Any links posted to amazon.com from HN should be to smile.amazon.com -> .5% of your purchase will be donated to a clarity of your choice.
Better yet, don’t buy the book, and donate the money you would have spent to charity.
okay
Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
141–150 of 459 posts
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#142Customers who bought this item also bought - ALFA AWUS036NEH Long Range WIRELESS 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi USBAdapter - Yubico - YubiKey 5 NFC - Two Factor Authentication USB and NFC Security Key, Fits USB-A Ports and Works with Supported NFC Mobile Devices EDIT:formatting
Is it even safe to buy yubikeys on Amazon given the counterfeit problem?
Don't know about counterfeiting, but when I tried to order yubikeys via German amazon, every single one of the blisters looked suspiciously as though they had been tampered with[1]. They were opened juuust slightly on the side - enough to potentially slide the key out and in again, definitely something that you could miss if you weren't paying close attention. I placed a second order and the exact same thing happened. It was quite weird and I've since ordered from yubico directly.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that there are like... seven copies in U.S. libraries, I think that's probably terrible advice.
Since Amazon says it's not available until September 17th and you can only pre-order it now, I think probably even those 7 are records inaccurately registered before the book is actually there, and there are probably 0! Or did some libraries get the book earlier than Amazon can? Possible, but my guess is not.
I think you are right. I called 3 libraries in my immediate ~15m drive area (university library, County, and City), all 3 confirmed they will have it, but none were listed on the World Cat site.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Even if I don't believe that Snowden is a Russian agent, I think that is a fair question. The point you make about the sources and uses of cash telling the truth about someone is a great one not only within the context of Snowden.
Has US intelligence actually claimed Snowden is a Russian agent? People keep saying he is a traitor, but not whether he was always a spy or had been recruited directly by the Kremlin. All that is being fueled by media speculation. There is also the likely possibility he didn't expect to be awarded a medal for uncovering the US governments own surveillance program on its citizens.
People who claim to have been inside USINT have been vocal about Snowden being an "op". See eg
https://www.google.com/amp/s/20committee.com/2016/07/02/the-...
Grains of salt with all of this of course. Even if you trust people like Schindler what they mean by "agent" and "op" is going to have significant nuance.
Web of trust, shared semantics, and personal priors especially hard to reason about here, IMV.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#145I think the administration badly, badly mishandled Snowden and Assange, and allowed Russia to coopt them by isolating and threatening them. If they had treated them as whistleblowers and journalists (even if they had nefarious motivations), they could have kept them in "the west" instead of driving them into the arms of Russia. I don't believe that Assange was a Russian agent at the beginning but he was surely one by…
An agent? No. But friendly towards those friendly to him? Who in the world doesn't do that?
After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#146Or how about from a library. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=edward...
Or how about we all choose how we wish to get content, and stop implying judgment. When did reading become an us vs. them thing?
The point, I believe, is to recommend a vendor other than Amazon, whose business model is datacenter management and datamining and being a front for cheap Chinese goods.
There is a bit of judgment, and that's okay.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate database, identifying you using photo recognition algorithms and your location using the home's address, and using that information to sell you things.
> using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happe…
> The threat isn't corporations
In a thread about surveillance, why are you drawing a dichotomy between different surveillers and basically giving one a pass? They're both prongs of the same threat! On the collection side, every bit vacuumed up commercially is available for use by the government. And on the use side, there is little difference between a government proper and corporations that have achieved enough power to exert de facto governmental control - especially when colluding through a common third party.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#148Snowden will absolutely be revealed as a HUMINT asset.
I am extremely grateful for his revelations but I always found his justification for his actions to be rather flimsy.
He worked as a CIA operative and then NSA contractor helping build global surveillance infrastructure (as well as allegedly designating targets for its use) but only realized his actions were unethical because they spied on US citizens and lied about it? What about all the other people he spied on or stripped of their privacy and rights? They don't count because they weren't born on the right soil? Suddenly lying becomes an ethical issue for someone who worked in the espionage world...
He took a lot more documents than just the NSA surveillance disclosures. Thousands of emails, IMs, and other correspondence between DoD officials unrelated to NSA that blew several agents cover. These fell into the hands of Russian and Chinese agencies..somehow
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It costs over a grand to quit the club known as "citizenship" you're going to want citizenship in wherever you reside first when you give up US citizenship (you could choose to be stateless, but that makes more problems than it solves). Doing this does not absolve you of existing debts in the eyes of the IRS. And finally, you'll be interviewed at the consulate and if your stated reason for giving up citizenship is "t…
Apparently, you can run for any government office in a foreign state and it immediately nullifies your US citizenship. I have only heard this as rumour, and I don't have time to confirm / deny this, but it may be worth looking into.
You don't have to look that hard to find that this is not true.
Boris Johnson (the UK Prime Minister) was a US citizen until sometime in 2016. His UK political office roles until then included serving as a MP (2000-2008), Mayor of London (2008 - 2016), and UK Foreign Secretary (2016 - the time he relinquished his US citizenship). Reports indicate that he gave up his US citizenship to avoid the IRS taxing him.
Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
#150Does anyone know how much money he gets from every book / ebook? I think buying it is, at least for some people, very much a support Snowden thought.
The publisher Metropolitan Books looks like it's part of Macmillan so they're likely a traditional publisher, which suggests he got a pretty healthy advance on the book because of his fame. I would also guess that even if he sold enough books to earn out the advance, his take on each incremental book is really small as the publisher took most of the financial risk with the advance itself.
(Macmillan employee)
Confirming, it is a Macmillan title. Metropolitan Books is a Macmillan imprint.