Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

computerweekly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#111

Post by schoen »

riversflow wrote: post #99
kwhitefoot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the same grounds that the US DoE has a right privacy, a right not to be spied on by Brazil.

I don't contend that the DoE or any other agency has a right to privacy from Brazil. Spy craft is just a part of international politics, turnabout is fair play.

Do you think it's bad if the U.S. prosecutes Brazilian spies who spy on U.S. organizations? Shouldn't we care whether the things that the justice system is punishing people for are things that are actually good or bad? (I mean, I guess your intuition probably says "no, not really"!)

I think if it's wrong we shouldn't do it (because we shouldn't do things that are wrong), and if it's not wrong we shouldn't punish other people for doing it (because we shouldn't punish people for doing things that are not wrong). Yes, this is exactly attempting to apply personal morality to the "international system". Which is made up of people who make conscious decisions about how to behave toward other people.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#112

Post by riversflow »

feoren wrote: post #82
riversflow wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I completely agree with this justification for spying, to the point I would be upset if they weren’t spying in this way. To me spy craft is where personal ethics become less important than realpolitik. The most powerful country in the world should have an inside track on whats going on in important markets, by hook or by crook. That’s the governments job. On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy…

Please see my sibling comment to yours for three reasons why this is a terrible justification for spying. > The most powerful country in the world should have an inside track on whats going on in important markets, by hook or by crook We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. Why is this the job of a spy agency and not its economics departments? I would…

> We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information.

How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo, if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable?

> Reason 1 . . . literally any spying could be justified this way.

I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does. Why should I? They don't have jurisdiction over me. I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate, which gets us to your Reason 2.

> Essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power

No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying.

> Reason 3

Again, do you have some sort of inside track on the DoD(or some other 3 letters)? You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes.

Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo; nations constantly spy on one another. Justify why we shouldn't spy, rather than pointing out it's pitfalls.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#113

Post by hatboat »

riversflow wrote: post #99
kwhitefoot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the same grounds that the US DoE has a right privacy, a right not to be spied on by Brazil.

I don't contend that the DoE or any other agency has a right to privacy from Brazil. Spy craft is just a part of international politics, turnabout is fair play.

"Sorry, I didn't pick the game - it is what it is" said LeBron to Neymar as they lined up for some one-on-one.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#114

Post by riversflow »

schoen wrote: post #111
riversflow wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't contend that the DoE or any other agency has a right to privacy from Brazil. Spy craft is just a part of international politics, turnabout is fair play.

Do you think it's bad if the U.S. prosecutes Brazilian spies who spy on U.S. organizations? Shouldn't we care whether the things that the justice system is punishing people for are things that are actually good or bad? (I mean, I guess your intuition probably says "no, not really"!) I think if it's wrong we shouldn't do it (because we shouldn't do things that are wrong), and if it's not wrong we shouldn't punish othe…

> this is exactly attempting to apply personal morality to the "international system"

I can do that. Nobody should lie, it's wrong. So, as long as every nation stops lying, they can stop spying too. Easy Peasy.

> Shouldn't we care whether the things that the justice system is punishing people for are things that are actually good or bad?

Absolutely. Which is why usually friendly-nation spies don't seem to get in trouble. Take a look at this list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies

I think lying/misrepresenting is bad and very harmful, however I also think it is human nature, and spying helps to alleviate that information asymmetry.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#115

Post by bediger4000 »

cwkoss wrote: post #36
jasmes wrote: post #8

Journalistic integrity balancing with the national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated. I am comfortable trusting the NYT to do their job. I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.

The NYT has a long history of being pro-war. People who dislike US using military force to enforce global hegemony would probably disagree with many of the editorial choices they are making behind closed doors.

Yeah, I remember the NYT sitting on Risen and Lichtblau's 2004 reporting about NSA dragnet surveillance until 2005, after Bush won.

NYT is not only pro-war, they're very conservative.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#116

Post by feoren »

riversflow wrote: post #112
feoren wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please see my sibling comment to yours for three reasons why this is a terrible justification for spying. > The most powerful country in the world should have an inside track on whats going on in important markets, by hook or by crook We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. Why is this the job of a spy agency and not its economics departments? I would…

> We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo , if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable? > Reason 1 . . . literally any s…

> Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo

That attitude definitely benefits those who like the status quo. I think the "burden of proof", if such a thing exists, is on the position with the least prior evidence. That something is the status quo is pretty weak evidence in its favor; I can point to many instances in human history where the status quo was pretty awful.

> if spying stopped wholesale

Strawman. I never said spying should be "stopped wholesale". Never anything even remotely close to that, in fact. I'm not responsible for defending a position you completely fabricated.

> I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does ... I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate

I don't believe the gathering of intelligence is "completely separate" from acting on that intel. I don't believe the accumulation of guns and ammunition is "completely separate" from the act of using those guns. I don't believe the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium is "completely separate" from building an atomic bomb. I don't believe building an atomic bomb is "completely separate" from using it.

> No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying.

"Spies don't kill people, bullets kill people. Actually, bullets don't kill people, a rapid transfer of momentum from the bullet to the human body kills people. Actually, momentum doesn't kill people, a rapid loss of blood from the resulting tissue damage kills people. You are confusing human physiology with spying." Right: nobody is ever responsible for anything.

> You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Histor...

You don't need a security clearance to know of many instances of this happening.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#117

Post by schoen »

feoren wrote: post #94
schoen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way to use this logic to ever argue that you shouldn't spy on someone. This reminds me of a talk by Halvor Flake in which he says that people in intelligence agencies are incentivized to try to know everything, in order to minimize the chance of being surprised by anything. > A technological breakthrough in battery tech has a big potential for "economic disruption"; is that a national security risk? I th…

Great points in general, but two things: > you don't want to give lots of information to the CIA if they're violent maniacs because they might use that information recklessly ... the biggest problem in the scenario is if the CIA is composed of violent maniacs, or if it's incentivized to cultivate rather than restrain people's tendencies to violent maniacal behavior. The problem is that the system can act like a viole…

I think this is all fair, but it's really so hard to know.

Even this idealized scenario about the terrorism-detector and taking action based on it... well, it's one that came up a lot around the post-9/11 environment (with selectees and the no-fly list [the rare case where people could actually experience the government making an adverse determination against them on classified grounds and get even the one bit of information] and the Guantanamo detainees and the drone kill lists).

However, the task of deciding if person X is a good guy or a bad guy, or trying to make a list of the bad guys within some population, is a very small part of what the intelligence community does. And that's partly because of the super-expansive notion of national security that we've been talking about, where so many parts of the government feel that it's their business to know everything that's going on in the world, largely without even thinking about the "who is a terrorist" question at all. As we discussed elsewhere in the thread, the government does not think that Petrobras is a terrorist. But somehow it thinks that it should know what Petrobras is going to do in the future, including "by hook or by crook".

I guess there are really at least two threads in the conversation, one of them being the inherent morality of surveillance and espionage activities, and another being "given how (one might think, but probably doesn't actually know) a government makes choices about the use of force, is it a good idea for that government to have access to more and more information?".

I think one of riversflow's points in reply to you was basically that, if a government doesn't make choices about the use of force in a good way, that's already a problem, which is not clearly improved by reducing the government's access to information, although you're also right that it could be. (And I've seen Bayesian arguments about that before, including a Bayesian justification for some legal standards involving in the rights of criminal defendants.) But overall, if we know so little about how those decisions are made at all, it will be hard to be very confident about whether more or less information would be likely to make them better or worse!

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#118

Post by nemothekid »

believecty wrote: post #110
nemothekid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out hcq, ivm worked and the mrna shots - not so much. Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin have not shown to be anywhere near the efficiency of MRNA vaccines, and the fact that they continue to muddy the waters cast a large doubt on whether the general public is capable of independent inquiry.

c19study.com You're wrong.

This meta-analysis site has been shilled since the early days of COVID and has given thousands of people, who have no business trying to parse medical data, a false sense of understanding of these dubious medical reports.

This is despite the fact that no governing medical body has approved or shown the efficacy of these drugs; even those bodies that have no economic bias, such as China or Russia.

I'm not enthused at the idea of various "nsa-study.com" sites popping up claiming god-knows-what poorly backed up by poorly understood NSA nginx logs.

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#119

Post by nerpderp82 »

jasmes wrote: post #8

Journalistic integrity balancing with the national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated. I am comfortable trusting the NYT to do their job. I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.

> comfortable trusting the NYT to do their job

Your comfort is one thing. Noted. But do you know enough about the NYT, what would their job be exactly?

They don't have a stellar track record. Iraq-War, Judith Miller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reporter-judith-...

Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

#120

Post by schoen »

feoren wrote: post #116
riversflow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo , if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable? > Reason 1 . . . literally any s…

> Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo That attitude definitely benefits those who like the status quo. I think the "burden of proof", if such a thing exists, is on the position with the least prior evidence. That something is the status quo is pretty weak evidence in its favor; I can point to many instances in human history where the status quo was pretty awful.…

> Strawman. I never said spying should be "stopped wholesale". Never anything even remotely close to that, in fact. I'm not responsible for defending a position you completely fabricated.

I think this is more in response to me than to you; one might correctly infer from my posts here that I think that a significant majority of espionage activity is morally wrong and should be stopped.

That's just a perennial difficulty in having a multi-way conversation.

Post reply on HN