> Why was only 1% of the documents published, in the end? “The documents are not like the WikiLeaks ones from the US state department, which were written by diplomats and, for the most part, easily understandable,” said Ewen MacAskill. “The Snowden files are largely technical, with lots of codewords and jargon that is hard to decipher. There are pages and pages of that which the public would not be interested in. There are also documents that relate to operational matters. Snowden said from the start he wanted us to report on issues related to mass surveillance, not operational matters. So we stuck to that.”
Ignoring the operational limitation requirement (of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%), a capable public can make this determination; we do not need journalists doing it for us. I am uninterested in the journalistic value of these documents; I am interested in the public value of potentially knowing the content of those documents and how the government is surveilling us and/or abusing their authority.
>“The bottom line is that Snowden is facing charges under the Espionage Act. If he was ever to return to the US and face trial, the documents could be used against him.
Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. He believed he was acting in the best interests on the public and is it NOT the job of journalists to protect a known source entity; they are to protect unknown sources.
Release MORE of the files, your profits and/or biased concerns for the journalistic value of the information shared be dammed. There is WAY more at stake.
They came to an agreement with Snowden and should honor that. We might want to see the rest, but I think long term it’s better for leakers to know journalists are trustworthy.
I agree this comes off as patronizing and profit driven. Only 1% of the documents are relevant today. They're holding the 99% until they feel they're relevant to current events so they can break the story.
I wonder what motivated this story to be published.
> Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world
Just to put the end of that sentence in context:
"Privacy International's 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year. Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being 'endemic surveillance societies'. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States."[0]
There are many, many reasons to criticize Russia - now more than ever - but those of us in the West should reflect on why we rate so poorly on this, too.
Snowden was _trapped_ in Russia. He was on his way to a country with no extradition and his passport was revoked, it's worth looking up to know that he didn't chose Russia.
It very well could be. People with a background jnnsocial engineering know there are many small and seemingly innocuous pieces of information that could be useful to an attacker.
> “The Snowden files are largely technical, with lots of codewords and jargon that is hard to decipher. There are pages and pages of that which the public would not be interested in. There are also documents that relate to operational matters. Snowden said from the start he wanted us to report on issues related to mass surveillance, not operational matters. So we stuck to that.”
Sorry, was the point of these revelations to increase public interest (aka to make the newspapers money), or to bring accountability against the NSA? So far there has been nothing published that would give any individual standing to bring such a lawsuit. Is this because Snowden was naive, or because the journalists sacrificed real accountability for self-interest?
Snowden said the point was to let the public decide.
There were several lawsuits. Some activities were ruled illegal. More accountability would require prosecutions and political action. And there was enough evidence for them.
The answer is burried, here is the only real reason given:
When MacAskill replied: “The main reason for only a small percentage [being published] was diminishing interest [from the public]...”
This is insane. They have 99% of the leak under lock and key and they say the reason is because no one wants to see it? My guess is its a gag order/request, if they publish they will lose other access or something but why would this Ewen MacAskill, @ewenmacaskill feel comfortable lying so directly?
Remember, the purpose of journalism is to make money - news is a product like any other. A story people aren't as interested in anymore is a story that doesn't make as much revenue.
Snowden made a mistake in not dumping the whole archive to Wikileaks as was done with the US State Department cables and the CIA's Vault 7 files.
I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collaborators in the private tech sector who seem to have been quite active participants in the program.
For example, one of the most revealing revelations was that NSA spied on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras - which is very hard to justify on national security grounds, and instead points to industrial espionage of the kind the NSA claims it doesn't engage in (as compared to China, etc.).
> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds
I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general, not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relationships among foreign politicians, epidemics, boycott and antiboycott campaigns, etc., are matters of national security in the sense that they could eventually develop into things that would affect a society negatively, or that could tend to increase or decrease the power of a state.
In maintaining the idea of privacy, we have to also maintain that others have to accept surprises and uncertainty. I don't know my neighbors' religious views, I don't know what oatmilk will cost next week at the supermarket, I didn't know when my former coworkers started trying to organize a union, I don't know if anyone has a crush on me. But all that information exists somewhere in computer systems. I accept that I have no right to it, but it seems incredibly hard to get governments to think the same way.
When Glenn Greenwald first talked about how spying on Petrobras wasn't a matter of U.S. national security, I thought that was obviously right. Petrobras isn't going to attack the U.S., it doesn't have any means of attacking the U.S., and it doesn't have any obligation to sell or not sell oil to the U.S. or any other country at any particular price. But now I think that it's not just like "the NSA must plan to help the Texas oil industry" or "the NSA must plan to help the Saudi oil industry" or something; it's more like "they don't accept that they should have to contend with surprises and uncertainty".
To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. And I think disclosing that it happens is right, but it doesn't seem to have led to the kind of discussion or debate that Greenwald seemed to hope for.
> If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
(But in this context we're not just talking about risks of violent attacks, but really risks of anything disruptive.)
Edit 2: The U.S. in particular is powerful enough to enforce economic sanctions which are themselves justified on national security grounds, so then there's also the sanctions enforcement part like figuring out whether Petrobras is working with the Iranian oil industry or whatever. Most countries probably wouldn't even expect to be able to do anything about that, although they might want to exert diplomatic pressure like "please stop trading with our enemy, from whom we concretely fear a physical attack".
They were also tapping the private network links of the Norwegian oil company Equinor (formerly Statoil) according to the original leaks.
It's kind of odd that neither of these oil giants have put pressure on the U.S. government as a result. They are about the only "victims" big enough to pursue the case legally.
I suspect a Supreme Court case is just about the only thing that can bring some of the remaining documents to light. Anyone with access today is almost certainly under some gag order.
That the NSA engages in industrial espionage on behalf of US industry has been known since the European Parliament’s ECHELON report in 2000. There it was a matter of spying on Airbus, the major competitor of Boeing. But considering that that report made few waves outside of the nerd community (cypherpunks, readers of John Young’s Cryptome site and Slashdot, etc.), and was soon forgotten, I don’t think dumping the whole Snowden archive would trigger the large-scale controversy that you might hope for.
Journalistic integrity balancing with the national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated. I am comfortable trusting the NYT to do their job.
I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.
The NYT has a long history of being pro-war. People who dislike US using military force to enforce global hegemony would probably disagree with many of the editorial choices they are making behind closed doors.
The Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the US nuclear triad mean that there is nothing in those documents that could pose any significant threat to US national security.
The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state with top-notch intelligence services can only do so much to prevent attacks. I think that adding more and more surveillance has diminishing returns in preventing attacks, meanwhile its existence is a threat to free society both directly, in that it could theoretically be used against political dissidents, and indirectly, in that it encourages a culture of self-censorship that is antithetical to political freedom.
If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
> national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated
It's actually the opposite
National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others.
The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stupidity or malice.
So we should actually be publishing almost everything from US/Russia/China because they often ruin millions of lives, but in practice ofcourse we do the opposite.
You're basically just saying that you're okay with CIA/NSA doing whatever they want and manipulating public opinion however they want without any accountability whatsoever.
Just like they did in 2003 with WMDs in Iraq?
Or when they said that Trump colluded with the Russians and that's why he got elected?
At least the journalists who said Saddam had WMDs didn't get a Pulitzer Prize, like those reporting on Russiagate did back in 2018.
https://nypost.com/2022/02/20/the-absurd-russiagate-pulitzer...
Meanwhile NYPost breaks the Hunter Biden Laptop story and gets banned from every major social media and tech site for saying the truth, while NYT and Washington Post get Pulitzer Prizes for telling lies.
> “There are pages and pages of that which the public would not be interested in"
The point is that these documents have interesting content, but it would not sell newspapers so they don't want to invest time working on that... it's nothing related to the publics interest.
What a sham. The NYT has openly said many times that it allows the US Government to determine what is "fit to print". How did it come to this?
I strongly believe there was some level of collusion between Greenwald & the USG. How else did he get to have a successful media career in the West, while fellow publisher/journalist Assange rots in prison?
Checking in with USG before publishing leaks is actually fairly standard procedure in order to avoid operatives on foreign soil being endangered.
Wikileaks did so at everyone of the major releases they did in conjunction with NYT, WSJ, spiegel and Le monde - it's also the reason they stopped collaborating with some of those journals when they found out some of their journalists hadn't followed procedures.
And it's also the reason why claims from USG that WL was endangering people's lives abroad were always bogus.
About NYT withholding documents: well, that's just another nail in the coffin of the paper's credibility, along with yet another betrayal of the trust they got from WL...
Greenwald moved to Brazil, and his partner was subjected to extraordinary detention while travelling. Greenwald was just smarter than Assange at avoiding traps.
Snowden has said he picked Greenwald/The Guardian over NYT because he knew Greenwald had the journalistic integrity not to squash the story/defer to the government, meanwhile NYT delayed publication of a story to after the 2004 Dubya reelection when requested.
As to Greenwald's media career? He seems to have gone really fringe the last few years, but maybe I'm saying this because I believe the mainstream Russia and Trump 2016 story, and he seems convinced about US mainstream media incompetence/deference, but he just sounds angry all the time...
garciasn|2 years ago
Ignoring the operational limitation requirement (of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%), a capable public can make this determination; we do not need journalists doing it for us. I am uninterested in the journalistic value of these documents; I am interested in the public value of potentially knowing the content of those documents and how the government is surveilling us and/or abusing their authority.
>“The bottom line is that Snowden is facing charges under the Espionage Act. If he was ever to return to the US and face trial, the documents could be used against him.
Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. He believed he was acting in the best interests on the public and is it NOT the job of journalists to protect a known source entity; they are to protect unknown sources.
Release MORE of the files, your profits and/or biased concerns for the journalistic value of the information shared be dammed. There is WAY more at stake.
criddell|2 years ago
cheschire|2 years ago
I wonder what motivated this story to be published.
saulpw|2 years ago
The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.
logifail|2 years ago
Just to put the end of that sentence in context:
"Privacy International's 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year. Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being 'endemic surveillance societies'. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States."[0]
There are many, many reasons to criticize Russia - now more than ever - but those of us in the West should reflect on why we rate so poorly on this, too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance
RobertRoberts|2 years ago
giantg2|2 years ago
It very well could be. People with a background jnnsocial engineering know there are many small and seemingly innocuous pieces of information that could be useful to an attacker.
YetAnotherNick|2 years ago
darkclouds|2 years ago
[deleted]
aestetix|2 years ago
Sorry, was the point of these revelations to increase public interest (aka to make the newspapers money), or to bring accountability against the NSA? So far there has been nothing published that would give any individual standing to bring such a lawsuit. Is this because Snowden was naive, or because the journalists sacrificed real accountability for self-interest?
mhh__|2 years ago
pseudalopex|2 years ago
There were several lawsuits. Some activities were ruled illegal. More accountability would require prosecutions and political action. And there was enough evidence for them.
wubrr|2 years ago
kylebenzle|2 years ago
When MacAskill replied: “The main reason for only a small percentage [being published] was diminishing interest [from the public]...”
This is insane. They have 99% of the leak under lock and key and they say the reason is because no one wants to see it? My guess is its a gag order/request, if they publish they will lose other access or something but why would this Ewen MacAskill, @ewenmacaskill feel comfortable lying so directly?
krapp|2 years ago
photochemsyn|2 years ago
I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collaborators in the private tech sector who seem to have been quite active participants in the program.
For example, one of the most revealing revelations was that NSA spied on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras - which is very hard to justify on national security grounds, and instead points to industrial espionage of the kind the NSA claims it doesn't engage in (as compared to China, etc.).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr...
schoen|2 years ago
I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general, not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relationships among foreign politicians, epidemics, boycott and antiboycott campaigns, etc., are matters of national security in the sense that they could eventually develop into things that would affect a society negatively, or that could tend to increase or decrease the power of a state.
In maintaining the idea of privacy, we have to also maintain that others have to accept surprises and uncertainty. I don't know my neighbors' religious views, I don't know what oatmilk will cost next week at the supermarket, I didn't know when my former coworkers started trying to organize a union, I don't know if anyone has a crush on me. But all that information exists somewhere in computer systems. I accept that I have no right to it, but it seems incredibly hard to get governments to think the same way.
When Glenn Greenwald first talked about how spying on Petrobras wasn't a matter of U.S. national security, I thought that was obviously right. Petrobras isn't going to attack the U.S., it doesn't have any means of attacking the U.S., and it doesn't have any obligation to sell or not sell oil to the U.S. or any other country at any particular price. But now I think that it's not just like "the NSA must plan to help the Texas oil industry" or "the NSA must plan to help the Saudi oil industry" or something; it's more like "they don't accept that they should have to contend with surprises and uncertainty".
To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. And I think disclosing that it happens is right, but it doesn't seem to have led to the kind of discussion or debate that Greenwald seemed to hope for.
Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181265 had a more concise take on this point.
> If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
(But in this context we're not just talking about risks of violent attacks, but really risks of anything disruptive.)
Edit 2: The U.S. in particular is powerful enough to enforce economic sanctions which are themselves justified on national security grounds, so then there's also the sanctions enforcement part like figuring out whether Petrobras is working with the Iranian oil industry or whatever. Most countries probably wouldn't even expect to be able to do anything about that, although they might want to exert diplomatic pressure like "please stop trading with our enemy, from whom we concretely fear a physical attack".
mbakke|2 years ago
It's kind of odd that neither of these oil giants have put pressure on the U.S. government as a result. They are about the only "victims" big enough to pursue the case legally.
I suspect a Supreme Court case is just about the only thing that can bring some of the remaining documents to light. Anyone with access today is almost certainly under some gag order.
OfSanguineFire|2 years ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago
jasmes|2 years ago
I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.
cwkoss|2 years ago
hax0ron3|2 years ago
The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state with top-notch intelligence services can only do so much to prevent attacks. I think that adding more and more surveillance has diminishing returns in preventing attacks, meanwhile its existence is a threat to free society both directly, in that it could theoretically be used against political dissidents, and indirectly, in that it encourages a culture of self-censorship that is antithetical to political freedom.
If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
nerpderp82|2 years ago
Your comfort is one thing. Noted. But do you know enough about the NYT, what would their job be exactly?
They don't have a stellar track record. Iraq-War, Judith Miller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reporter-judith-...
ClumsyPilot|2 years ago
It's actually the opposite
National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others.
The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stupidity or malice.
So we should actually be publishing almost everything from US/Russia/China because they often ruin millions of lives, but in practice ofcourse we do the opposite.
wubrr|2 years ago
pauldenton|2 years ago
agilob|2 years ago
bena|2 years ago
taylorfinley|2 years ago
Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/the-intercept-the-first-online-p...
greatgib|2 years ago
The point is that these documents have interesting content, but it would not sell newspapers so they don't want to invest time working on that... it's nothing related to the publics interest.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
eviks|2 years ago
pphysch|2 years ago
What a sham. The NYT has openly said many times that it allows the US Government to determine what is "fit to print". How did it come to this?
I strongly believe there was some level of collusion between Greenwald & the USG. How else did he get to have a successful media career in the West, while fellow publisher/journalist Assange rots in prison?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/government-censor...
antoinebalaine|2 years ago
About NYT withholding documents: well, that's just another nail in the coffin of the paper's credibility, along with yet another betrayal of the trust they got from WL...
toyg|2 years ago
duxup|2 years ago
Because leaks can have consequences and it's not clear to the NYT exactly what those might be?
It's a tough situation because the government may not be a trusted partner, but I understand asking / trying to avoid collateral damage.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
netsharc|2 years ago
As to Greenwald's media career? He seems to have gone really fringe the last few years, but maybe I'm saying this because I believe the mainstream Russia and Trump 2016 story, and he seems convinced about US mainstream media incompetence/deference, but he just sounds angry all the time...
dadrian|2 years ago
art_vandalay|2 years ago
MikusR|2 years ago
[deleted]