Interview with Edward Snowden

> if I had wanted to live a safe life, I would still be sitting in Hawaii in paradise with the woman I love collecting a huge paycheck to do almost no work.

Regardless of if he is a hero or villain, he does have integrity.

People that sacrifices their safety or lives to help a good cause are the ones I respect the most. I hope he will be able to visit his country safely sometime.

p.s. Please fix the title, it is clickbaity and almost unrelated to the actual article/interview.

> Let's assume you could simply poke an icon and all the hidden activity would stop, would you do that?

> DER SPIEGEL: Of course.

That I think is the crux of the issue - our consent is not real.

It's an English-language title, and publishers typically schedule things months or years in advance.

Please consider alternative narratives.

He acted selfishly, not morally. Like a startup founder he wanted to disrupt an existing infrastructure, with a one-sided view of the trajectory his impact would have on the domain. Any collateral damage would be easy to hide in the personal narrative memory hole.

Deep thoughts and intellectual defenses are not so hard to construct, should not be uncritically accepted with significant corroborating evidence, and should certainly not be taken in any way to imply morality, as shown by the growing list of deep thinkers who supported and participated in Jeffrey Epstein's schemes.

With Snowden we have very little corroboration, so best reserve judgement. And if he does wind up dying as many other Russian actors have...

I respect Snowden's ability to clearly articulate his position. I look forward to his book. And unlike the somewhat polarizing discussions of others, I found his statement on the difference to between intelligence and the actions of covert action, propaganda, and influence to be quite reasonable. In much the same way that accounting systems suggest you firewall the people who can sign checks from the people who can enter legitimate expenses to prevent embezzlement, the 'rules' in an intelligence agency have to firewall the collection and analysis of intelligence from the operational abilities on the other side.

We see this is civil intelligence agencies where police officers (who are the operational end of law enforcement) are given direct access to intelligence sources (from places like Palintir) and then abuse that relationship to collect intelligence on enemies (like ex spouses) in order to inform how they can operate against them.

A more effective system is to put a strong firewall between the intelligence and the operator so that there is always documentation when operations requests intelligence information and the justification given for that collection. It creates an auditable paper trail that allows for a prosecutorial effort to be mounted against bad actors.

As one person put it, watching the watchers only works if you have a record of everything they have done that can be authenticated. Such a system would log every piece of intelligence an analyst received, and with a check in place to validate a 'need to know' for things like a target's spouses nude photos, your auditors could weed out bad actors in the pipeline. That is the sort of structure that makes institutions stable and more difficult to corrupt. Processes that survive execution with a number of bad actors.