Years ago, when I interviewed at places that did USG-related work, the stuff I heard about that I didn't have to sign an NDA to hear, scared me enough that I knew Snowden-scale stuff was entirely within the capabilities of the US Govt. I didn't realize they would use it against us just blatantly in direct violation of every law put in place to prevent it, though.
I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
Transparency is the key. Governments love secrecy because that allows them to do whatever nasty stuff they want while pretending to be righteous at the surface.
Just look at past secrets that have been disclosed recently and think: should those things really be secret? I say absolutely no.
The mentality of keeping things secret to hide your real intentions, or to not upset people too much (or they will panic!), or to keep other governments on their toes so you're ready to take them by surprise in the event of a conflict (how has that worked so far? The real threat actors will know anyway what naughty stuff you're doing to make sure they'll be the losers if the need arises - like when you just urgently need more cheap oil) is something we, all peoples of the world, need to overcome as soon as possible.
You may argue the situation in the world right now proves that governments need to be ready for conflict all the time, and secrecy gives them more power to take enemies by surprise... but you're mistaken, it's exactly the opposite! The whole China/Russia animosities are due to the West patently doing things, like keeping military bases in every weak country[1] that will let them around China and Russia, that clearly shows they have every intention to escalate to a war with them at the earliest sign of trouble, yet we lie without hesitation about it... like we're the peaceful people who keep trying to convince evil governments to change their belligerent ways. Perhaps if we stopped putting weapons pointing right at them, right at their neighbourhood, they would be better persuaded that war is not a possibility?
We do the same with climate change by the way... we want everyone else to change, or we won't do it alone, forgetting that we're the ones who pumped 90% of the CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of industrialization, while some countries that are now considered "climate villains" have been on it for only a couple of decades... hypocrisy at its worst.
I think your takeaway is wrong. It isn't the government doing naughty secret things but the government doing so with support from a plurality of the people. The patriot act is a non-partisan issue that gets renewed every administration. Snowden and Assange should be locked up accroding to a majority of americans.
Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.
You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.
I kind of had this realization when reading about things the government did in the past, like air-drop LSD onto soldiers, agent-orange, psychic experiments, and other nonsense.
My first instinct was 'wow, those wacky 60's', but then it slowly dawned on me 'what's changed?'. Nothing, nothing has changed.
> we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
How does that help? For me the lesson of the Snowden affair has been that it does not matter whether we know what the government is up to, because they will do what they want to us regardless; there is nothing we can do about it.
This is what proponents of small government fear, and by extension why creating more organizations where a small group of people deciding for a large group is bad, because they can be corrupted. See for example any union that has existed for more than 10 years and how they are called "corporate unions", in an intentionally blind case of "no true Scotsman".
Also one of the reasons communism doesn't work - the mechanisms needed for it to be implemented centralize even more power to a central committee than with other systems of government.
I agree, the world-view really changes once you realize this.
When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points / IX's during the 90s that had just been called "some old police telco stuff, ignore it."
I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.
I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.
The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.
Very eloquently phrased. Some of the commonly accepted truths and geopolitics narratives are quite disturbing and actually very Orwellian in a genuine (and not clichéd) sense. Narratives around China and Russia, narratives around our own liberty are completed warped, and to speak out singles you out. There’s definitely a chilling effect about what is acceptable to talk about and what isn’t.
>I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive
I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.
Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away.
It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that.
We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too.
This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down.
> A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If you were a spook of a geopolitical adversary, one of the most effective things you could do to undermine the US would be to undermine their (hugely powerful) intelligence apparatus. There is a reason a a lot of US-critical media comes out of Russian and Chinese state sponsored media.
While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.
Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.
> parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive
That was out of left field. What about people who believe it was plausible that Russian intelligence services were behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta emails, that the intent behind those leaks was to interfere in elections, and that such leaks had a non-trivial influence given the election was so narrow? That seems like a reasonable set of beliefs to hold, not "absurd official lines". I don't have access to the evidence behind the set of claims, but it strikes me as highly plausible.
Many of these "spook-adjacent types" (why not just call them "NPCs", wasn't that the lingo as of a week ago?), don't believe such attempts are primarily trying to skew the outcome in favor of Trump, they believe a general effort is being made by Russia and China to weaken confidence in elections, liberalism, democracy and the West broadly. Not because Russia and China are intrinsically evil, but because they are rivals, and as rivals have found an effective tool capable of undermining from within. The DNC/Podesta email leaks being only one of the more visible outcomes of these efforts.
I thought it was pretty widely believed before the snowden leaks that the US (and in particular the NSA) did warrantless surveillance of US citizens. What was lacking was credible evidence; anyone who claimed it was widespread before snowden could easily be written off as a conspiracy theorist.
It would have been a big scandal if Snowden revealed that the NSA was not doing what he said they were doing. That is, it was well known that the purpose of the NSA was to do exactly that.
> Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience.
You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens.
It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage.
Everything in the above comment is propaganda by someone who wants you to not look at the evidence because it would instantly discredit their position. If you want to know what Snowden actually did - go look at a random sampling of the documents, and tell us what you see.
In the last ten years technology has increased substantially. In the last five years AI has advanced significantly.
That is worth really letting sink in.
I try my best to avoid every kind of online discussion on these topics that I reasonably can avoid. Some might even see it as paranoia. But I assume that every single thing I post online (or say on the phone, send in text, or write in emails) is traceable back to me directly, that it is being captured and stored by multiple agencies and countries and that it is all fed into AIs that are at least as capable as GPT-4.
Imagine a Gov-GPT where you can ask it: "Tell me everything I need to know about John Smith" and the AI can related his job history, credit score, recent emails at home and work, his phone calls, his purchases, his political opinions, his spiritual beliefs, his likely weaknesses ... all smartly formatted in a succinct essay that we know and love from ChatGPT.
My question is, if we aren't there already, how long until we are?
Indeed. I guess that whole DUAL_EC_DRBG random-number-generator story - the NSA backdoor deal with RSA is essentially true? No confessions yet it seems, however.
TIL that the Arab polymath al-Kindi invented frequency analysis & wrote the first cryptanalysis book ‘Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages’, in the 9th century.
I think people would be surprised and sickened to know just how cooperative the big tech companies are with the intelligence agencies. Microsoft is especially cooperative, even as going so far to make sure their systems are compatible with surveillance systems. Yes, Telcos have had to this as well, but I don’t think many people know that Microsoft has proactively done this.
>Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping you from ignorance is that constant stream of classified knowledge. It’s hard not to feel superior, not to say things like “If you only knew what we know” all the time. I can understand how General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, comes across as so supercilious; I only saw a minute fraction of that secret world, and I started feeling it.
This really well describes the feelings I was getting around the time of the revelations, as I scrolled through the secret documents, it's like a different world out there.
Hackers can hack. But these agencies can do so much more.
Intelligence agencies have the law behind them, can force you/the hardware suppliers (so called "interdiction")/software providers (PRISM etc) to play ball and force you to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) at the end of the day.
Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply).
The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.
Again, it's just a different world out there. Would love to know what their capabilities look like nowadays.
Serious question, why are the Snowden leaks so revered and not the reporting of James Risen several years earlier? Risen exposed operation Stellar Wind which was the grossest abuse of spying apparatus approved by the Bush admin over the express objections of their own DOJ. Risen also appeared in court for every summons about his activities and was dutifully defended by the NYT until he was ultimately exonerated.
Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.
I have a vaguely related question about Signal. People say it’s secure and encrypted but it was widely publicised that Sam Bankman Fried’s Signal messages were inspected by authorities. How did this happen?
There were cooperators in the same chatroom, a participant in the chats gave up their phone at an airport, or he volunteered it (probably not this). Same way it was obtained in all these cases: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22signal%22+AND+%22encrypt...
The government can do whatever it wants in a non-democratic system. People in this case must use any means to organize themselves to overthrow the government cannot openly violate the rights of citizens because the mechanism of overthrowing the government through protest or votes work
We got a campaign of "Let's tear down the unelected and unaccountable government agencies," and millions of Americans voted for it. It largely didn't work.
I didn't follow the Snowden story because I don't have the background to evaluate the claims, but there is something I recall that hasn't been discussed yet.
Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.
Basically, few people are able to escape the "Snowden good, US Gov bad" groupthink and really see what happened with Snowden. The guy was a massive traitor that made the US much, much less safe for probably a very long time. Remember US Gov actually DOES care about your rights. The CCP and Putin do NOT. He made the latter much stronger.
The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.
I suppose this is supposed to make Snowden look bad. It doesn't.
The author is James Clapper, who Snowden's revelations proved lied in Congressional testimony about whether the NSA was collecting information on millions of Americans. So when he says that "multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts [...] were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned [Snowden]," he's talking about the Congress that he lied to about these programs. How are we supposed to trust that Congress can conduct effective oversight when the intelligence community lies to them?
(We shouldn't.)
Snowden embarrassed the intelligence community and they won't forgive him for it. Americans (and others) should take that into account when they read or listen to the intelligence community's criticisms of Snowden.
> The materials Manning had leaked were embarrassing; the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance.
Dang, sounds like they should have cast a finer net or something eh?
> he had appointed himself as judge over what he had seen, and then, without conducting an investigation or calling out wrongdoers, was going to bring about justice in ways that multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts - which were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned him - apparently were unable or unwilling to do.
And yet the American people, who ostensibly hold the reins here, weren't uniformly enthused about what they heard. This is an insider with immaculate insider mentality griping about a whistleblower whose complaints in the previous paragraph apparently went miles overhead. What an eye-roller.
> the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance.
Good, maybe this will incentivize intelligence agencies to not abuse their power knowing people will whistle-blow and reveal secrets. When you remove all other methods of accountability, this is what happens. Intelligence agencies did this to themselves.
[+] [-] throwaway892238|2 years ago|reply
I think the lesson I learned from the Snowden leaks is, if the government can do it, the government will do it - if not now, one day soon. That's... kind of a value-changing, life-changing realization. That no law will stop a government from doing what it wants. We can't stop it. But what we can do is install enough peep-holes (transparency) that when it happens, we're more likely to find out about it, so we can do something about it.
[+] [-] brabel|2 years ago|reply
Just look at past secrets that have been disclosed recently and think: should those things really be secret? I say absolutely no.
The mentality of keeping things secret to hide your real intentions, or to not upset people too much (or they will panic!), or to keep other governments on their toes so you're ready to take them by surprise in the event of a conflict (how has that worked so far? The real threat actors will know anyway what naughty stuff you're doing to make sure they'll be the losers if the need arises - like when you just urgently need more cheap oil) is something we, all peoples of the world, need to overcome as soon as possible.
You may argue the situation in the world right now proves that governments need to be ready for conflict all the time, and secrecy gives them more power to take enemies by surprise... but you're mistaken, it's exactly the opposite! The whole China/Russia animosities are due to the West patently doing things, like keeping military bases in every weak country[1] that will let them around China and Russia, that clearly shows they have every intention to escalate to a war with them at the earliest sign of trouble, yet we lie without hesitation about it... like we're the peaceful people who keep trying to convince evil governments to change their belligerent ways. Perhaps if we stopped putting weapons pointing right at them, right at their neighbourhood, they would be better persuaded that war is not a possibility?
We do the same with climate change by the way... we want everyone else to change, or we won't do it alone, forgetting that we're the ones who pumped 90% of the CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of industrialization, while some countries that are now considered "climate villains" have been on it for only a couple of decades... hypocrisy at its worst.
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/where-are-us-and-russian-military-ba...
[+] [-] passer_byer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|2 years ago|reply
https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
Your takeaway should be that a democracy would always reflect the will of the people with or without any law because that is what the rulers must do to continue to get elected.
You worry about privacy and laws, they worry about answering for even a relatively small terrorist attack.
The people gave away their freedoms out of fear.
[+] [-] snarfy|2 years ago|reply
My first instinct was 'wow, those wacky 60's', but then it slowly dawned on me 'what's changed?'. Nothing, nothing has changed.
I wonder what they are doing today.
[+] [-] marssaxman|2 years ago|reply
How does that help? For me the lesson of the Snowden affair has been that it does not matter whether we know what the government is up to, because they will do what they want to us regardless; there is nothing we can do about it.
[+] [-] win32k|2 years ago|reply
They didn't. You interpreted the Snowden revelations incorrectly. The government actually cares a LOT about civil liberties.
[+] [-] vasco|2 years ago|reply
Also one of the reasons communism doesn't work - the mechanisms needed for it to be implemented centralize even more power to a central committee than with other systems of government.
I agree, the world-view really changes once you realize this.
[+] [-] andrepd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|2 years ago|reply
I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.
I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.
The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.
[+] [-] theaussiestew|2 years ago|reply
See my other comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097082#36098762
[+] [-] dralley|2 years ago|reply
I present to you a real, still-active Russian troll account.
https://twitter.com/blackintheempir
How do I know it's a troll account? Take a look at this: https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1662112840554098688
Just like "There is no panic in Balakliya", there are occasionally moments when whole networks of these accounts tweet clearly scripted messages all at the same time which kind of gives the game away.
https://twitter.com/JoniPyysalo/status/1567799462751309826/p...
It's quite interesting to read, honestly. They have a decent pulse on what narratives are effective, but present it in such an consistently hamfisted and exaggerated form that it makes it just a bit too obvious if you're taking in more than one or two tweets. But it's twitter, most people don't do that.
We can argue about how effective this kind of stuff is, but that it's happening is pretty indisputable. You can say it's just a lie that everyone pretends to believe, but the documents leaked by Teixeira talk about this stuff in detail too.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russians-boasted-tha...
This document for example says that the Russian Main Scientific Computing Research Center internally reports that only 1% of their social media bot accounts get shut down.
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA19...
[+] [-] landryraccoon|2 years ago|reply
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones.
Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.
[+] [-] hackerlight|2 years ago|reply
That was out of left field. What about people who believe it was plausible that Russian intelligence services were behind the leaks of the DNC and Podesta emails, that the intent behind those leaks was to interfere in elections, and that such leaks had a non-trivial influence given the election was so narrow? That seems like a reasonable set of beliefs to hold, not "absurd official lines". I don't have access to the evidence behind the set of claims, but it strikes me as highly plausible.
Many of these "spook-adjacent types" (why not just call them "NPCs", wasn't that the lingo as of a week ago?), don't believe such attempts are primarily trying to skew the outcome in favor of Trump, they believe a general effort is being made by Russia and China to weaken confidence in elections, liberalism, democracy and the West broadly. Not because Russia and China are intrinsically evil, but because they are rivals, and as rivals have found an effective tool capable of undermining from within. The DNC/Podesta email leaks being only one of the more visible outcomes of these efforts.
[+] [-] cout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw1920|2 years ago|reply
You clearly haven't read the leaks. If you had, you would have quickly realized that the vast majority of the leaked documents are totally unrelated to spying on citizens.
It's crystal clear to anyone who looks at the evidence itself that Snowden was not having a crisis of conscience, but was instead committing espionage.
Everything in the above comment is propaganda by someone who wants you to not look at the evidence because it would instantly discredit their position. If you want to know what Snowden actually did - go look at a random sampling of the documents, and tell us what you see.
[+] [-] zoogeny|2 years ago|reply
That is worth really letting sink in.
I try my best to avoid every kind of online discussion on these topics that I reasonably can avoid. Some might even see it as paranoia. But I assume that every single thing I post online (or say on the phone, send in text, or write in emails) is traceable back to me directly, that it is being captured and stored by multiple agencies and countries and that it is all fed into AIs that are at least as capable as GPT-4.
Imagine a Gov-GPT where you can ask it: "Tell me everything I need to know about John Smith" and the AI can related his job history, credit score, recent emails at home and work, his phone calls, his purchases, his political opinions, his spiritual beliefs, his likely weaknesses ... all smartly formatted in a succinct essay that we know and love from ChatGPT.
My question is, if we aren't there already, how long until we are?
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 36097082|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iJohnDoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amoshi|2 years ago|reply
This really well describes the feelings I was getting around the time of the revelations, as I scrolled through the secret documents, it's like a different world out there.
Hackers can hack. But these agencies can do so much more.
Intelligence agencies have the law behind them, can force you/the hardware suppliers (so called "interdiction")/software providers (PRISM etc) to play ball and force you to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) at the end of the day.
Don't want to agree? You end up like Qwest (CEO got jailed) or Yahoo ($250k daily fine until they comply). The power gained is immense though, just read about XKeyScore.
Again, it's just a different world out there. Would love to know what their capabilities look like nowadays.
[+] [-] tootie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumhead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theaussiestew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] from|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user6723|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ganesh7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sxhunga|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrp|2 years ago|reply
Snowden was apparently fairly active as a protester against government surveillance before he got his gig as an NSA contractor. It seems he originally pursued the job with the intention of finding information to leak. If this is true, then a large part of the story should be how it shows the incompetence of the government in doing security checks.
[+] [-] win32k|2 years ago|reply
The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.
[+] [-] Slava_Propanei|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] DirectorKrennic|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] CrazyStat|2 years ago|reply
The author is James Clapper, who Snowden's revelations proved lied in Congressional testimony about whether the NSA was collecting information on millions of Americans. So when he says that "multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts [...] were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned [Snowden]," he's talking about the Congress that he lied to about these programs. How are we supposed to trust that Congress can conduct effective oversight when the intelligence community lies to them?
(We shouldn't.)
Snowden embarrassed the intelligence community and they won't forgive him for it. Americans (and others) should take that into account when they read or listen to the intelligence community's criticisms of Snowden.
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
And yet, I don't see these international terrorist groups having been particularly successful since the Snowden leaks.
Of course Clapper is going to try to paint the leaks in a bad light; the leaks painted him in a bad light!
[+] [-] WaxProlix|2 years ago|reply
Dang, sounds like they should have cast a finer net or something eh?
> he had appointed himself as judge over what he had seen, and then, without conducting an investigation or calling out wrongdoers, was going to bring about justice in ways that multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts - which were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned him - apparently were unable or unwilling to do.
And yet the American people, who ostensibly hold the reins here, weren't uniformly enthused about what they heard. This is an insider with immaculate insider mentality griping about a whistleblower whose complaints in the previous paragraph apparently went miles overhead. What an eye-roller.
[+] [-] 93po|2 years ago|reply
Good, maybe this will incentivize intelligence agencies to not abuse their power knowing people will whistle-blow and reveal secrets. When you remove all other methods of accountability, this is what happens. Intelligence agencies did this to themselves.
[+] [-] throw7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newZWhoDis|2 years ago|reply
He lied to Congress and lied to the American people.
[+] [-] alphanullmeric|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|2 years ago|reply
ref: https://reason.com/2018/01/17/time-is-running-out-for-prosec...
[+] [-] yeetsec|2 years ago|reply
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