Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revealing what is in those documents might threaten US power projection in the world, but it would not threaten US national security in any significant way. That is, it might hurt the US' ability to shape the world as it desires, but it would not make the US significantly more vulnerable to being attacked because no matter how much people know about the NSA's activities, groups that want to attack the US would still…
> Perhaps some details about how nuclear plants are secured, or the details of the mechanisms by which authorization to fire nuclear missiles is given. Stuff like that. But there should be nothing like that in the NSA documents. You are wildly incorrect. NSA does lots to help secure the homeland.
Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I love how you just dismiss evidence that demonstrates how wrong you are by insulting it.
Go get your 10th booster vaxxie.
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 difficul…
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...avoid operatives on foreign soil being endangered." See Valarie Plume affair.
Valarie Plame.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183380
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby#Involvement_in_t...
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#125Earlier 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…
In the "realpolitik" environment you mentioned, when you lose control of your private information, you lose control of what's done with that information. That's is a good reason to care about protecting information and not regard this as "completely separate".
An example that people mention a lot in the domestic context is that laws and governments can change, so that information that was innocuous before could be sensitive in the future.
Someone doesn't need to have jurisdiction over you in order to harm you with your secrets. They could taunt you about them, they could blackmail you with them, they could use them to compete with or undermine your business, they could pass them to your government as a tip, they could reveal them to your political opponents...
You might say that this is all Reason 2 and not Reason 1 material, but if a government has unauthorized access to secret information of its choice, it's going to be hard to control or predict how it may use that information against your interests later. But, you might say, I also can't actually control whether they get unauthorized access to my secrets, so I just have no power over them at all, so why even talk about it?
Well, I'd say that lots of people who read HN have practical opportunities in their careers to engage in espionage or not, to make it harder or easier, to expose it or not, and so on. Governments are going to ask some people reading this thread to do them favors. They can't necessarily guarantee the safety of their own information, but they can significantly affect the safety of other people's information. It matters whether they think that's desirable or not!
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#126Earlier 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.…
I believe literally all those things you don’t believe about having something being completely separate from using it. A car can kill people just as easily as a gun. So what? It’s who used the object who is responsible for what it does and owning something doesn’t necessarily imply using it or even imply it at all.
How do you justify that point of view? I really don’t get that perspective.
I can’t say for certain, but I doubt extraordinary rendition is only using "terrorist-detector model” and not relying on analysts/tips. Also worth noting is that it seems like it hasn’t happened in ~20 years, and was a product of 9/11 fervor.
Let me put it another way. Why should the powerful countries take weaker ones at their word and not employ fact checkers? Nations are only really beholden to their constituents and greater powers. Why would any country tell a major power who wasn’t spying the truth?
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Shilled". I love how you just dismiss evidence that demonstrates how wrong you are by insulting it. Go get your 10th booster vaxxie.
You ignored my entire post in order tone police me.
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#128Earlier 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…
> 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. In the "realpolitik" environment you mentioned, when you lose control of your private information, you lose control of what's done with that information. That's is a good reason to care…
I mean, my expectation is that those are the kind of offers you can’t refuse.
Why do you not find information asymmetry completely harmful?
Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#129Re: Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published
#130> Why was only 1% of the documents published, in the end? “The documents are not like the WikiLeaks ones from the US state department, which were written by diplomats and, for the most part, easily understandable,” said Ewen MacAskill. “The Snowden files are largely technical, with lots of codewords and jargon that is hard to decipher. There are pages and pages of that which the public would not be interested in. The…