71–80 of 213 posts
His mission yes - giving up the comforts of a stable paying job in Hawaii and exposing himself to tremendous danger from a variety of nation-state level adversaries for life - in the bargain. Amazingly commendable - all for the sake of preserving core Liberty and Freedom as we know it. What happens next ? Will things go back to businesses as usual?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird invasive thought I keep having is if Snowden could, if at all, be a limited hang-out-OP/MISO (PsyOp) to gauge just how much the public would accept. There have been enough revelations to see that the NSA got to keep what it is in entirety; mission accomplished.
The government could have used Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) to keep the Snowden documents out of the papers in the USA, sending the Secret Service round to collect any 'inappropriate' documents. With a 'D-Notice' to effect the same in the UK and coupled with the usual soft measures - threaten to take away press passes from journalists (and their papers) - the whole lot could have been kept out of the papers…
Even articles in publications like "Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press" refer to this phrase as a thing for prisoners: http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news-media-la...
So it's unclear what you're talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird invasive thought I keep having is if Snowden could, if at all, be a limited hang-out-OP/MISO (PsyOp) to gauge just how much the public would accept. There have been enough revelations to see that the NSA got to keep what it is in entirety; mission accomplished.
This is definitely tinfoil hat territory. Some very high level people in the intelligence community may lose their jobs or (if things go very well) face charges in the next year or two. If the whole Snowden affair is an inside job then those high level people must have been ignorant of it since they would never accept the personal risk of the shitstorm that has resulted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing on HN about how most Americans simply don't care about this issue and it being the reason there isn't more of an uproar. However, I have a different take: They have a different opinion than you. It's not that they don't care, are brainwashed, or "lost", it's just that they have a different opinion on the matter. Now I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but let's keep in mind that their opinion is jus…
They have a right to an opinion, but that does not necessarily mean that their opinion is valid. From Wikipedia on Validity: "an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is logically entailed by its premises."
The Washington Post sat on the Collateral Murder video. [1,2] The New York Times sat on the warrantless wiretapping scandal at the request of the White House. [3] CBS sat on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal at the request of the Pentagon. [4] What is the Washington Post not telling us? [1] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/15617022129 [2] http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/wapo_denies_allegation_it_sat.... [3] http://fai…
What's your point? They are telling us a lot of things that Edward Snowden said recently that are interesting. Why whine?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's what would in most industries be considered a reasonable sized sampling. When you then look at this poll then, things start to look grim indeed: http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...
A reasonable sample is a function of the size of the overall population. Assuming you're talking a few million visitors in some fixed period of time, at 500 comments, you're still a little ways off from a 95 percent confidence interval and a +/-3 margin of error.
Jesus Christ some of the comments on that article. I wonder if there was some way to analyse what percentage of it is astro-turfing and what percentage is real red-blooded Americans just brainwashed into thinking government knows best. Americans you are lost. It's been nice knowing you.
I think this sentiment has been expressed since the 1800s. Same criticism applied to Rome... and all human civilization, really. We are a lost species, it would seem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your point? They are telling us a lot of things that Edward Snowden said recently that are interesting. Why whine?
I don't see it as "whining" as much as a reminder of the "what we see is all there is" bias. We may never know what's being hidden from us, but it's worth remembering that we can be near-certain of the existence of unknown-unknowns. The point is that all of this may be the tip of the iceberg. It's intellectually interesting to think about, with potentially grave consequences for day-to-day life.
True enough, but I think everyone already knows that.
The content of the recent Snowden interview, not so much.
I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. Despite a fair amount of indignation from the public, it seems to me that the majority has accepted the new surveillance reality.
Privacy as an abstract concept is meaningless to most Americans -- thanks in part to pervasive data mining and targeted advertising by Google, Facebook, credit card companies, and so forth. That's not to say privacy doesn't matter to them. Children often want to keep things private from their parents. LGBT persons often want to keep their sexual orientation private from less tolerant members of society. But that's because the consequences of such a violation of privacy are immediate and visceral. In contrast, the automatic mass collection of data by the NSA doesn't have any more of a tangible impact on most people's lives than does Google's or Facebook's.
To put this another way, very few Americans have altered their behavior because of Snowden's revelations. And it's largely because the government hasn't given them any reason to. The NSA can read my e-mail, but I can safely say "Fuck the NSA" without consequence. In contrast, when I was in China, attempting to visit a prohibited website would result in my Internet connection being blocked for up to an hour. Or to pick an example in the U.S., making an illegal turn in front of a traffic camera would result in my getting a ticket. Absent that sort of "feedback" from the NSA's surveillance, the harms of mass surveillance simply don't click with a lot of people.
That's not to say such very real harms don't exist. The NSA's data collection is tied in various ways to the no-fly list, the war on drugs, and targeted assassinations, each of which result in visceral, immediate harm to real people. But from my perspective, the surveillance aspect of these stories have not been told particularly well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing on HN about how most Americans simply don't care about this issue and it being the reason there isn't more of an uproar. However, I have a different take: They have a different opinion than you. It's not that they don't care, are brainwashed, or "lost", it's just that they have a different opinion on the matter. Now I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but let's keep in mind that their opinion is jus…
They have a right to an opinion, but that does not necessarily mean that their opinion is valid. From Wikipedia on Validity: "an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is logically entailed by its premises."
Personally I worry about how long this takes to resolve; if it takes too long, there might be enough social value drift no one will be upset by this sort of thing anymore. And that will be a much harder to fix starting point. Well, I would consider it a state worth fixing, at least.