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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

#221

Post by mixmastamyk »

throw1920 wrote: post #164
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…

> Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens. It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage. Everything in the above comment is prop…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#222

Post by merman »

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…

What you are trying to do is called whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#:~:text=Whatabo....

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#223

Post by anon____ »

roenxi wrote: post #178
Loquebantur wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even beyond the war crimes; just the wars themselves. The WMD thing in Iraq is nice because not only was the war flimsily justified, but that justification itself was a lie. However, a lot of the other wars are just bizarre. Taking Afghanistan - the costs, suffering caused and damage to the global economy are completely absurd. Nothing was achieved. There isn't any reason for someone in the US to even feel better aft…

The cost of one party is the profit of the other. What was that money spent on? Weapons, ammunition, vehicles, food and clothes and other stuff for the soldiers. Someone sold that stuff, and those people needed these wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#224

Post by kspacewalk2 »

theaussiestew wrote: post #182
FormerBandmate wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst leaders in history and the neocons legitimately thought they could create a free market utopia in Iraq (lmao), check out Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They fucked up horribly and made Iraq worse because they were incompetent morons who fired the entire army and didn't bother to make sure people actually had basic services. Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire and…

Funny, that sounds like the Ukrainian public’s opinion about Zelenskyy before the war started. Dismal leader with rock bottom approval ratings and high levels of corruption. Still, that definitely doesn’t justify foreign invasion.

One was an electorate in a democratic country being disillusioned about a leader they freely elected. The other is and a genocidal dictator who murdered the previous dictatorial leadership to get to power, gassed civilians and launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands. Not sure how those two "sound alike" to you. Care to elaborate?

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#225

Post by stephen_g »

ROTMetro wrote: post #195
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Instantly to the 'what about' deflection.

“Whataboutism” is only a thing if the comparison is in bad faith (i.e. irrelevance or significantly different scales of atrocity).

Directly comparing one unjustified, illegal and unjust war (Iraq) with another one (Ukraine) isn’t whataboutism, it’s a legitimate criticism of hypocrisy.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#226

Post by jki275 »

philippejara wrote: post #203
jki275 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. His passport had been revoked before he got on the plane. He got on the plane to "Ecuador" on a temporary travel document from Ecuador, knowing he was never getting off anywhere but Moscow. https://apnews.com/article/587786e6e63b4dc2b70c471606d7f584

from your own article: "If a senior official in another country or with an airline orders it, a country could overlook the withdrawn passport, the official said."

That doesn't contradict anything I said or support anything I was responding to.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#227

Post by XorNot »

merman wrote: post #222
Loquebantur wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you are trying to do is called whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#:~:text=Whatabo... .

Look up "false equivalency" next. And then "bad faith".

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#228

Post by kspacewalk2 »

rayiner wrote: post #173
pydry wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

There's no comparison at all. The vast majority of the people who died in Iraq were killed by other Iraqis in a sectarian conflict. Yes, it was sparked by the US invasion, and they definitely should be blamed for both invading in the first place and for fucking it up once they did, but American soldiers did not, with very very few exceptions, go around indiscriminately killing civilians and leveling cities block by block WW2-style, like the Russians did in Bucha, Mariupol, etc.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#229

Post by wrp »

I didn't follow the Snowden story because I don't have the background to evaluate the claims, but there is something I recall that hasn't been discussed yet.

Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#230

Post by XorNot »

theaussiestew wrote: post #115
hackerlight wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. How do you know that this is true without mind reading or lie detection powers? I'm not being sarcastic. You see these people talking and h…

First, it’s because I noticed myself and others doing this through observation and intuition. Secondly, it’s because there are literally accounts and articles where these people say out loud what they’re doing. E.g The Tucker Carlson example wasn’t me just surmising something, I read it in an article where acquaintances literally said he held no outrageous views privately and was literally doing it to rile his audien…

Ah yes, Tucker Carlson who was dropped by Fox News for managing to lose them $750m after refusing to reign in his messaging on Dominion, and then during discovery his personal messages and recordings include such explicit gems found in court filings as:

* "Now this guy may be a child rapist," he says, "I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her."

and

* When the show host describes 14-year-old girls at Mr Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he says: "If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario."

and then

* Mr Carlson refers to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as "the biggest white whores in America", he calls the journalist Arianna Huffington a "pig" and says that Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton are "anti-man".

Yes I'm sure that guy who has day in and day out pushed "extreme" narratives for so long is just a totally well-adjusted person. You know, just like Bill O'Reilly who proceeded him ... what's that? He went down for sexual harassment in the workplace? [2] Total outlier. Definitely all an act.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47523608

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/21/bill-oreilly-3...

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