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Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

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Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#151

Post by senttoschool »

theaussiestew wrote: post #136
FormerBandmate wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse

This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by c…

Politicians leverage anti-China rhetoric to get votes while mainstream media use it to get an audience.

Just write "China bad" and automatically get 2x more views and clicks.

When was the last time you read something positive or even neutral on China in the mainstream media? I can't remember the last time. Probably before Trump.

1.4 billion people and not a single positive thing happens in China, according to Western media.

Show a Chinese person being happy? Must be CCP propaganda.

You didn't automatically say "China bad"? CCP shill.

Show a Chinese company having international success? Must have stolen the tech.

Social media app that US teens love to use? China must doing mass surveillance on Americans.

This sort of black and white demonizing of China creates extremist views. You can see these extremist views on China all over HN, where one expects users to not be easily deceived. I was wrong.

People are so concerned and fearful of pro-China propaganda that they don't even realize they've been drinking propaganda from the other side as well.

Mainstream media gets more views and clicks by generating fear, anger and saying "China bad":

* Your view of China turns negative over time

* Politicians need your vote in order to advance their careers

* Politicians say "China bad" to get your votes

* Media quotes politicians saying "China bad"

* Your view of China turns even more negative

* Politician's approval ratings are down

* Politician says "China bad" to distract you

* Your view of China turns worse

Because of this endless cycle, it's career suicide for a US politician to not be anti-China. Any US politician objectivity on China has been lost since 2016.

And it's not like there are alternative media since the media landscape has consolidated into a handful of powerful conglomerates.

I know some will accuse me of being anti-western or pro-CCP below. No. I'm not. I'm anti-extremists.

The fact that even people on HN are convinced by the good (western) vs evil (China) narrative shows you how effective this sort of thing is.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#152

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #121
theaussiestew wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very eloquently phrased. Some of the commonly accepted truths and geopolitics narratives are quite disturbing and actually very Orwellian in a genuine (and not clichéd) sense. Narratives around China and Russia, narratives around our own liberty are completed warped, and to speak out singles you out. There’s definitely a chilling effect about what is acceptable to talk about and what isn’t. See my other comment on th…

[flagged]

Do you think Cheney's war was significantly more justified than Putin's war?

People who start wars are legitimately bad, but let's not pretend that Russia is special here .

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#153

Post by hutzlibu »

Loquebantur wrote: post #143
FormerBandmate wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse

The US has Guantanamo Bay. Among others. The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system. The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp. The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clea…

"Else it is only another layer of deception."

There is still a great difference between mainstream media and politicians avoiding certain topics and police activly supressing knowledge about historical events and rewriting history as they see fit (tiananmen square).

And completely banning Winnie Pooh, because some internet dudes made a funny picture.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#154

Post by Zetice »

bee_rider wrote: post #133
Zetice wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about as a boring person who does think the state should be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on people? And that person doesn't have to be anti-encryption, just anti-bad opsec.

> What about as a boring person who does think the state should be allowed to focus the Eye of Sauron on people? Sure. Not everyone has to agree with me. I think it is unpopular to be happy about intelligence agencies spying on us. So hopefully I can win over some of the in-between people by causing them to fully face their position. But if someone just fundamentally disagrees with me, I think this tactic won’t work.…

That's the thing; for someone who thinks "eye of Sauron" is acceptable, they don't think it means "writ large surveillance of everyone", they think it means "targeted surveillance via warrant of a credible threat to American interests domestic and abroad."

So you really have a disagreement on terms, not on merits.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#155

Post by opportune »

motohagiography wrote: post #52

When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points…

One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If you were a spook of a geopolitical adversary, one of the most effective things you could do to undermine the US would be to undermine their (hugely powerful) intelligence apparatus. There is a reason a a lot of US-critical media comes out of Russian and Chinese state sponsored media.

While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.

Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#156

Post by FormerBandmate »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #69
drumhead wrote: post #48

Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.

> If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. The thing that was pretty apparent from Snowden's leaks is primarily that they don't need to . This fear that "NSA can crack cryptography" is the wrong fear. First, as others have noted, there are legions of other researchers evaluating and attempting to break widely used crypto-systems. There is no reason to belie…

https://xkcd.com/538/ writ large

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#157

Post by splendor_spoon »

pstuart wrote: post #120
nyolfen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more realistically, it was israel: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusi... perhaps you recall trump’s first two acts in office — recognizing jerusalem as israel’s capital, and sanctioning russia. curious!

Ha! Makes sense. I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny. Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.

The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-r...

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#158

Post by pydry »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #152
FormerBandmate wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you think Cheney's war was significantly more justified than Putin's war? People who start wars are legitimately bad, but let's not pretend that Russia is special here .

America would be a better place if it had more people furious that America is turning into Russia, and fewer people trying to justify that it's not quite as bad.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#159

Post by opportune »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #14

I think people would be surprised and sickened to know just how cooperative the big tech companies are with the intelligence agencies. Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems. Yes, Telcos have had to this as well, but I don’t think many people know that Microsoft has proactively done this.

There are enough examples of what happens if you as a tech company don’t cooperate with intelligence that I don’t blame them. There is nothing you can do against people with guns, gag orders, and secret courts when they show up and tell you to do something.

Though yes, Microsoft is a particularly grossly sycophantic player - their strategy clearly is to be the IC’s best friends because it will get them IC contracts and probably help protect/benefit them in many other aspects.

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