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Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

reuters.com

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Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#191

Post by mikestew »

rmrfstar wrote: post #188
mikestew wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you weren't alive or old enough to pay attention back when Russia ballet dancers/athletes/et. al. would come to the U. S. for the Russian Nutcracker Ballet tour, then ask for asylum. Or maybe your country-that-is-not-the-US didn't make a big deal of it, but it would be all over the news about how some ballet performer seeks asylum from The Evil Empire(tm). Of course the person would seek asylum in the U. S.,…

Has anyone on this thread seriously discussed leaving the US with their partner, based at least in part on the growth and aggressiveness of its domestic security services?

What, and then become a victim of U. S. foreign policy?

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#192

Post by ilyagr »

hourislate wrote: post #172
ciarannolan wrote: post #71

If granted a pardon by the current or future US president, is there any chance that Russia will not let him return home?

Russia doesn't prevent it's citizens from traveling. What prevents it's citizens from traveling is getting a VISA to the destination country. This is granted through the local Embassy or Consolidate of destination country requiring a VISA. Permanent residency is not citizenship. Granting Permanent Residency will give him some sort of stability knowing he will not have to renew his status every year (or so) and be abl…

That's not strictly true. In Russia, unlike US or Europe, you have to show your passport to leave the country, and you can be prevented from leaving by court order.

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#193

Post by Matticus_Rex »

seppin wrote: post #185
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but mafia states do PR so that they aren't recognized as clearly as mafia states.

Yes, and if you are a citizen of a free country that defects to a mafia state to help in their PR efforts, such an action should be called out for what it is.

Literally no one contends he defected for the purpose of helping Russia's PR, so you calling it out as that is deliberately slanderous.

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#194

Post by manquer »

nradov wrote: post #183
btilly wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a senator, Obama missed around half his votes due to campaigning. During 2008, he missed close to 2/3. But he made sure to be back in Washington in July to vote for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to retroactively give immunity to AT&T for cooperating with a massive illegal wiretapping operation for the secret services. That was the point where I knew where Obama would stand on mass surveillance.

Congress is like the only job where you can take off as much time as you like and use it to apply for a better job.

Congress also gets to decide their own salary hikes.

political jobs were meant to is how sports was a century back.

Being a pro was actively frowned on in many competitions, you were supposed to play part time and still excel.

Political office never paid well, most politicians had farms and other businesses to keep them afloat. Presidents were famously responsible for hosting functions at the White house, some died broke . Also travelling between d.c and your home state was a significant effort for many so extended breaks was needed.

The rules made sense then , they don't now, however given congress makes laws and it's own rules not much can be done to fix it without constitutional amendments.

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#195

Post by jjones2 »

Semaphor wrote: post #32
tinus_hn wrote: post #22

The big question is what Russia has to gain from this. Is it just to troll the US?

It’s an easy PR win. The US behaves like a petulant child, and Russia can come off like the benevolent country protecting freedom. That seems like an extremely easy decision to make.

The irony of this is so great it must really burn the usg. Russia protecting freedom in 2020...

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#196

Post by vinay427 »

anonAndOn wrote: post #99
tinus_hn wrote: post #22

The big question is what Russia has to gain from this. Is it just to troll the US?

Snowden is "Exhibit A" for how the US is hypocritical about opposition to surveillance states. Any time the US wants to try to shame Russia at the UN Security Council, Putin can just put a picture of their newest Moscovite up on the projector.

Not to defend the intelligence apparatus in the US (and several other Western countries) but hypocrisy would imply the US is actually acting on its intelligence to target or influence its own people along a similar vein as many authoritarian countries with policies widely criticized in the US. I think that's a very low bar, and we should be able to criticize the US system even though it doesn't have these widespread far-reaching powers, i.e. without resorting to hyperbole.

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#197

Post by jancsika »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #104
jancsika wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both put lives at risk for what has apparently achieved zero gain. So, future impact affects your assessment of the righteousness of an act of conscience? How does that work?

Maybe that looks like a gross "argument from final consequences"... ...but if we could get this police state going and everyone would shut up about it we'd all be 100% safe right?

Hee hee, that's like when I tried changing a makefile to speed things up and it compiled the library in question in zero seconds.

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#198

Post by anonAndOn »

vinay427 wrote: post #196
anonAndOn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden is "Exhibit A" for how the US is hypocritical about opposition to surveillance states. Any time the US wants to try to shame Russia at the UN Security Council, Putin can just put a picture of their newest Moscovite up on the projector.

Not to defend the intelligence apparatus in the US (and several other Western countries) but hypocrisy would imply the US is actually acting on its intelligence to target or influence its own people along a similar vein as many authoritarian countries with policies widely criticized in the US. I think that's a very low bar, and we should be able to criticize the US system even though it doesn't have these widespread…

I'm not sure if you consider a Predator drone monitoring protests[0] as influential but, surely, you must admit camo-clad officers in unmarked vans abducting specific protestors[1] as worthy of a legitimate concern.

[0]https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/126639991697850777... [1]https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#199

Post by vinay427 »

anonAndOn wrote: post #198
vinay427 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to defend the intelligence apparatus in the US (and several other Western countries) but hypocrisy would imply the US is actually acting on its intelligence to target or influence its own people along a similar vein as many authoritarian countries with policies widely criticized in the US. I think that's a very low bar, and we should be able to criticize the US system even though it doesn't have these widespread…

I'm not sure if you consider a Predator drone monitoring protests[0] as influential but, surely, you must admit camo-clad officers in unmarked vans abducting specific protestors[1] as worthy of a legitimate concern. [0] https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/126639991697850777... [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

Yes, absolutely. I think this is despicable and should not be tolerated. However, it's the scale and widespread nature that differs. Most Americans will never be confronted with or even know people who have been confronted with this sort of abuse of authority. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many countries, and this difference should not be dissolved to make a point. I think the US should be able to do better, although not because it's inherently better in some way (what country is?).

Re: Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency

#200

Post by kyboren »

yourapostasy wrote: post #131
jsu32 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was his intent: Why not selectively publish only the parts about surveillance of US citizens? Why publish details of how the US was dealing with adversaries like China? From the looks of it, Snowden cared about getting famous more than any specific goal.

Selective publishing runs into the problem of easy deniability and drawn out recognition if any due to its narrow scope. The weight of the body of the revealed secrets forced the hand of the US intelligence agencies to admit their veracity. Considering how whistle blowers in the US are routinely persecuted, the malfeasance in so many cases successfully survives whistle-blowing, and the leadership who directed authori…

> [...] organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency.

This is the insight and strategy Assange laid out in his 2006 essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance"[0] and put into practice with WikiLeaks.

> Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

> We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment)

> In a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not. We can show most of this difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between all the conspirators. Call this total conspiratorial power.

> Instead of cutting links between conspirators so as to separate a weighted conspiracy we can achieve a similar effect by throttling the conspiracy — constricting (reducing the weight of) those high weight links which bridge regions of equal total conspiratorial power.

> Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down.

> Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance.

[0]: https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

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