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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

#231

Post by rayiner »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #228
rayiner wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 b…

The excess death rate from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is at up to 4.5 million people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terro...

At an individual moral level maybe it’s worse for a soldier to kill civilians directly, than to kill them indirectly by overthrowing the government and destabilizing the health system. But if you’re comparing nations I think you have to look at a macro level, not at the level of individual morality. “Team America: World Police” foreign policy has a much higher aggregate body count than Russia’s territorial expansionist foreign policy.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#232

Post by XorNot »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #156
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What I dislike about this comic is the subtle implication that torture is an effective means of information extraction - it suffers from the car keys phenomenon of how people think about torture.

Basically: if I threatened to hit you with a crowbar unless you gave me your car keys, you'd give them to me, because a car isn't worth anything.

Same story with an ordinary person's computer: they just don't have enough worth hiding that can't be repaired later, compared to serious injury. "Oh no, someone got my credit card! I'll have to argue for some chargebacks from my bank after I report it was stolen" rather then recover from a shattered knee-cap.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#233

Post by elihu »

ok123456 wrote: post #140
pstuart wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, the Wikileaks DNC email dump was just a front for Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?

It was discussed at the time. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned as DNC chair over what was in the emails.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasse...

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#234

Post by still_grokking »

dudul wrote: post #218
freerangebat wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if historically governments were ever controlled by the people. It seems democracies that can somewhat control the government are extreme outliers in human history.

Democracy via elected representatives is a lie. "Extreme outliers" may even be too much. Is there even a handful of examples?

It's not even a lie. It's just not democracy.

The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.

"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.

I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.

The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#235

Post by droopyEyelids »

markus_zhang wrote: post #145
anonymousiam wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take what you've said a little further, intelligence agencies have the "law" behind them, but once you become aware of everything they (all of them, worldwide) are doing, you get a completely different perspective on the "law" itself. Being involved in these activities can also diminish your ethical base, which I guess explains some of the crazy law-ignoring/law-breaking activities within all governments.

Law is a weapon of the ruling class. That's why I laugh at whoever suggests about unions. Downvote me as you wish, but it won't fix the problem for ya.

In the USA the law about unions have neutered them enough that what you say is true, but in Europe where they have sector level unions and sympathy strikes, unions give people material power over their conditions

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#236

Post by boomboomsubban »

wrp wrote: post #229

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 st…

>Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor.

This is a bastardized version of events. Snowden had a number of jobs that required high level clearance from 2006-2013. He supposedly took the final Booz Allen Hamilton job because it had a great deal of access to data, but he had long since passed the security checks necessary to get the job.

You can argue that there should be more checks done upon switching jobs, or that people with clearance should face more periodic checks to their current status, but there was no real reason for Snowden to fail the security checks.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#237

Post by thewildginger »

faddypaddy34 wrote: post #148
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 Ukraine used illegally cluster bombs on ethnic Russians for years. This is actually documentation. https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...

>The Ukraine

It's a country, not simply a geological region.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#238

Post by selimthegrim »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #165
nyokodo wrote: post #160

[flagged]

He was flying to Ecuador and his passport was revoked when he was in Russia. If you speak out against the war in Ukraine in Russia you get shot, and he has a wife and kids now. He's done his part imo

You go to jail. Putin isn't Stalin. But Snowden isn't a Russia citizen, so the US could shoot him if rendered, now that Russia withdrew from the ECHR.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#239

Post by _8j50 »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #176

Years ago, when I interviewed at places that did USG-related work, the stuff I heard about that I didn't have to sign an NDA to hear , scared me enough that I knew Snowden-scale stuff was entirely within the capabilities of the US Govt. I didn't realize they would use it against us just blatantly in direct violation of every law put in place to prevent it, though. I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks i…

I think your takeaway is wrong. It isn't the government doing naughty secret things but the government doing so with support from a plurality of the people. The patriot act is a non-partisan issue that gets renewed every administration. Snowden and Assange should be locked up accroding to a majority of americans.

Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.

You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.

The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.

Re: Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

#240

Post by i2cmaster »

thewildginger wrote: post #237
faddypaddy34 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ukraine used illegally cluster bombs on ethnic Russians for years. This is actually documentation. https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...

>The Ukraine It's a country, not simply a geological region.

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