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Edward Snowden Reconsidered

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Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#41

Post by plugger »

tptacek wrote: post #35
shard972 wrote: post #5

> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed by Snowden. An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search engine allows partners to collect user data; it does not. The article has been updated. So the author spent all this time writing t…

There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.

But the flip side of that coin is that to my understanding he disclosed the information to only a handful of journalists and not the entire world. Sure, his decision wasn't ideal, but no situation was given the position he put himself in.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#42

Post by plugger »

shard972 wrote: post #4
pessimizer wrote: post #2

Unintelligible and endless. I don't know what's being "reconsidered" because this adds nothing other than an weird-ass attempt to associate Wikileaks, Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald with Putin and Russia, Nazism, and the Australian far-right(?!).

The Australian far right, also known as the shooters and fishers party... Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party. Also the claim of "alignment" comes from preference runoffs, because wikileaks put them ahead of the greens. Seems like a lot of bias packed just in this one sentence.

> Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.

Are you Australian? The shard in your username makes me think you might be.* Regardless, down here the handful of people who would be considered as proponents of gun rights would also most likely align with the far right (One Nation, Shooters and Fishers, etc).

* Don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia "shards" is a slang term for ice/crystal meth.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#43

Post by pvg »

kgarten wrote: post #40
pvg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what you asked. The article lists several occurrences which the author interprets as support for Putin. You said you read the article and found no such thing. That's not a reasonable representation of the article. Or of reading.

Several? Snowden is brought into association with Assange and Greenwald, a lot of the instances you are talking about mentioned in the article are not related to Snowden but to Wikileaks etc. I don’t know any instance where Snowden was in direct support or defended Putin (even from the article). The only “Support” from Snowden was showing up in a TV show with Putin asking him 2 questions. Still my question holds: whe…

I'm not really interested in hashing out whether you think Snowden does or does not support Putin by your personally chosen criteria of the meaning of 'support' and proof. I'm happy to agree that you think he doesn't in advance.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#44

Post by dandare »

Grue3 wrote: post #39
dandare wrote: post #6

> The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated. No evidence has been found that he was, just as no evidence has been found that he was a spy for China. ... We can’t know. Wikipedia: Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy...

People used to say Wikileaks is independent and definitely not propped up by the Kremlin. And now it's plainly apparent that they are. For me, living in Russia and knowing the kind of rhetoric our government likes to push, it was obvious all along. Once Snowden will be revealed working for the Kremlin, I'm looking forward to gloat about that too.

Can you present any solid evidence to support your "plainly apparent" claim?

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#45

Post by _bfhp »

tptacek wrote: post #35
shard972 wrote: post #5

> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed by Snowden. An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search engine allows partners to collect user data; it does not. The article has been updated. So the author spent all this time writing t…

There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.

> people he barely knew

Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#46

Post by tptacek »

_bfhp wrote: post #45
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.

> people he barely knew Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?

I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they contain --- which is what Snowden did.

Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows? That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them characterized... but, this is fine.

So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad because it ran with an incorrect count.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#47

Post by Grue3 »

dandare wrote: post #44
Grue3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to say Wikileaks is independent and definitely not propped up by the Kremlin. And now it's plainly apparent that they are. For me, living in Russia and knowing the kind of rhetoric our government likes to push, it was obvious all along. Once Snowden will be revealed working for the Kremlin, I'm looking forward to gloat about that too.

Can you present any solid evidence to support your "plainly apparent" claim?

See, the typical tactic of Kremlinbots is to deny all existing evidence as fake, and then ask for proofs. So, I have to ask you first: do you find the current evidence that MH-17 was shot down by a Russian Buk launcher, and that Skripals were poisoned by Russian GRU agents "solid" enough? If you don't think the evidence for these two events is "solid" (I think it is solid), then I will be unable to provide you "solid" evidence that Wikileaks cooperates with Kremlin.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#48

Post by [deleted] »

rtisdale wrote: post #15
Aqueous wrote: post #8

I can come up with no better summation of the damage Snowden has done to liberal democracies and the rule of law than his quote near the end: "...Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving effective change" In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and…

>In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't create the lasting change they hope for. Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately ignored. This security apparatus undermines the very fabric of law and government t…

[deleted]

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#49

Post by _bfhp »

tptacek wrote: post #46
_bfhp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people he barely knew Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?

I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they contain --- which is what Snowden did. Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leak…

I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article bad.

I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off.

"They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.

Re: Edward Snowden Reconsidered

#50

Post by gandhium »

kgarten wrote: post #11
Aqueous wrote: post #8

I can come up with no better summation of the damage Snowden has done to liberal democracies and the rule of law than his quote near the end: "...Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving effective change" In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and…

So what happens if a you realize your government is not adhering to the law? Shouldn’t you inform the public? That’s what Snowden did, with high costs to himself. Snowden taught a generation to have a moral compass. This article adds no new insides. Instead it drifts off in conspiracy theories.

> Snowden taught a generation to have a moral compass.

And then hid with the government that definitely wasn't adhering to the law.

I'd say it's not a good example of a moral compass.

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