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Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#111

Post by krapp »

scrrr wrote: post #38
krapp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see people actually having an opposing point of view. Not everything has to be parallel construction, false flag operations and conspiracy.

Yeah but come on, it's happening.

There's a difference between it happening, and it happening so often that it can be taken for granted. The CIA trying to plant microphones into stray cats hoping they'd wander within earshot of Soviet dignitaries happened too.

The truth is, it isn't known, the scale of these operations, and you can assume everything is full of spooks or not. But the more reasonable assumption, absent evidence to the contrary, is that it's likely not a conspiracy. Particularly when you're describing points of view which a lot of Americans actually do hold.

Although then I suppose you could suggest that the reason Americans believe certain things, or even the appearance of that belief, is the result of propaganda but, again - who knows?

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#112

Post by krapp »

tedks wrote: post #86
krapp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see people actually having an opposing point of view. Not everything has to be parallel construction, false flag operations and conspiracy.

But some things are. So some comments, probably the best, most convincing ones, the ones with the most time and effort spent on them, are sockpuppets from the American military. There's no "parallel construction" or "false flags" here. There's just propaganda. All governments use propaganda. Governments have always used propaganda. If you think propaganda isn't a large part of your day-to-day life you're just unable…

>So some comments, probably the best, most convincing ones, the ones with the most time and effort spent on them, are sockpuppets from the American military.

This appears to assume that it's all but impossible to legitimately hold the opposing point of view, or be able to articulate it, without there being a script involved?

It's a non-falsifiable hypothesis. How can I prove your comment isn't some subtle form of propaganda? Maybe mine is. Maybe this forum is mostly shills, spooks and sockpuppets anyway. Maybe dang is a covert NSA operative. He did 'borrow' someone's account, after all. Can't prove he isn't.

>All governments use propaganda. Governments have always used propaganda. If you think propaganda isn't a large part of your day-to-day life you're just unable to see it.

If you think you see it everywhere, I would submit the government might have far more control over you than you believe.

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#113

Post by ScottBurson »

sanderjd wrote: post #95
couchand wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting trade-off: living in exile but invited to video conference at every big name event and helping direct the course of the national security discussion, or in solitary confinement in Guantanamo but more "popular" I'd say Snowden made the right choice.

While I think the "solitary confinement in Guantanamo" assumption is probably off-base, certainly he'd be in a tough situation somewhere, and he probably did make the right choice. I definitely wouldn't have had anywhere near the courage he has shown in his whistleblowing, let alone the courage it would take to face the punishment. Nonetheless, I'll expand on what I meant by "popular"; in the mainstream his flight is…

Remind those people what happened to Chelsea Manning. She was tortured for months.

(I understand your point, though.)

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#114

Post by tormeh »

mikeash wrote: post #110
tormeh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew there were some supplies coming from the US, but was it really of a war-winning magnitude? I would like to know. GDP is not really that good a measure of a nation's war-fighting ability. Only some types of production is useful for near-total war. A nation needs solid institutions, natural resources, logistics, roads, factories and heavy equipment. The service sector goes out the window, ditto with all luxury/e…

Well, just scroll down a bit and see military production numbers on that Wikipedia page. The US produced over 100,000 tanks compared to German's 67,000 and Japan's 3,700 (although the Soviet Union slightly outweighs the US here), 250,000 artillery pieces compared to 160,000 for Germany and 13,350 for Japan (the USSR once again outweighs the US here, with over 500,000), about 2.7 million machine guns compared to about…

Thanks, that was really interesting. I had no idea that the American production assistance was so great.

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#115

Post by mpyne »

zevyoura wrote: post #100
mpyne wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The opinion is that if Snowden didn't flee in today's climate then he likely would have ended up in isolation or Guantanamo. That's his opinion, and it's unfounded IMHO. Actual terrorists are increasingly and deliberately put on public trial in New York, and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning got his (now her) trial as well.

Manning was held in effective solitary confinement for 9 months.

Which had a lot to do with being in a military prison where joking with the guards about killing yourself actually could result in being placed in a Prevention of Suicide status. In any event, even with that Manning was transferred away from solitary in the first half of her detention and finished the trial outside of solitary (and thereby set the precedent for how later activist spies should be treated).

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#116

Post by mpyne »

tormeh wrote: post #97
mpyne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea. If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not…

Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US. It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes w…

> He doesn't give a shit about the US.

I didn't say hostile to the U.S. I said hostile to the West. That doesn't mean cutting off contact or anything so silly, but let's not act like Russia has not long been at odds with the general foreign policy of the West.

Even post-Cold War, it dates back to stuff like Bosnia and Kosovo. Remember reading the "TIL" about that singer who used to be in the British armed forces and claimed to have avoided WWIII by not attacking Russian troops at an airport in the Balkans during Bosnia?

The way Russia views it, the West has certainly been antagonistic towards them, between the NATO expansion, possible construction of missile shields in east Europe, intervention against their Serbian brothers in Bosnia and then Kosovo, open talk of friendship between the U.S. and Georgia, the difference in perception over what was authorized in the Libyan intervention, and later the EU trying to influence Ukraine away from Russia.

You are certainly right that there are domestical political reasons for Putin to play up an external enemy, but his behavior is certainly consistent with, at best, an antipathy towards the West. Sure, they'll play along in international politics as it becomes convenient to them, but the USSR did that too.

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#117

Post by noir_lord »

rooster8 wrote: post #24
jerf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible... Congress has no balls. To make this more than mere snark, seriously, committees of the size of Congress are nearly entirely structurally incapable of taking serious stands of this nature. That's not sarcasm, it's a real structural problem with committees, and despite how we often refer to it in humor, it's a fully real thing, not a joke. This is why the US still needs an executive branch, which is struc…

I thought OP was implying that he had dirt on anyone who would try to reprimand him. Everyone hesitates in a surveillance state.

That is exactly what I was implying maybe it was unclear.

You don't need dirt on all of congress (though I wouldn't be surprised if they had it on most of them) just key players committee leaders etc.

Hell the stuff doesn't even have to be illegal to be useful, illicit affairs have brought down presidents before.

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#118

Post by tptacek »

bediger4000 wrote: post #67
jjoonathan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't. They wouldn't even be controversial at the EFF. The controversy stems from cost/benefit judgements on individual spy programs AND from the fact that Clapper perjured himself in front of congress and the american people. The latter is a far more clearcut issue than the former, and it's what we were talking about before the lawyer came in and changed the subject.

Has there been any cost/benefit analysis on any of the spy programs that Snowden's leaks have revealed? It doesn't look like it to me. For instance, it should also be uncontroversial that universal surveillance only ends up with an intimidated, fearful citizenry, and a total lack of innovation, but oh well. For those reasons alone, we should probably start out against universal or dragnet surveillance.

Wait, I don't understand how you can simultaneously believe that the NSA has actually built an apparatus of universal surveillance and that universal surveillance leads to an intimidated citizenry and total lack of innovation.

Which is it? Is the NSA restrained in their surveillance, or does surveillance not actually ruin innovation?

Re: Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?

#119

Post by tedks »

krapp wrote: post #112
tedks wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But some things are. So some comments, probably the best, most convincing ones, the ones with the most time and effort spent on them, are sockpuppets from the American military. There's no "parallel construction" or "false flags" here. There's just propaganda. All governments use propaganda. Governments have always used propaganda. If you think propaganda isn't a large part of your day-to-day life you're just unable…

>So some comments, probably the best, most convincing ones, the ones with the most time and effort spent on them, are sockpuppets from the American military. This appears to assume that it's all but impossible to legitimately hold the opposing point of view, or be able to articulate it, without there being a script involved? It's a non-falsifiable hypothesis. How can I prove your comment isn't some subtle form of pro…

>This appears to assume that it's all but impossible to legitimately hold the opposing point of view, or be able to articulate it, without there being a script involved?

You're reading a lot into "probably."

I'd expect that someone whose day job is to comment on forums to be better at writing comments than someone who only comments on forums as a hobby. That seems how it is in most professions.

It seems like without explicitly defining our experimental terms, the reverse (there are literally zero sockpuppet comments on the linked page) is equally unfalsifiable. Personally, if I were talking to a friend about what comments we've written on the Internet, and she mentioned writing a comment on that page, I'd take it as a virtual certainty that that particular comment was not written by a sockpuppet, so I don't think my belief is unfalsifiable.

>If you think you see it everywhere, I would submit the government might have far more control over you than you believe.

...no, I see propaganda pretty much everywhere. Less so now that I live outside a major city, but when I did there'd be propaganda all over the place.

You might be seeing propaganda as too narrow a term. Propaganda is just government advertising, sometimes related explicitly to supporting politicians but more often related to rather mundane things. "See something, say something" is propaganda. Ads on the bus or on bus stops about the risks of jaywalking are propaganda. Highways have maybe one propaganda sign every 50 miles, on average (this might be an East Coast thing). "Click it or ticket" was propaganda (and beautiful propaganda at that).

And that's just considering only things explicitly put up by the government. Bumper stickers are propaganda for political parties. You can go to the more government-dominated metro stations in DC and see propaganda advertisements from Boeing, Raytheon, Palantir, etc., aimed at politicians. Activist and advocacy groups produce propaganda full-time.

I suggest checking out the PropagandaPosters subreddit. There's great propaganda from World War II or the Cold War (from all over the world), but also a large amount of modern propaganda.

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