"During the Bush administration, people were kidnapped all over the world and dumped in secret prisons, where they were tortured. During the Obama administration, the kidnappings, the secret prisons and the torture, have been replaced by death lists and extrajudicial executions of people, carried out by pilotless aircrafts, known as drones."
I spent hours and hours in 2007/08 watching Obama with the hope that change is real this time. And now, it's painful just to hear his name. With the current candidates on either side, just bracing for worse.
> I spent hours and hours in 2007/08 watching Obama with the hope that change is real this time
If most people just watch, even the best efforts towards change are going to be subverted.
> With the current candidates on either side, just bracing for worse.
There's always Bernie, but it means putting some effort into the political process yourself. :)
> What I understand is that the power of corporate America, Wall Street, the corporate, the media is so great that real change to transform our country does not take place unless MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BEGIN TO STAND UP and say very loudly and clearly that the United States government has got to represent all of us, and not just the top 1 percent," he said.
Obama was promising to launch cruise missiles and drone strikes into Pakistan during the campaign; why did you think he was going to be less violent and more restrained than Bush?
It seems that many Obama supporters whipped themselves into such a hatred of Bush that they never really considered who they were really supporting (, though I do not presume to accuse you of that).
> I spent hours and hours in 2007/08 watching Obama with the hope that change is real this time. And now, it's painful just to hear his name. With the current candidates on either side, just bracing for worse.
# Don't tell me that some power can corrupt a person; You haven't had enough to know what it's like!
Back in 2008 some friends invited me to celebrate Obama party. I was only one who told them then he is a damn liar, a good one, but a liar. Was a good party anyway.
And Im telling you know, a candidate will come a few months from now which will again win your hearts and minds and promise what you want, and you'll again fall for it.
Youre american presidential election is an strong illusion of partifipating in governmental decisions. Thats all it is, you dont have anyone reasonable to vote for.
Technology is truly augmenting ourselves and this medium "shapes the scale and form of human association and action", as Marshall McLuhan once said.
With that given said, compare a whistleblower, say 20 years ago, with one today. Snowden not only had the world's greatest communication platform at his disposal, to disseminate whatever information he cared about, but now he can still address millions of people, speaking at the world's greatest universities and giving interviews, while being in exile.
Regardless on where you stand on these privacy/spying issues, I think it's hard to deny the fact that he started a dialog, and now the entire world can be part of it.
> With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published "The Concept of Dread."
> [...] When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
The sensual intimacy of what Snowden revealed is hard to convey to people who don't live on the internet. They don't understand the violation and the anxiety. Even John Oliver can't change that.
"Edward Snowden reached 1.5 million followers in no time. He only follows one himself – the NSA’s official account."
That's funny.
On an unrelated note, what a hero this man is. The US should consider itself fortunate that it has people who at great personal cost would expose wrongdoing. It's a pity the irrationally scared public doesn't consider him a hero.
I wouldn't consider him heroic, I recently watched Citizen Four and the impression he gave me and the way he put it was that he was just fed up. That being said, I'm not sure I'd have it in me to do the same, though I haven't found anything I truly believe in to the deepest depths of my core...yet.
But he was on his way to Cuba, which would have been his choice. It would have been a bad choice, because the US would have grabbed him there. It's a pretty quick jaunt from anywhere in Cuba to the US base at Gitmo.
What this article makes clear is that he is heavily guarded by the Russians. It's not a coincidence that this meeting took place in a hotel filled with high ranking Russian military. Would Cuba have afforded him the same level of protection?
When I think of Edward Snowden, a video comes to mind, where there are three cattle in a corral and a butcher kills one of them with a riffle from close range. The cow obviously doesn't quite make it out of that situation and basically just falls over on its side. The shot and the cow falling kind of startles the other two cows and they jump an take a few steps but then just kind of stand there and look around and slightly take a look at their fallen comrade, but otherwise go about just kind of standing there, continuing to do their cow things.
That's kind of how I see society. What Snowden revealed has been going on and it's really just the tip of the iceberg and it will only get worse. But what do we do? We say "that's not cool" and then get back to posting our whole life on facebook and trusting the assurances of the same government that does far more lying than not. Here we are, you are maintaining your own government surveillance dossier on facebook, with all the connections and associations listed and conveniently connected. It is any and all past authoritarian dictatorships' wildest dream they could have never even imagined. yet it continues, the business media proclaims that there is no stopping facebook's domination, which will include what Zuckerberg's slip-up from yesteryear of intending to fully replacing the internet even if just in perception of people's minds. (see his free access to facebook in emerging markets where he is trying to head off the internet becoming a thing in people's minds)
It will be quite interesting to see how this all plays out. I am not going to hide the fact that no matter how I look at it, even if things seem all rosy and nice and pretty now, there are far more wildly risky and probably catastrophic outcomes down the path society has and seems to insist on taking.
No, not quite. I publish things on Facebook, et al when I want them to be public. It's the equivalent of a bulletin board for me.
When I want something to be between myself and a specific person or group of people, I make a phone call or email. Obviously it's not as restrictive as saying something in person, as you might for something truly private.
But there are degrees. The only way to keep something truly private is not to tell anyone but it's not fair to equate a private conversation with a public broadcast, just because you sometimes use the public broadcast.
> I had everything set up in such a way that my family could cut ties with me and condemn me if things went poorly. And I was okay with that; I was prepared to accept that.
Snowden was acutely aware of the consequences his actions could have. This really drives that home.
>In 2007, FBI agents carried out so-called morning raids at the homes of people who worked or had worked at the NSA, and had tried to blow the whistle on a mass surveillance program they felt had gotten out of control. One man was dragged out of the shower in his home, a gun to his head, in front of his family. Another man opened his door and soon had the house full of black-clad agents in Kevlar vests searching his home until late at night. The home of Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the NSA, was searched, his passport was cancelled and he lived under the threat of 35 years imprisonment for four years, prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He lost his job, his pension and spent everything he owned on his defense lawyer. Today he works at an Apple store in Maryland and has been able to establish that the only person, who was investigated and prosecuted, after trying to talk to his superiors about the mass surveillance, was himself.
I remember the first time I read 1984, in middle school. To my young mind it was extremely frightening, and every time I would put it down I would have the same feeling one has when they wake up from a nightmare: relief that it was just a fiction. That it was unlikely to ever happen in real life. Snowden's revelations made me feel like that relief is gone forever.
Right after the revelations came out, I discussed it with a former journalist in Silicon Valley, who was also Jewish American. I could not believe it when he used the, "I'm-not-worried-because-I-have-nothing-to-hide" argument. I guess he never heard the reason why the Nazis were so successful in killing and imprisoning Amsterdam's Jewish population, at a rate that far exceeded other European countries.
The Dutch, you see, are meticulous record keepers. Even today you can find property records that date back to 1600s and earlier. And, at some point along the way, someone thought it would be a good idea to record people's religion, in addition to the more typical things like address and date of birth. Oh, they had been doing it long before Adolf Hitler conceived of his final solution. It must've seemed like a good idea at the time. They probably never thought those records would be used the way they were after the Germans took over the country....
I wonder what is the future for him. I guess when the next president comes in office, and those leak story blow over, maybe he'll get pardoned, or maybe he'll stay in Russia for the rest of his life. The sure thing is that nobody will forget him.
Although I wonder if it can be proven or argued (or not) that Snowden is not working with Russia. Maybe in the realm of intelligence nothing can really be proven, and it doesn't really mean anything for me to trust my gut about Snowden not working against the US. Are there any articles debunking those theories ?
You can find the argument in the article. If you want to spy for Russia, you don't do it by dumping a bucketload of articles to a guy living in Brazil writing for the Guardian.
I've read some of them, but they all fail to provide a motive for why he'd work against the US, or how Russia would have even contacted him. There's also a mix of stories that say he was flipped before going to Russia which fail to suggest how Russia made contact with him in the first place, and stories that say he was flipped in Russia, with no real suggestion of what he's doing.
I've view Snowden has a hero in a time where it is very hard to stand up and cast a light on national wrongdoing. I often struggle when I return to the US Midwest and my family and others complain that Snowden is a traitor. I wonder why they can't see the obvious wrongdoing by our leadership and how it erodes our values.
Since its the Bible belt I often find myself reminding people of the story of David [1] who hid with the Philistines when his nation and leader of Israel and turned on him. The irony is almost overwhelming to them since Snowden so closely fits the exact profile of the story.
Some nights in my darker moments I worry that we and by extension myself, have become the bad guys in that story, more akin to the egotistical and delusional King Saul than David.
> I wonder why they can't see the obvious wrongdoing by our leadership and how it erodes our values.
It's because traditional Christian values have been hijacked by business leaders who believe it is in their best interests to cultivate a populace with unquestioning deference to authority. (They're probably right about that too.)
Don't worry about it. We have always taken time to recognize our heroes. History is littered with people who were called traitors who now have roads and schools named after them.
But I do wonder if our politicians were to trying to pull off another Iraq Invasion type event, whether it would be as easy today as they made it appear in 2003. Would it be easier for a whistleblower to disrupt it today? It doesn't feel so.
Because two wrongs don't make a right? Some of what Snowden did seems straightforwardly heroic, and some of it... much less so, to me at least.
Not everyone thinks exactly the same way you do. Believe it or not, outside message boards like this, there are a lot of people that don't care about NSA surveillance of US Internet traffic at all, and care a lot more about Islamic terrorism (to be clear: I am not one of those people).
IANAP but could it be that you and your kin have a different view as to what the leadership of a nation is for?
For example, they could see the primary role as protecting the safety and prosperity of the citizenry of the USA.
You, maybe, see it as protecting the values of the USA as, for example, enshrined in the constitution?
I think there is an argument that Snowden's actions could have put at risk the former for the sake of the latter. I don't believe that he did but I could understand if someone believed that he took an unnecessary risk.
I think there is also an argument that says that to give up ones values if to forsake the need for protection as what's left isn't worth protecting.
> when I return to the US Midwest ... Since its the Bible belt
For those unfamiliar: The Bible Belt isn't in the US Midwest and generally the regions aren't much alike. The Bible Belt is the most conservative region in the US and is in the American South. The Midwest has historically been liberal, even progressive in places, the home of unions and democratic voters. (Also the Midwest isn't in the middle west, but you can find a map.)
That's not to say that there are no Midwestern areas where people are more religious or conservative, or that tsunamifury's family doesn't live in one.
There's your problem right there. Your implication is that the people you talk to are blind to their own values. In reality, they simply value different things than you.
> I wonder why they can't see the obvious wrongdoing by our leadership and how it erodes our values.
I can't keep up self-satisfaction when I've to admit that I am lacking deeper understanding of my environment. The simplest solution to that problem would be that I tell myself with as much other people as possible that understanding my environment isn't that important, because we've managed life until here without it. We declare ourself as normal and defame everyone not belonging to our social bubble. Maybe we even declare the minority of people that get whats going on as an undesirable to be in group. But you've to remember that those processes are normal and healthy. People getting sucked up in reality tend to depression.
For me the angle is accountability. Whatever your family wants, and it'll be different than you individually, they all want the elected and appointed officials of the government to carry it out honestly and without corruption.
Proper separation of the bodies of government is important for everyone, conservative and liberal alike. The domestic spying not just on average citizens, but also specifically on (potential) political opponents (like then-senator Obama, for example) weakens all of us.
It sounds efficient to some, to imagine one monolithic law-enforcement entity without its hands tied so the idea of parallel construction, for instance, doesn't bother them. But it's not a "rights of the guilty" leftist tree-hugging issue, it's a corruption prevention issue. By separating our agencies and making them work through official channels we have a check on any one getting out of control.
Be you Right or Left, the government are our employees and Snowden is the one who came to tell us the rest had their hands in the cash register. (And worse, were forging our name with the bank, etc...)
Snowden really doesn't know as much as he claims to. Not to mention he's careless and the he exposed legitimate intelligence operations on foreign countries
[+] [-] enlightenedfool|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Estragon|10 years ago|reply
If most people just watch, even the best efforts towards change are going to be subverted.
> With the current candidates on either side, just bracing for worse.
There's always Bernie, but it means putting some effort into the political process yourself. :)
> What I understand is that the power of corporate America, Wall Street, the corporate, the media is so great that real change to transform our country does not take place unless MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BEGIN TO STAND UP and say very loudly and clearly that the United States government has got to represent all of us, and not just the top 1 percent," he said.
[+] [-] nickff|10 years ago|reply
It seems that many Obama supporters whipped themselves into such a hatred of Bush that they never really considered who they were really supporting (, though I do not presume to accuse you of that).
[+] [-] tripzilch|10 years ago|reply
# Don't tell me that some power can corrupt a person; You haven't had enough to know what it's like!
[+] [-] antocv|10 years ago|reply
And Im telling you know, a candidate will come a few months from now which will again win your hearts and minds and promise what you want, and you'll again fall for it.
Youre american presidential election is an strong illusion of partifipating in governmental decisions. Thats all it is, you dont have anyone reasonable to vote for.
[+] [-] plainOldText|10 years ago|reply
With that given said, compare a whistleblower, say 20 years ago, with one today. Snowden not only had the world's greatest communication platform at his disposal, to disseminate whatever information he cared about, but now he can still address millions of people, speaking at the world's greatest universities and giving interviews, while being in exile.
Regardless on where you stand on these privacy/spying issues, I think it's hard to deny the fact that he started a dialog, and now the entire world can be part of it.
[+] [-] mbrock|10 years ago|reply
> With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published "The Concept of Dread."
> [...] When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...
The sensual intimacy of what Snowden revealed is hard to convey to people who don't live on the internet. They don't understand the violation and the anxiety. Even John Oliver can't change that.
[+] [-] jakeogh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littletimmy|10 years ago|reply
That's funny.
On an unrelated note, what a hero this man is. The US should consider itself fortunate that it has people who at great personal cost would expose wrongdoing. It's a pity the irrationally scared public doesn't consider him a hero.
[+] [-] HiroshiSan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|10 years ago|reply
But he was on his way to Cuba, which would have been his choice. It would have been a bad choice, because the US would have grabbed him there. It's a pretty quick jaunt from anywhere in Cuba to the US base at Gitmo.
What this article makes clear is that he is heavily guarded by the Russians. It's not a coincidence that this meeting took place in a hotel filled with high ranking Russian military. Would Cuba have afforded him the same level of protection?
[+] [-] Thrymr|10 years ago|reply
His destination was Ecuador. It's not like he had a lot of choices, or he didn't try other countries: https://edwardsnowden.com/asylum-requests
[+] [-] wahsd|10 years ago|reply
That's kind of how I see society. What Snowden revealed has been going on and it's really just the tip of the iceberg and it will only get worse. But what do we do? We say "that's not cool" and then get back to posting our whole life on facebook and trusting the assurances of the same government that does far more lying than not. Here we are, you are maintaining your own government surveillance dossier on facebook, with all the connections and associations listed and conveniently connected. It is any and all past authoritarian dictatorships' wildest dream they could have never even imagined. yet it continues, the business media proclaims that there is no stopping facebook's domination, which will include what Zuckerberg's slip-up from yesteryear of intending to fully replacing the internet even if just in perception of people's minds. (see his free access to facebook in emerging markets where he is trying to head off the internet becoming a thing in people's minds)
It will be quite interesting to see how this all plays out. I am not going to hide the fact that no matter how I look at it, even if things seem all rosy and nice and pretty now, there are far more wildly risky and probably catastrophic outcomes down the path society has and seems to insist on taking.
[+] [-] soylentcola|10 years ago|reply
When I want something to be between myself and a specific person or group of people, I make a phone call or email. Obviously it's not as restrictive as saying something in person, as you might for something truly private.
But there are degrees. The only way to keep something truly private is not to tell anyone but it's not fair to equate a private conversation with a public broadcast, just because you sometimes use the public broadcast.
[+] [-] alexro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateabele|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonalmeida|10 years ago|reply
It took me a few to realize when the conversation was changing from the narrator to Snowden.
[+] [-] kyle4211|10 years ago|reply
Snowden was acutely aware of the consequences his actions could have. This really drives that home.
[+] [-] marcusgarvey|10 years ago|reply
I remember the first time I read 1984, in middle school. To my young mind it was extremely frightening, and every time I would put it down I would have the same feeling one has when they wake up from a nightmare: relief that it was just a fiction. That it was unlikely to ever happen in real life. Snowden's revelations made me feel like that relief is gone forever.
Right after the revelations came out, I discussed it with a former journalist in Silicon Valley, who was also Jewish American. I could not believe it when he used the, "I'm-not-worried-because-I-have-nothing-to-hide" argument. I guess he never heard the reason why the Nazis were so successful in killing and imprisoning Amsterdam's Jewish population, at a rate that far exceeded other European countries.
The Dutch, you see, are meticulous record keepers. Even today you can find property records that date back to 1600s and earlier. And, at some point along the way, someone thought it would be a good idea to record people's religion, in addition to the more typical things like address and date of birth. Oh, they had been doing it long before Adolf Hitler conceived of his final solution. It must've seemed like a good idea at the time. They probably never thought those records would be used the way they were after the Germans took over the country....
[+] [-] jokoon|10 years ago|reply
Although I wonder if it can be proven or argued (or not) that Snowden is not working with Russia. Maybe in the realm of intelligence nothing can really be proven, and it doesn't really mean anything for me to trust my gut about Snowden not working against the US. Are there any articles debunking those theories ?
[+] [-] revelation|10 years ago|reply
Theres no value in the press for Russia.
[+] [-] jackweirdy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fineman|10 years ago|reply
Also, they changed the passwords when he left.
[+] [-] nashashmi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsunamifury|10 years ago|reply
Since its the Bible belt I often find myself reminding people of the story of David [1] who hid with the Philistines when his nation and leader of Israel and turned on him. The irony is almost overwhelming to them since Snowden so closely fits the exact profile of the story.
Some nights in my darker moments I worry that we and by extension myself, have become the bad guys in that story, more akin to the egotistical and delusional King Saul than David.
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2027
[2] My relevant history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9444512
[+] [-] lisper|10 years ago|reply
It's because traditional Christian values have been hijacked by business leaders who believe it is in their best interests to cultivate a populace with unquestioning deference to authority. (They're probably right about that too.)
[+] [-] Sven7|10 years ago|reply
But I do wonder if our politicians were to trying to pull off another Iraq Invasion type event, whether it would be as easy today as they made it appear in 2003. Would it be easier for a whistleblower to disrupt it today? It doesn't feel so.
[+] [-] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
Not everyone thinks exactly the same way you do. Believe it or not, outside message boards like this, there are a lot of people that don't care about NSA surveillance of US Internet traffic at all, and care a lot more about Islamic terrorism (to be clear: I am not one of those people).
[+] [-] lucozade|10 years ago|reply
For example, they could see the primary role as protecting the safety and prosperity of the citizenry of the USA.
You, maybe, see it as protecting the values of the USA as, for example, enshrined in the constitution?
I think there is an argument that Snowden's actions could have put at risk the former for the sake of the latter. I don't believe that he did but I could understand if someone believed that he took an unnecessary risk.
I think there is also an argument that says that to give up ones values if to forsake the need for protection as what's left isn't worth protecting.
[+] [-] hackuser|10 years ago|reply
For those unfamiliar: The Bible Belt isn't in the US Midwest and generally the regions aren't much alike. The Bible Belt is the most conservative region in the US and is in the American South. The Midwest has historically been liberal, even progressive in places, the home of unions and democratic voters. (Also the Midwest isn't in the middle west, but you can find a map.)
That's not to say that there are no Midwestern areas where people are more religious or conservative, or that tsunamifury's family doesn't live in one.
[+] [-] nordsieck|10 years ago|reply
There's your problem right there. Your implication is that the people you talk to are blind to their own values. In reality, they simply value different things than you.
[+] [-] evook|10 years ago|reply
I can't keep up self-satisfaction when I've to admit that I am lacking deeper understanding of my environment. The simplest solution to that problem would be that I tell myself with as much other people as possible that understanding my environment isn't that important, because we've managed life until here without it. We declare ourself as normal and defame everyone not belonging to our social bubble. Maybe we even declare the minority of people that get whats going on as an undesirable to be in group. But you've to remember that those processes are normal and healthy. People getting sucked up in reality tend to depression.
[+] [-] fineman|10 years ago|reply
Proper separation of the bodies of government is important for everyone, conservative and liberal alike. The domestic spying not just on average citizens, but also specifically on (potential) political opponents (like then-senator Obama, for example) weakens all of us.
It sounds efficient to some, to imagine one monolithic law-enforcement entity without its hands tied so the idea of parallel construction, for instance, doesn't bother them. But it's not a "rights of the guilty" leftist tree-hugging issue, it's a corruption prevention issue. By separating our agencies and making them work through official channels we have a check on any one getting out of control.
Be you Right or Left, the government are our employees and Snowden is the one who came to tell us the rest had their hands in the cash register. (And worse, were forging our name with the bank, etc...)
[+] [-] NN88|10 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/iankatz1000/status/662041192541089792
Snowden really doesn't know as much as he claims to. Not to mention he's careless and the he exposed legitimate intelligence operations on foreign countries