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Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

theguardian.com

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Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#91

Post by samstave »

MisterWebz wrote: post #69
twoodfin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope pg is reading these comments and is pleased that hn has become one more of the innumerable discussion boards where calling the U.S. a "police state, plain and simple" has become part of the everyday discourse. Yuck. I know there has always been a strain of the paranoid (sometimes well-earned) in hacker culture, but presumably it wasn't what this site was built to highlight.

You can increase the quality of HN threads by replying to such "paranoid" comments with a counter-argument instead of complaining.

Crap, I accidentally fat-fingered my vote into a downvoted. I meant to upvote you.

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#92

Post by robrenaud »

dmix wrote: post #61
brador wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean: Your move Larry, Mark, Steve, Merissa and Tim. In the end the base unit of society is still the human, no matter how many layers we place around them.

correction: > no matter how many [lawyers] we place around them A CEO/Chairman hurting a public companies profit via protest against NSA would result in shareholder lawsuits. Another good example of the the legal constructs around corporatism and public stock markets hurting the inherent protectionism from abuse free markets offer society. Corporatism often prevents large companies from acting morally, whether by bei…

What happened when Google left China?

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#93

Post by geetee »

pearjuice wrote: post #27
ck2 wrote: post #4

How is it possible for Snowden to be inspired any further? He sacrified his life for us. He is the inspiration. Certainly no president in the next few terms will rest until he is rendered, he has to look over his shoulder now forever. Thank you for your sacrifice Mr. Snowden.

Sacrified his life? Please stop. He merely leaked classified data and sold pieces of it here and there. He is basically living the life of a celebrity right now yet dramafies his existence.

Proof that he sold information please?

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#94

Post by kamjam »

Evernoob wrote: post #33
pearjuice wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sacrified his life? Please stop. He merely leaked classified data and sold pieces of it here and there. He is basically living the life of a celebrity right now yet dramafies his existence.

> living the life of a celebrity right now I very much doubt it's as glamorous as you seem to be imagining.

Exactly, he's living in hiding. Osama Bin Laden had to do the same, but for actually committing terrible crimes. Hardly the same magnitude and hardly living the life of a celebrity.

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#95

Post by samstave »

twoodfin wrote: post #37
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being pedantic. No knock, no warrant, no redress when they murder you or a loved one for your family = police state, plain and simple.

I hope pg is reading these comments and is pleased that hn has become one more of the innumerable discussion boards where calling the U.S. a "police state, plain and simple" has become part of the everyday discourse. Yuck. I know there has always been a strain of the paranoid (sometimes well-earned) in hacker culture, but presumably it wasn't what this site was built to highlight.

I'm so tired of this viewpoint. You may not realize it, or value this revelation, but the issues we are discussing regarding the NSA, Snowden and the electronic spying is of critical importance. We are seeing the shaping of the present and the future of the Internet and thus all human communications.

I am beyond happy and proud of HN for keeping such a discourse about these issues! I have so much more respect for the HN community for keeping these issues on the front page and having such a sober view of their implications!

It's exceptionally naive to think that these issues are not related to what HN is all about: technology startups; what if your going to build "the next google" - clearly then you will come face to face with some MIB demanding access to your users data. If you don't pay attention to what's going on now, and develop an understanding of how grave this situation is, you'd never be in a position to build the future without furthering an actual police state.

The world is being steamrollered by the interests of the .001% and there is no reason why it has to be that way.

Edit: minor grammatical changes

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#96

Post by haberman »

MisterWebz wrote: post #69
twoodfin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope pg is reading these comments and is pleased that hn has become one more of the innumerable discussion boards where calling the U.S. a "police state, plain and simple" has become part of the everyday discourse. Yuck. I know there has always been a strain of the paranoid (sometimes well-earned) in hacker culture, but presumably it wasn't what this site was built to highlight.

You can increase the quality of HN threads by replying to such "paranoid" comments with a counter-argument instead of complaining.

By engaging in a line of comments that is so far from reality, the quality of discussion is lowered because it is off in the weeds instead of confronting the real issues.

One of the reasons I generally like HN so much is because there is so much expertise around that the comments often get right to the actual heart of an issue.

A great example is something like the P ≠ NP attempted proof from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850 The top comment is extremely informative, nearly the best commentary you could find about the issue anywhere.

Imagine if the top comment was instead from one of the numerous people who believed they had already proved P = NP or P ≠ NP, and they went off about their own theories and disparaged all of the mathematical community for ignoring them. A mathematical quack, basically.

The people who actually understand math could spend their time refuting this guy, but by doing so the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the site would go down, and with it the overall comment quality. And besides, the quack has probably heard it all before and it didn't change his mind. So instead people vote stuff like this down so that the top comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.

The problem with stories like this is that the equivalent of these mathematical quacks get voted up to the top. The natural hacker distrust for authority, which on one hand motivates good and productive work on privacy/anonymizing technologies, in this case motivates people to post comments that involve low-quality grandstanding and statements about the political situation that are objectively false. Sure it is possible to refute them, but S/N ratio is still lowered and no one's mind gets changed anyway.

By the way, I'm not someone who is downplaying the significance of Snowden's revelations. I just want to read a discussion that really cuts to the heart of the issues, instead of generic outrage, vague calls to action, and outright inaccurate statements like calling the US a police state.

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#97

Post by ispolin »

twoodfin wrote: post #79
MisterWebz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can increase the quality of HN threads by replying to such "paranoid" comments with a counter-argument instead of complaining.

criley2 did that and got the cookie-cutter response I replied to. That response is the same as you'd read on any of a hundred boards that love to tread over and over through black-helicopter-ville. Nobody's mind is being changed and nothing new is being added to the discussion. Like those boards, it's boring as hell.

So a discussion in 4 parts then:

1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)

2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?

3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)

4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?

Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.

Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.

(edit: formatting)

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#98

Post by ck2 »

jusben1369 wrote: post #81
pearjuice wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sacrified his life? Please stop. He merely leaked classified data and sold pieces of it here and there. He is basically living the life of a celebrity right now yet dramafies his existence.

HN folks. I think ck2's response and pearjuice's response are both inaccurate as they represent an extreme view. It might be useful to read about celebratory and the attractions and psyche of those that are drawn to it. Many of you here share Snowden's feelings but none of you did what he did. Was it simply his sense of justice that made him do this? Or something more? If he'd stayed in the US and immediately faced t…

I don't worship Snowden at all or see him as celebrity. If anything I wish there was 100% more attention on the information he brought to light instead of him.

I merely recognize his extreme sacrifice and thank him for it.

If we are supposed to thank the people who ran and signed up for the military to invade Iraq and empowered the insanity of the last administration, we most certainly can thank Snowden for showing us that not only has the insanity not stopped, it may have gotten far worse.

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#99

Post by lukifer »

celticninja wrote: post #73
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being pedantic. No knock, no warrant, no redress when they murder you or a loved one for your family = police state, plain and simple.

That they can take your assests without proving any criminal wrongdoing surely tips the balance into police state.

At some point, it becomes a pointless semantic game. It's clearly not Stalin-bad, but it's still pretty damn bad. There are solid reasons both to support and dispute the label of "police state".

To strive for accuracy, I'd go with "unaccountable oligarchy" or "faux-democratic tyrannical beauracracy". Not as punchy, admittedly. You could also call it "soft fascism".

Ultimately, we live in a new and unprecedented form of state power run wild, and while there are echoes of history, it's probably going to continue to unfold in a mostly unique way. There's no reason to forcibly apply the old labels any more than there is to call an airplane a "winged tank".

Re: Email service used by Snowden shuts down, warns against using US-based companies

#100

Post by mzs »

criley2 wrote: post #8
spodek wrote: post #5

"Can we call it a police state now?" I saw the question on Reddit after a different revelation last month. I feel like we're going to ask that question more and more. I can only hope more and more of us are inspired, as Snowden was by Levinson (Lavabit's CEO) and many of us have been by both of them, and we act to protect ourselves and constrain our governments from overreaching to where they can't help repeating the…

My reply on Reddit when I see people bring that up is simple: You insult people who have experienced a police state by calling what we are experiencing a police state. A police state has no distinction between legislation and executive. Our legislation is currently investigating the president for: * CIA coverup of the attack on our Benghazi consulate' * IRS targeting of political opposition They're planning on using…

Criley, have you lived in a police state? I did. I don't offend easily but my advice to you is that unless you had a dog in this race by living in a police state yourself, please think harder about saying what I will or will not be insulted by.
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