform the people about what the government is doing, and that's exactly what Snowden did. Not eagerly, and he paid a heavy price for it, but he recognised it as necessary and did what needed to be done.
Whistle blowing is a social service. Assange tried to do something that stepped outside nearly every social rule we have and challenged our bedrock assumptions about journalism and free speech... He did that irresponsibly and may have harmed people, but I admire the effort. He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is.
> He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is.
I guess we watch different Bond movies when you have guys like Kim Jong-un running some shows out there, having concentration camps and killing their brothers with nerve agents on the airports
That's more of a real villain. To be a Bond villain, you need more grand standing and scenery chewing. The biggest real villains prefer to do their damage quietly without anyone noticing, while Bond villains make for a better story.
Kim Jong is too wrapped up trying to keep power back home that he can't make a German/European crazy hair brained scheme to try and take over the world.
Building an informant culture in your populace and threatening collective gulagging on the rebel's family doesn't quite have the same flair as tying the rebel to a table with a slow moving laser aimed at his junk.
Do you expect me to talk? No Mr Bond! I expect you to die!
I am a big Snowden supporter but I wouldn’t go as far as “beyond reproach”. A whistle blower is seeing wrongdoing, and reporting it. What he did instead is grab all the files he could get hold of, send them to journalists and tell them “I know there is wrongdoing there, find it among all this legitimately secret stuff that should have never left the NSA”. You can see why the NSA would find the approach more than cavalier.
I think given how it affected the public debate, he should certainly be given leniency if not pardon. But that is not to say he did nothing wrong.
Snowden's trigger was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath about mass surveillance to Congress when specifically asked about blind data collection.
When the head of the organisation commits federal crimes without reproach(he was not prosecuted after the details were revealed), who are you supposed to report to except the public?
And Snowden was stealing files months before that happened. Maybe Snowden was on the fence about leaking and Clapper's lie pushed him over the edge. Or maybe it was what convinced him he was right.
But he had already been taking documents by the time Clapper got in front of Congress according to the unclassified house intelligence report on Snowden.
He'd also been denied some lateral movement on teams / projects from what i've heard. I think it's easy to reframe all his actions into hero worship but we have to acknowledge that his original motivations may not have been the end results we see today.
So laws exist, but people don't always adhere to the law for reasons like ignorance and malicious intent. There are also laws which are bad laws & regulation, easily exploitable by clever people, financially lucrative in some cases.
The intelligence services have a difficult task, they need to be on top of their game so they need to know everything and try to prevent problems snowballing unless its not particularly harmful and could be quite educational for future improvement. You have a blank sheet of paper, what would you do to maintain or reduce harm to society?
I say this as someone who has met Andrew Parker, Stella Rimmington and Jonathon Evans and is wise to their ways but not someone who has signed the official secrets but has arguably an "autistic" interest in secrecy and quantifying all walks of life.
Ah man, those poor folks at 3-letter agencies screwing rest of the world and their own citizens. Of course it would be better for them to know everything, have everything, exploit everybody and so on.
That's not how modern democratic society can and should work though
I would say beyond reproach is apt since the misbehavior lies with the agencies and there was no channel to prevent the crimes in question.
The punishment of Snwoden cannot be determined as long as there is no consequence and assesment for the misbehavior of agencies. You cannot determine whether it was justified to leak the info if the crimes committed were not investigated. It is a basic protection allegation to focus the discussion on the misbehavior of Snowden.
This is the same in every case government abuse. Don't defend Snowden, accuse the agencies in question instead. Because that is the topic. The defense will build itself. Other approaches will fail as they did so often before. It doesn't matter if justified or not. So the question about leniency is the wrong one.
What sucks is that the 'wrong' of small people are always so easily seem and easy to point the finger however small it is, the wrong done by actual power holders, which will impact innumerable people, which lays ground for systemic abuse, catastrophic failure(e.g.: Nassim Taleb's "ruin problems") etc are always too much to grasp and get proportionally much less attention.
In Brazil what we now have I can't describe another way if not societal insanity, all the real problems are probably "too much", too complex, people have decided to stop facing them and decided regressing to fetish, cliches, downright modern superstitions instead. Some weeks ago an Avengers comic with a gay kiss panel generated more commotion than a 8 year old shot by police(which in itself would be a sign of the obvious much bigger systemic problems we're not properly dealing with. We're all fucked.
* Removed the target from his back. At this point, all his value is "to be made of an example" not "a former operative with incredibly sensitive information, potentially worth neutralizing"
* Recused himself from being a political player like Assange wanted to be.
Also, who says he is a good judge to make the right call for each document?
Journalists can do a far far better job of responsibly handling the material, with enough time, resources and expertise to investigate the material, even get in touch with the government, etc.
Doing it personally would've been incredibly irresponsible and actually a power-play for personal gain not whistle-blowing for the better.
Thing is, that by stealing and releasing documents he did not read (by his own admission) he could not have known what collateral damage he would've done to US and allied intelligence capabilities.
One might argue that any damage to intelligence interests is superceded by the public's interests in learning about abuses, but had he made a more targeted leak collateral damage might not have been an issue.
Trusting journalists to do the job is a cop out. He took the action of taking the documents, then foisted responsibility on someone else. And make no mistake, intelligence services spy on journalists and have compromised journalists. Snowden had no way of knowing whether other intelligence agencies could get to what he gave the various media outlets. Even some carelessness on their part could have revealed secrets to others.
If he is not a good judge for what document supports wrong doing, then he is not a whistle blower in the first place. And I am not suggesting he is not. I have no doubt that he knew what a compromising document looked like.
He had been collecting the documents for months even before the incident that he says prompted him to blow the whistle. He knew that detailed lists of Chinese targets were not needed to blow the whistle on phone metadata collection, but he grabbed those lists anyway and immediately showed them to the SCMP.
I think you miss how mind-numbingly boring all this stuff is. The evil is in the overarching character of the programs and infrastructure -- not the minutia. But without seeing the minutia you cannot see the program.
Imagine that the year is 1942 and someone leaks you a stack of bookkeeping records from some german labor camp in poland. In it, the records account for gassing prisoners by the truckload, but to your eyes it's all just just the cryptic numbers and administrative filler of any complex bureaucracy. To make any sense of it, you need many layers back of the surrounding documentation-- not just to establish what you're looking at, but to establish what you're not looking at. Communication that shows that the data is real, not an exercise, that the prisoners are being killed rather than that the accounting is just covering deaths from natural causes, that it's really a big intentional program sponsored from on-high and not just a fluke where a local administrator or two went nuts.
Without a wealth of supporting material it would be easy to dismiss Snowden's reports as "sure well, there was some overreach here and there. It wasn't officially sanctioned and the relevant parties have been sacked, James Clapper had no idea and did not perjure himself and we haven't been systematically lying to the public for a decade." In a world where the NSA was accountable to the public, Snowden would only have to reveal enough to force them to account and disclose and continued inquiry would unearth the rest. But we do not live in that world: The NSA's actions are not open to public inquiry. One shot is all we got for any real transparency into the mass surveillance apparatus. Consider the byzantine dismissals that Jewel v. NSA experienced. ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-... )
It seemed pretty obvious to me that Snowden purposefully obfuscated what documents he took by accessing everything-- a fact you seem to have exploited in a number of posts to exaggerate the scope of the documents he took, according to our best understanding of his actions per the journalists he worked with-- in order to create a situation where the administration's ability to tell additional lies to cover up the situation would be limited by the risk that somewhere in the stash Snowden had a document which blew the latest lie apart.
For another example: There is an absurd number of patents filed on most of the technical tools being used for the mass surveillance on the internet-- and their feature sets often end up leaked in product documentation and internet standards. They're not even particularly well hidden, some with co-authors who's linked in pages brag about their TS/SCI and work in intelligence... Yet, pre-snowden, people pointing to this wealth of details even combined with first hand accounts of how it was deployed, were just treated like kooks. Without the ability to open a real inquiry it isn't enough to prove that something suspicious is up, the proof must be utterly overwhelming to have a meaningful effect.
The powerpoint decks that were published were pretty self explanatory and graphical. Journalists would not have been able to make any sense of a bunch of log files anyway.
And despite that we've seen multiple levels of deflection and outright lies even with the level of details provided.
Norwegian newspapers backtracked and apologised for writing articles exposing Norwegian participation in illegal metadata monitoring, arguing that the monitoring that for all of the other parties involved was about domestic monitoring in Norway's case for some reason was about Afghanistan.
Had it not been for the amount of surrounding context, the lies would have been believable. Even then it took the then head of military security to step up and make claims about operational issues in military security that they never talk about, to draw attention away from the vague denials of the police security service.
But the sheer amount of data, coupled with the revelation that the US itself captured full recordings of the same conversations that Norwegian surveillance supposedly captured valuable metadata about made it stand out as a ludicrous cover-up.
And still the newspapers did not dare challenge it even with all the extra details.
As it stands, Snowden released too little - even with all the material he did provide, it was still something that proved possible to sufficiently deflect from that it had shockingly little impact.
I think we have a test case for your hypothesis. The snowden disclosures started with a single court order and then the prism slide deck. Go look at the initial redirections and denials about the first prism slides for a pretty good taste of where things would have stopped if that was all he put out: https://www.google.com/search?q=prism+slides+denial
Nobody is beyond reproach and anybody that is going to blow the whistle on something is almost always going to have an ulterior motive. That doesn’t mean we should ignore them, though.
Is there a path between taking the hit fully and alone and not divulging ?
A way to store information outside, and maybe think about it and how to use it to have an effect on policies without causing the source to suffer. Stealth hack in a way.
That sounds like the "improve from the inside" argument, e.g. keep your trap shut until you've managed to attain a position power to solve the problem you've got.
Whether or not you feel that is feasible or appropriate is, ultimately, going to require insider knowledge and experience. While I do have some experience with BAH (painfully apathetic[0]), I've never worked for the NSA so I can't say whether that is a plausible alternative to Snowden's action.
[0] - FWIW, we had a number of employees passing out promotional religious literature around the office. I'd raised some concern about it, basically should we be worried about legal trouble, and was told to keep my concerns to myself. Among the reasons I didn't last a month in that circle of hell.
What Snowden made me realize, is that how all countries in the world are fighting for a buck, and their own interest. It's difficult to understand what is at stake because there is a duality between the peacefulness of civilized life, and the distrust between countries, even when they're allies, which we call diplomacy. Civilian life is structured by law, but there are no courts to sue countries when they harm each other.
Snowden highlighted a trivial fact, which is that intelligence agencies will spy. Countries will fight for their self-interest. It's important to remember that countries can do whatever they want if the citizen see that it's in their interest.
Snowden just reminded us to always keep Machiavel in mind. That's how nations operate, and I don't think the UN will change this. It goes for terrorism, oil, climate change, standard of living, electronics, trade. If something is not in the interest of a country, it will probably be dismissed.
I nodded at first, but something rubs me the wrong way.
I don't know if you intended it, but I read this a little defeatist. I also agree countries will forever jostle their power against each other, because there is no higher court to take complaints.
But there is no unwritten law which says we must let our spy orgs spy completely unfettered on their own citizens. If we let them do that, we might just as well give them the keys to the kingdom. Democracy will die, the feedback loop between corrupt leaders and the three letter orgs will eventually be to strong and everything will be a charade until there is no need for even the pretense of rule of law.
This is the danger we are fighting. (With mixed success I think.)
I think you're right. I think a big problem the world has is that the big countries with all the power say and act like it's wrong when the smaller countries do it. A complete double standard.
Governments also fight for their self-interest even if against their populations. This is deffo not restricted to country x country dynamics. It's also important to remember that increasingly countries do not do what's their citizens "will", so that would be an idealized view instead of an empirical one. Also since laws are passed by gov, when it suddenly forgets to put the checks and balances for itself, it is lawlessness too.
This book is already translated in many languages by a lot of different publisher (just saw the French version published by Seuil at a bookshop). Good luck with trying to get the money for all the sales outside of the US....
Remember he is now rather difficult to employ; and needs to avoid the appearance of inappropriate alegiances. So - making money off of a book should be kind of a big deal for him. Also, it takes a whole lot of time and effort to write a book (which could theoretically have gone towards supporting himself otherwise).
> Over the course of my career, it became increasingly difficult for me to ask these questions about the technologies I was responsible for and not about my country. And it became increasingly frustrating to me that I was able to repair the former but not the latter.
He was trying to repair our government by judicious application of sunshine.
The more this guys is persecuted the more of a martyr he becomes - like the Romans nailing a certain someone to a cross. I don't think that worked out as well as the Romans hoped.
Fundamentally this isn't about the 'man' it's about freedom and that idea will transcend no matter what the government suits do or what becomes of Snowden.
When Snowden first 'came out', I was 100% onboard that he was a treasonous, self-aggrandizing traitor. Even though we sort of knew what NSA was doing to an extent - there were rumors about NSA or AT&T monitoring all internet traffic in San Francisco since the 90s [1][2] - I would not give the argument that what he did was patriotic even a moment of consideration.
Now that things have settled a bit, and perhaps having gained some more perspective, I do feel that what he did was justifiable, perhaps even patriotic.
It turned out to be an issue with cookies. I deleted all my cookies for wired.com and then it worked. Strange, because the front page of the site showed but not the article.
>He cannot quite make the blanket claim that there are no protections for contractors, but he may have been correct in believing that there appear to be no clear protections, especially from retaliation.
And if you looked at the dates in the third link, you would notice they are from after the leaks.
I have. Being a hero means some risk to yourself does it not? Ultimately if you piss off a government you're going to run the risk of things going poorly for yourself.
All I know is the last place he should have went was to a foreign country. Official channels -> congress -> media, and this is at great risk but this is what Ellsberg did.
With all this said- whistle-blower protections ought to become mandatory training for all DoD contractors, government employees, or anyone who handles classified information.
If that's the case why does he feel the need to lie about it? Why should I believe anything that he says now? I don't like being lied to- not by my government, and not by Mr. Snowden.
If he had noble intentions he took the worst possible route through this minefield.
I see nothing to suggest he was lying. If the protections that are there on paper are not real, in the sense that they do not protect you, or you have good reason to believe they're not real, then it's not a lie to say there aren't any protections.
Personally, I think he did well not to be naive enough to trust that they'd work.
I don't see anything misleading in it either, given that I don't see why anyone would look at those kind of whistleblower protections and believe they are anything but a PR exercise.
EDIT: Put another way: I'd believe those kind of whistle-blower protections are meaningful when we see these agencies admitting to past failures that have been brought up and taking proper responsibility and demonstrably taking steps to ensure better oversight. Until then, the safest assumption is that making use of any whistleblowing provisions they claim to have is at best ineffective, at worst dangerous.
These protections are used all the time- it just doesn't always make the news.
>demonstrably taking steps to ensure better oversight.
Like expanding the protections? We see a whistle-blower complaint right now in the news working pretty much as intended, with the whistle-blower's identity being protected.
How are SEC whistleblower protections relevant to the NSA?
As for the Pentagon, you'll note that part of what it covers is that the Pentagon Inspector General has struggled to substantiate allegations of retaliation in most cases, to the point where they ended up resorting to introduce a new system of mediation to resolve cases. Maybe that's because the allegations were bullshit, or maybe that's because the system is totally without teeth. In either case it does not illuminate the case of Snowden at all.
Yet, when the secrets being revealed are important enough, whistleblowers are met with unmasking, armed raids, and prosecution. Perhaps things really have changed in the NSA since Snowden, but given the NSA's record I doubt it.
I’ve been reading the book this article is excerpted from. So far my key takeaway is that just because you did something interesting doesn’t mean that your life is interesting or that you have anything interesting to say.
There's a point where he talks about metadata, how the NSA is able to justify their "bulk collection" by not considering data accessed until someone actively _looks up_ something from their wide capture net, and that metadata isn't just a byproduct of bulk collection, but the downplayed gem itself. It was at that point I wished we had that information with Snowden's understandable and informative writing style, that I could recommend to people who have no or negative interest in Snowden. I love the book, but regret it's only going to reach the hands of the choir already preached to.