People became ambivalent. Snowden fled eventually to Russia. Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out. When he fled to Russia, he looked less like a martyr and more like a national security information leaker or spy like Robert
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
Easy advice to give as a bystander lacking context (2013!), hard to follow as a "martyr" living in that context. It wasn't even clear whether he'd be a martyr (he could have easily turned the politics around, wouldn't be the first time in the American history).
I was definitely around in 2013. And it was quite clear at the time there will be government persecution for the leaks, I mean that's why he ran in the first place.
If you stand on the path of martyrdom for your people you should be prepared to follow it to conclusion rather than fleeing to the sworn enemy.
Well the sworn frenemy has a crude but fitting idiom for that I suspect you might be familiar with, and Snowden might be too now: пиздеть - не мешки ворочать.
I have huge respect for people that have passed the test of going against their environment and comrades to do what they think is right (even if/when I disagree with it or it harms my interests). You can argue that he was insincere or a double agent (this is definitely wrong), you can argue he's a traitor by endangering people who had nothing to do with it (weak argument IMO), but arguing from an armchair that he must have walked full length is just silly I think. Let's have an extreme and inverted thought experiment to test your views. Imagine someone blows the whistle about FSB's Ryazan sugar [1] today, must he not run and let his head be smashed with a sledgehammer in a prime time TV show?
He gave up his life in the US to tell the people what the gov is doing. It's not like he then went and said hey Putin need some help destroying America? He just fled because otherwise the US would throw him in a hole for the rest of his life. What good would that do? It's not about martyrdom it's about getting the information out there. The information is out. Him being in a hole wouldn't do anything good for anyone.
Gave up his life? Why, he may have been living his best. A fully funded expat life in Moscow with some Jason Bourne cachet instead of scrapping by as a Sharepoint admin in the age of AI.
If I had edited the comment you would see an "edited" tag on it. I'll do it on this one.
Edited to add this. Nevermind, there's no tag now. That's strange, I could swear that's a thing. Maybe I edited too early? Trying again now it's 18 minutes later. Still nothing, guess I've just imagined it?
As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."
Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Did anything change in terms of policies or people responsible seeing criminal charges as a result of these findings?
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.
One thing I know for sure is that those leaks caused a lot of the tech community to go a lot harder into encryption.
The reason practically all sites are HTTPS now can be traced to this. Many, if not most, sites in 2012 were plain http. Which is actually difficult for me to remember despite working on sites as a sysadmin back then.
I don’t think anyone was convicted, maybe some resignations and a lot of very uncomfortable questions from the senate- and likely some policy changes, though I can’t point to them.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.
He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)
Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?
And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.
“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.
They said that Snowden caused a shift in the public debate not that nobody listened to them beforehand (you should know they were raising concerns going back to 2002).
Baltimore Sun was reporting on Drake in 2006. Binney was publicly talking about it to Wired News and Democracy Now in 2012. Snowden happened in 2013.
So that makes my point even plainer than it possibly could have been made. The people who did the right thing by your definition got nothing done (and this was what caused Snowden to do it the way he did) and since Snowden, those previous cases were taken seriously by the government
Well their complaint triggered a formal DoD IG investigation and produced a highly critical audit plus fraud investigations. Trailblazer program was killed in 2006. That all happened well before Snowden. Snowden skipped all of those channels entirely. Binney and Drake were taken seriously but you are glossing over all do the other stuff that Snowden leaked that had nothing to do with the privacy concerns deemed that went beyond what FISA courts authorized (and no court found violation of 4th amendment).
Snowden did it completely wrong and you can’t convince me otherwise. I don’t see this conversation going further as you move the goalposts.
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
He said "as Americans, we're better than that", does that sound like defending? That he was conflicted about it isn't too surprising, he was ratting out his colleagues and the institution he had worked for through the entire of his professional life.
To the rest, you've fallen for their trick. Three CIA threw the book at him, and indeed tried to convict him for his leaks: "The five-count indictment against Kiriakou charged him with violations of both the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (for allegedly revealing the identity of a covert agent) and the Espionage Act (for allegedly revealing national defense information to unauthorized individuals such as journalists). He was also charged with making false statements to the CIA about a book that he was seeking to publish."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act is just the charge that stuck. When you're revealing government secrets, it's very, very hard not to accidentally cross the line, especially when you consider that the whole justice system is arranged in their favor, not yours.
The result is that lots of people say they support whistleblowers, but anytime someone actually whistleblows they back the government line and say "they went too far". Why is the onus on whistleblowers, acting in secret and with fear of retribution at every step, to perfectly separate the illegal actions from the legal, and punish only the former? Why is the onus not on our government, the elected representatives who ought to serve us and obey the law, to not commit crimes against humanity in the first place?
If you demand perfection from whistleblowers but accept faults in your government, don't be surprised if you don't get many whistleblowers.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
What the current president does now has no bearing on what was done then, with a somewhat functioning Supreme Court and an adversarial Congress. The conspiracy theories spread by Snowden helped lead to Trump, and that is the main point I want to get across. While spreading his conspiracy theories, he also helped the CCP, and that is something for which he would stand trial for in the U.S.
If he stayed in the U.S., his punishment would already be over. Now with the current president directly telling DOJ what to do, who knows what would happen if Snowden were to stand trial today, but that isn't a possibility Snowden faced when he fled.
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other
>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?
Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?
Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?
Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.
Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).
-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.
I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.
But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.
The "Collateral Murder" video of the unlawful killing of journalists was part of the archive that Wikileaks published that's been attributed to Chelsea Manning. All available evidence supports this was part of the material. Chelsea's leak was the contents of the shared drive, not just diplomatic cables.
The release of the diplomatic cables themselves gravely harmed U.S. interests and is alleged to have led to the deaths of CIA collaborators.
Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.
The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.
It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.
I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.
Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?
>So imagine a censored random variable... D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
This is not a real thing, it's just something you made up. You can see this obviously if you transfer this to another domain. For example, if I get a paper cut at work do you think that means I'm partially dead? Do you think that singular example of a paper cut means "we can be fairly sure" that "a bunch" of my coworkers have died from paper cuts?
Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.
It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.
A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.
There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.
It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.
Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.
I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.
We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal
He likely did do what he was accused of, with two well-meaning (and now presumably former) fans of his (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...), though it's his right to argue against that. It does not seem like a "honeypot" trap, these were genuine supporters.
The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.
I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.
Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.
Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
Only one program went beyond what was originally authorized and shutdown. The rest had no basis to be leaked. It caused grave damage to the national security of the US. Those programs had nothing to do with the privacy of American citizens that everyone keeps latching on here. They are ignoring the rest of the stuff
He didn't flee to Russia. He had booked tickets to Ecuador going through Russia. The Obama administration revoked his passport, rendering him stateless and unable to leave Russia. Please do not regurgitate propaganda.
He actually fled the US before the leaks became public to Hong Kong but it was a calculated risk because Hong Kong has extradition treaty with the US. So he was fleeing already.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
Yeah, Snowden was lucky he wasn't, by definition, stateless, otherwise Russia may not have offered him asylum. They got to piss off the US by doing so.
He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.
What a weird argument. Sure, he didn't "have" to, but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend years (decades? life?) in prison for doing something he believed was morally right.
when the secret being leaked is that the united states is spying on its own citizens and violating the 4th amendment.
i find it weird how many Russians, Chinese and Americans are weirdly protective of their own government's oppressive behaviours in the name of patriotism.
Again you are missing the point. Nothing was proven in violation of the 4th amendment. Ninth Circuit didn’t even latch on that argument nor express it. Courts agreed that the metadata collection program went beyond what was approved by the FISA courts. But he leaked a whole host of foreign spying programs that had nothing to do with Americans.
Just as some Chinese people want Ai Weiwei to rot in prison, some Russians wanted Navalny to rot in prison and some Americans wanted or still want Snowden and Assange to rot in prison.
It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.
My point is that the definition doesn't matter when faced with Snowden's situation. Not being stateless offered no respite, therefore it's materially no different - to Snowden, in his situation.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
Her default option was to return to her abuser and face more abuse so she went to the only shelter she could access, having no means to access any other shelter.
Thinking the US government wouldn't kidnap and rendition him from Ecuador is an extremely ignorant and uninformed position on how the US exercises power in the Americas. He made a least-bad choice of all possibly horrible choices and chose to stay in Russia.
He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.
Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.
It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.
My point is that even if he did find himself physically in Ecuador he is not stupid enough to think that the US would not rendition him from Ecuador. Therefore making it an unacceptable risk to actually go to Ecuador. I believe it is highly likely that he never planned to go to Ecuador.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.
Which ironically makes the Internet more surveillable, because now every single connection has to hit some TLS-terminating origin and can't be cached at the edge of our own networks. Don't confuse security with privacy.
Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.
The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
Sure, but hiding the contents provides a lot more value than hiding some parts of metadata.
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
> These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
> if you edit it to leak a secret the protection is everything.
It’s really not, because knowing when you edited it is already enough, given that there’s a timestamped edit history. And the size and shape of your request payloads will show that you edited it, not merely performed GET requests.
Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.
Passport revocations are all details. Where else he would have gone and stayed alive/un-arrested until now?
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
He fled the US and got stuck in Russia instead of Ecuador.
I'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
He wasn’t stuck : his lawyers would contact the State Department and arrange a surrender. There is also the case of limited validity to return to the US. He chose to apply for asylum still and exiled himself.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.
Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.
He was faced with the possibility of arrest or hoping for full asylum in Russia. It was another calculated gamble. But I don’t agree he was stuck. It was all self created problem. No one forced him to take the circuitous route he took and no one forced him to leak as himself. Could have been private/anonymous. Could have stayed in the US.
I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.
Thank you for pointing this out. So often that point gets lost in the weeds of the discussion of trivialities. The absolute irony is that Snowden is more 'ideal American' than 99% of the rest of the population, and the people that cast him in any kind of bad light should be ashamed to call themselves Americans.
> Some people viewed him less relevant over time as the archive merely trickled out.
The article addresses this argument, and quite thoroughly dismisses it as BS. Read the report about how rapidly the reporting stopped and how much material was left untouched.
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry