191–200 of 459 posts
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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.
Seems like a difference without a distinction, and I'm not even sure it's correct. If he's acting in the interest of Russia, he's a Russian agent.
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I was going to say exactly this. It's amazing how many Americans honestly think it's clear that Snowden is a "bad guy" because he's close to the Russians. Likewise Assange was pushed into a position that made him very unlikable to the US center-left (he could have probably played his hand a bit better). So mainstream American's are distrustful of both and pretty much everyone hates Assange.
If you examine what Ed Snowden leaked, it’s clear he was trying to do significant damage to the NSA. Much or most of what he stole and was leaked was unrelated to domestic surveillance. Much of it revealed our overseas activity. It’s difficult to see how any of it was to the benefit of Western interests.
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Given that you can change the MAC address, how does throwing it away improve opsec...?
It seems good practice not to assume there are no other ways to id/fingerprint a device then by mac address..
Opsec should be based on reality and threat modeling, not endless rounds of whatabout.
Edit: if you (the rhetorical you, not parent specifically) actually know something here, chime in!
We were called "paranoid lunatics" even when we started speaking about ECHELON in the '90ies. Same with the clipper chip. Same with TPM/DRM/ME. Same with Internet centralization. It's worth asking why the general public keeps trusting authorities and distrusts techies, even those among us with a career in security.
It's funny the tech/security/sysadmin guys complain that their work is appreciated only when things go wrong, but fail to give the same benefit of the doubt for US law and order.
We were called "paranoid lunatics" even when we started speaking about ECHELON in the '90ies. Same with the clipper chip. Same with TPM/DRM/ME. Same with Internet centralization. It's worth asking why the general public keeps trusting authorities and distrusts techies, even those among us with a career in security.
I'll trust techies the day they actually are in the job of protecting people and have to deal with real danger of bad actors continuously trying to blow up Western democracies. It's funny the tech/security/sysadmin guys complain that their work is appreciated only when things go wrong, but fail to give the same benefit of the doubt for US law and order.
I 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…
>I think the administration badly, badly mishandled [whistleblowers] Yes, but by design. Other than passing lip service towards transparency. The fact is Obama admin actively sought to silence them. I know this isn’t popular because HN won’t want to hear anything bad about Obama, but it’s a fact. In the seven years of Obama's presidency, the administration launched a record number of cases against those who revealed…
That said, I think it's amusing when people need to call out "Under president 's administration..." as if it makes a point by itself and implies something directly about the president that was named. Let's not pretend here, that's exactly what you were doing. Using this same logic, I hope you blame George W. Bush's administration entirely for the 2008 recession. I want to be clear, I'm not pretending that the sitting president's policy decisions and other influences don't have an effect. But inherited legacy, context, and the surrounding details play a huge role in how these things play out.
First, the people you are talking about (Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden) all have different circumstances surrounding their cases.
Second, they all stepped forward roughly around 2009 and later. Most gathered the information they leaked between 2000 and 2008 working on programs for the CIA and NSA. They all leaked information that wasn't supposed to be leaked. The default in our government is to handle that with punitive measures. If they had stepped forward during any other presidency would the outcome have been the same? Yes.
Third, alluding to some sort of hypocrisy with regards to transparency when talking about intelligence programs initiated by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc is ironic. Just because an administration wanted to embrace transparency doesn't mean it's fine to free-for-all leak information from those agencies.
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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…
You can choose to be stateless? I thought I've read in UK media that countries are not allowed to make a person stateless. This is in the context of ISIS fighters with dual-nationality, these people are having their British citizenship stripped. Caused a bit of a hoohah with the Canadians.
Here is a full rundown of the process: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-renounce-us-citizensh...
IRS is counting your book sales Edward, CIA and FBI might be the least of your worries ;)
I 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…
To the contrary, I think the fact that you think both Snowden and Assange are Russian agents demonstrates that the administrations response was actually quite effective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you examine what Ed Snowden leaked, it’s clear he was trying to do significant damage to the NSA. Much or most of what he stole and was leaked was unrelated to domestic surveillance. Much of it revealed our overseas activity. It’s difficult to see how any of it was to the benefit of Western interests.
He wasn't "just trying to damage the NSA", he was trying to get the truth out about surveillance, the fact that the NSA was damaged was tangential and they shouldn't have been spying on US citizens. The NSA and other gov police entities were basically breaking half the dictates and the entire spirit of the US Constitution.