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

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

#71

Post by riversflow »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #16
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.

> national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated It's actually the opposite National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others. The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stu…

The bigger you are, the farther you have to fall. The most powerful nation on earth also has the most to lose.

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

#72

Post by hax0ron3 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #66
hax0ron3 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the US nuclear triad mean that there is nothing in those documents that could pose any significant threat to US national security. The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state…

> there is nothing in those documents that could pose any significant threat to US national security. You are saying that because if anyone attacks us with conventional forces we will nuke them/invade them then we have no nation security interest concerning anything in classified documents compiled by our espionage services? Is this a correct interpretation and if so do you stand by it? If not can you please clarify…

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 be confronted by the US' overwhelming national security strengths of being surrounded by huge oceans, having a nuclear deterrent, and also having the world's most powerful conventional military.

I can imagine there being classified documents that pose an actual significant national security risk. 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. Maybe there is something in there that would tip people off about the NSA's encryption-cracking capabilities. But no system that is actually critical for national security should be vulnerable to such information being revealed. And if there is some system that is vulnerable because of it, more surveillance is not the answer anyway.

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

#73

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #33
saulpw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a capable public can make this determination The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.

True the average person can't do that. However there are many organisations who can analyze different aspects from different perspectives and pull out consumable information from it. By having the raw material available this then can be cross-ckecked. If it's kept secret you need complete trust.

I for one do not wish to give America's enemies access to all of our classified information.

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

#75

Post by schoen »

riversflow wrote: post #62
schoen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general , not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relati…

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…

Huh, I have a radically different intuition from you. :-) I think "personal ethics" applies to everything and everyone in the world. The people who do things are moral agents.

> On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy from the USG?

Among other things, their confidentiality is protected by Brazilian law. If hackers break that law, Petrobras should be entitled to a remedy against them, just like Americans should be entitled to a remedy against Russian hackers, whether they intend to steal money or private information.

As far as I know, all governments harbor criminals in this sense, but I think they should be incentivized to do so much less, including by pointing out that the espionage is a crime and not glamorizing it (or being upset with governments for not doing it!).

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

#76

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #17

Snowden made a mistake in not dumping the whole archive to Wikileaks as was done with the US State Department cables and the CIA's Vault 7 files. I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collabora…

Why is it a mistake to protect sources and military capabilities?

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

#77

Post by kwhitefoot »

riversflow wrote: post #62
schoen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general , not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relati…

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…

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

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

#79

Post by schoen »

fyokdrigd wrote: post #70
schoen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general , not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relati…

> To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. sorry to break it to you, but the answer was too succumb to a full blow 60s style coup which remove the president who autored the Reuters article above. she was ousted by the senate, the right wing vice who was there for "governability" signed rights to new oil reserves to texaco on his first week in power and then…

> sorry to break it to you, but the answer was too succumb to a full blow 60s style coup which remove the president who autored the Reuters article above.

I know lots of people in Brazil who wrote publicly all the time about how they didn't agree with Dilma's impeachment (and thought it was legally improper) and didn't agree with her successors. They all managed to avoid torture or disappearance or the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

If the impeachment and its aftermath were a coup, they were definitely not a "60s style coup".

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

#80

Post by feoren »

schoen wrote: post #37
photochemsyn wrote: post #17

Snowden made a mistake in not dumping the whole archive to Wikileaks as was done with the US State Department cables and the CIA's Vault 7 files. I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collabora…

> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general , not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relati…

(Arguing with the point you present, not against you, since it seems like you mostly disagree with it too.)

Reason 1 to reject spying for this reason: literally any spying could be justified this way. Every butterfly's wing flap could theoretically contribute to a "national security risk". In line with that great quote that "If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified." There's no way to use this logic to ever argue that you shouldn't spy on someone.

Reason 2 to reject this: when we start broadening the scope of "national security risk" to include things like "economic disruption", then 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. A technological breakthrough in battery tech has a big potential for "economic disruption"; is that a national security risk? What if it's invented in Iran? Would the U.S. sabotage the (hypothetical) "Iranian national energy laboratory" if it were on the cusp of a revolutionary technology that could weaken the U.S.'s economic position?

Reason 3 to reject this: we get it wrong. If the CIA's "terrorist detector" says Joe Schmoe has a 99% chance of becoming an active terrorist, based on his religion, political views, age, recent Google searches, facial hair, income, and gait, what is the actual probability of him becoming an active terrorist? The standard "Bayesian false-positive" puzzle applies here: the base-rate of humans committing actual terrorist acts is extremely low. Even if the CIA's terrorist-detector model is 10x better than OpenAI's wet dreams, there's no way it's more than 99% accurate. With a base rate of something like 10^-6, we're looking at a roughly 0.01% chance that Joe is actually a terrorist, given a very accurate model giving a 99% positive result. Do we think the person making the decision about whether to make Joe disappear is aware of these subtle nuances in Bayesian statistics? Even if he did, he also knows that if Joe did go on to bomb an office building, there might be a headline soon that "the CIA's own model said Joe Schmoe had a 99% chance of being a terrorist and DID NOTHING!!" So of course Joe disappears forever, based on a futurecrime, because he Googled the wrong thing at the wrong time in his life with the wrong skin color and facial hair.

Put all these reasons together and you can get some really questionable behavior from these agencies, and that's even assuming it's all done with the legitimate good intention of protecting the U.S.

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