301–310 of 459 posts
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So inform us. Present evidence for your opinion or keep your opinion to yourself.
He didn't give any less evidence than OP.
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You think Assange put himself at as much risk as he did to promote himself? He spent 7 years locked in an embassy (to great detriment to his health and was arguably worse then jail), is now in jail, and is facing at least life in prison, if not the death penalty. You really think he did all that just to promote himself and for some attention?
> He spent 7 years locked in an embassy ... To avoid criminal charges for things unrelated to his political/journalistic exploits. Plenty of people run when faced with possible jail time, e.g., Roman Polanski.
I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.
Much discussion on this topic relies on popular sentiment and media reporting. The redacted and declassified Congressional report should be considered a primary source and contradicts many common beliefs about Mr. Snowden: https://www.congress.gov/114/crpt/hrpt891/CRPT-114hrpt891.pd... The Executive Summary provides a good overview. In contrast to the Amazon book page that claims he helped "build" the system, it appe…
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Well, then I suppose it was indeed a PR stunt for the Russians to accept South African farmers, and they are according to your logic indeed Russian Agents! That is assuming a PR campaign pushes an agenda, and I would argue it does.
There is a difference between and unwitting pawn, especially in a circumstance like that, and someone who acts with full knowledge as to what they're doing. I don't understand why this is difficult.
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Is that the case for both govt and private corporate surveillance? How widespread is the use of Alexa in your area?
The key difference is that you can decide not to buy corporate products you do not want, but have to comply with the laws. I am a lot less concerned about stupid things done by a majority for convenience (and I can choose whether to do participate or not) than about the law that forces the same stupidity down my throat. My 2c.
That's a fallacy by both choice and externality.
There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement.
Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She can literally chose between non-free software (which includes surveillance), or death.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/mar/26/sandler-fsf-free-...
Emergency medical services, government contracts, third-party contracts by various firms and organisations, third-party use of Gmail either directly or as a hosted email service (see Benjamin Mako Hill's "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours": https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...), and the issues of spillover externalities (Amazon Ring doorbell surveillance, third-party tracking of mobile phone SIMs, MACs, and Bluetooth signatures, facial surveillance) mean that, no, actually, you cannot decide not to participate in corporate surveillance.
And, as a final point, both government and corporate surveillance and oppression very often speak to the same underlying dynamic: that of power to defend both itself and its wealth and/or golden geese. Examples are numerous, though the Johnson County War would be a good case history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_County_War
Let's please put this canard in its well-deserved grave and bury it.
I wonder what if he would mention anything about 5G in the book. As far as I understand, all the fuss US making against Huawei is actually due to its (future) crippling of its eavesdropping capability. Not that 5G is a panacea for that but Huawei is augmenting their equipments against such attacks, and they will be the main supplier.
I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.
Can I ask what country this is in? Here in the UK, nothing had changed, and any debate that wasn't centred around condemning Snowden and justifying the actions of the security services, was very short lived.
And whilst what eg GCHQ actually do hasn't really changed much as far as I can tell, it's been brought onto an "open" legal footing which is progress. The next step will be for the legal safeguards which are currently rather toothless to evolve to have real teeth. I think that will happen eventually but it'll be a slow journey to get there.
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> 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 pow…
Corporate surveillance is only a problem because it will sooner or later feed in to government surveillance. If I could wave a wand and stop that happening I'd be fine with corporate surveillance; I'm annoyed but not threatened by the idea that someone will study my every movement trying to sell me things I want. I'm threatened if the extremely arbitrary government decides that I'm an undesirable for some reason. > c…
1. Persistent psychological manipulation (advertising), including political manipulation, based on knowing your weaknesses better than you know yourself.
2. Punitive insurance rates based on unreasonable inferences, especially for mandatory insurances. Like say doubling your auto insurance rate for buying more than a few beers per week. Or your health insurance going up due to buying power tools.
3. Blacklisted and prevented from working industry wide. A good concrete example I got from HN just the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consulting_Association .
4. Prevented from or price-gouged when using vital services. For example - the unbanked (ChexSystems), recent Internet censorship (Visa/MC), Internet service ("six strikes").
The issue isn't the straw man of being "dragged out of your apartment by McDonalds employees", but rather being prohibited from buying food due to being uniformly banned from McDonalds, Burger King, and Walmart - say you've previously shoplifted but have served your sentence, are simply wrongly accused, or perhaps just didn't respect a sign saying to take off your sunglasses.
I know you're likely to respond to these by defining them away as not being problems in your paradigm, but paradigms are only as good as their constructive results. Our current politicatastrophe is basically due to people clinging to their chosen paradigm way past its utility. FWIW our modern society is indistinguishable from a "Libertarian Paradise" where USG is a private corporation that owns everything and who've you've contracted with to be here. An axiomatic approach of morality-by-construction doesn't work - the only way is to judge qualitative situation.
I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.
That's great to hear. Unfortunately, his actions haven't really done anything in the US. I wish I could say otherwise, but I haven't seen a single thing change. Privacy still isn't an issue that's on most people's radar. The government still does what it did before and likely a lot more. I have a ton of respect for Snowden, but he severely overestimated how much Americans care about privacy, spying, surveillance, or…
I've seen intranet encryption between internal services become much more commonplace
I really only want read the story told by Snowden's bank accounts and use of cash. Pretty sure this isn't that.
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.
Especially in face of repeated requests for clarity and/or specifics.
The initial question might have passed muster (I'd considered giving it the benefit of the doubt). Reading the rest of the thread, it fails badly.