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Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

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Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#161

Post by D_Alex »

beachstartup wrote: post #133
STRML wrote: post #79

I live in Hong Kong, and can verify that it is absolutely a technologist's paradise and an extremely easy place to move around in. Phones are incredibly cheap; the cheapest functional Android knockoff smartphones will run you about $50-80 (all prices in USD for simplicity), maybe less if you get it in Kowloon. "Burner"-style phones can be as low as $8. SIM cards are essentially free (usually about $8-10 deposit on th…

yeah to cut straight to the chase a special administrative region of the people's republic of china is actually more free than the USA.

Dunno about "free", but what really bothers me is that someone decided to seek asylum from the US.

US used to be the gold standard in democracy and justice.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#162

Post by alexqgb »

krapp wrote: post #149
alexqgb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What Snowden did is, arguably, treason." Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.

Fair enough, I'll concede the point. But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.

You really don't understand what a formal declaration of war is, do you?

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#163

Post by contingencies »

panacea wrote: post #39
Apocryphon wrote: post #35

I've been thinking of alternative destinations. New Zealand, home of exile Kim Dotcom, could work. But what about Sweden? Aren't they very neutral? Or Switzerland, the nation that's synonymous with neutrality?

Sweden? The country that's trying to extradite Assange?

More importantly, they illegally nabbed anakata from Cambodia, bundled him on a plane, and threw him in solitary for >2 months, which is torture under UN definition. And he's a Swedish citizen.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#164

Post by glurgh »

AVTizzle wrote: post #60
glurgh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's striking how one obscure blog post can be more valuable than all the media speculation on this question (that I've seen) put together. The infographic is taken from the South China Morning Post, a mainstream media outlet. It's followed by some verbiage about the speed of the Hong Kong judiciary and then a mention of a murder trial (actually, two trials) that's gone on for nearly 10 years - but that's a murder tr…

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I don't imagine an "interest in Chinese language and culture" would have anything to do with this decision.

I'm not being entirely serious (hard to be, given the little we know) but I'm not being sarcastic, either. Some of Snowden's behaviour has been pretty odd. A variety of interpretations are possible. One is that he's a mastermind media manipulator/intelligence operator/exploiter of immigration laws/meticulous planner of a fugitive. This idea has some traction on HN and outside but I'm pretty skeptical of it. The interpretation that I lean towards, mostly for Occam's razor-ish reasons, is that he's maybe a little bit naive and perhaps doesn't quite know what he's doing.

If you care about things like your credibility and being taken seriously you probably don't do things like fib about your salary or suggest the CIA is going to hire triads to have you whacked.

If you hope to avoid the reach of the US criminal justice system or intelligence services you probably don't meet, in person, with high-profile US journalists in a Hong Kong hotel carrying a Rubik's cube. You probably don't go to Hong Kong in the first place where your ability to predict your future fate is very limited.

And finally, if you hope to represent your prosecution as political and your acts as acts of conscience in defense of civil liberties, you probably don't start divulging operational details of overseas US intelligence operations to foreign governments - they're not related to your stated cause and just land you in much deeper doodoo.

Now, it's possible all of this is some diabolically clever ploy/gambit but, personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#165

Post by contingencies »

rld wrote: post #128

> Budding spies and others of a paranoid nature can buy a couple of those SIM cards to swap in and out of their (unlocked) phones for $10 in any 7-11, no registration, no questions asked (try doing that in India or Argentina!) Argentine here, you can buy SIM cards literally everywhere. Vendors will even sell them to you on trains.

Logging on to GSM your phone uploads its IMEI ('phone serial number') with the SIM card identifier or IMSI ('sim ID'). So if you switch, you are still tracked. Budding spies will learn their tech before putting their ass on the line.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#166

Post by krapp »

alexqgb wrote: post #162
krapp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I'll concede the point. But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.

You really don't understand what a formal declaration of war is, do you?

I do. I'm suggesting that will probably be the justification, regardless. What is treason and what gets treated as treason can be two different things.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#167

Post by rayiner »

clicks wrote: post #158
rayiner wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to eng…

But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. I get what you're trying to say... but I'm not sure if the latter point of that statement is so spot on. Manning was a wealthy white…

Manning was a soldier and faced the military justice system, which is necessarily harsh. With Schwartz, we'll never know what kind of shake he would have gotten--a judge never even got to hear his plea.

Re: Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

#169

Post by akiselev »

anigbrowl wrote: post #132
akiselev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort. As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fac…

Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia.

I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free.

Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them.

The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.

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