More like "USA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, much of U.S. population says," I'd say.
That happens when you do something most people would feel shame for.
A major difference between NSA employees and the rest of us is that they can easily stop what they're doing. Let's hope their pitiful loss of morale leads them to develop a conscience, respect for the law, or whatever it takes to stop doing things that lead to feeling so bad.
> “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.”
Bullshit. They're adults who chose to do what they did and work where they work.
We have emotions to guide our behavior. If they feel bad for the environment they chose to work in and the work they chose to do, maybe they should look in the mirror and ask if they ought to reconsider their choices and do something that doesn't draw shame and contempt from the rest of the world while undermining their county's interests.
I was in a Hadoop course with a person who had just left the NSA in mid-June (right when the Snowden bomb dropped). She was in complete denial about his allegations, and was outright hostile to the rest of the room for "actually believing he was telling the truth". A key quote: "Do you really think they just let people access these systems without rules? You really believe that?" (the tone was beyond condescending, implying that we were all naive and ignorant) My argument to her was that my experience dealing with intelligence agencies is that they build stuff very quickly, focusing on capabilities. Anytime systems are built like this, safeguards are an afterthought.
As it turns out, we were all right, and she was all wrong. I would love to talk to her today and wipe that smug look off her face by pointing out that the "safeguards" were nothing more than policy and rules with zero enforcement mechanisms. Hence the guy who spied on his ex for years without being caught.
The fact that, on a personality level, she was one of the more awful people I've been stuck sitting next to in a class, makes me question who the NSA hires. She was hired straight out of college, so I guess the culture was sucked right into her. And man does that culture suck.
Wait, should I believe that the NSA doesn't know what documents were taken? Because I hold the belief that they do know, down to the PowerPoint slide, what resides in Snowden's Cache. I believe that the NSA is either incapable of telling the truth, or believes that lying about what they know is an advantage somehow.
Is there some way to decide this quandry logically?
Because I hold the belief that they do know, down to the PowerPoint slide, what resides in Snowden's Cache.
Why? When it happened, they almost certainly didn't. By now they may have restored all their backups to that point of time, and recreated their network to see exactly what he could have possibly taken, but beyond that it seems likely they don't know..
I'd imagine they are slowly working out what documents he has. Everytime a new one appears they go "oh, shit" and look at what other docs were nearby.
They have probably checked multiple times a few critical documents to see if he had access to them.
Furthermore, whatever safeguards they might put on the data are completely irrelevant. They shouldn't be mass collecting data without a warrant in any case.
You were just arguing about whether their lawbreaking was competently executed or not.
Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court. Warrants aren't ever going to figure into spying.
You can bound the scope of what spy agencies spy on, but expecting them to spy and to get a warrant to spy before they do it, that's not going to happen. If you truly want warrant based searches for everyone, everywhere, then you have to ban spy agencies world wide and make this all a law enforcement function.
>Let's not be naive. Spying doesn't involve warrants. It's called spying because that's what it is, spying, not building a legal case to take to court.
Except sometimes when the collected information was used for exactly that [1]
Actually, warrantless surveillance goes beyond that. I'm a Norwegian citizen, and I take issue with the NSA having instant access to all the homemade porn me and my girlfriend exchange. So this concern really goes beyond the borders of the US. Saying that this would be all fine and dandy if it was restricted to the 95% of the people who are not in the US is a very good way to piss off all your allies and trading partners.
And the same goes for the rest of us and our respective governments as well, of course.
I think a big part of the problem here is the idea that not only are governments responsible for protecting their own citizens, they are also only required to respect the basic rights of their own citizens. That inevitably leads to one of two conclusions if governments then feel entitled to conduct mass surveillance of everyone else's citizens.
One possibility is that those other people's own governments consider the surveillance a hostile act. Now everyone's government starts a cold war of information with everyone else's, even if they claim to be allies.
The other possibility is that those other people's governments do not defend their own citizens from the mass surveillance, or even actively collaborate in it despite their apparent obligations to their own population. Now people don't just have cause to mistrust foreign governments, even supposedly allied ones, but they can't even trust their own government to protect them.
Obviously neither of these outcomes is exactly taking the political or ethical high ground. But no-one seems to want to take a lead on what to me is the obvious third alternative: everyone accepting that we are all part of a global community today, and that international trade and communications and transportation are in all our best interests, and that which country's flag was flying when you were born probably has very little to do with whether you are a good person (probably) or a real danger (in which case everyone has legitimate grounds to go after you and already has processes in place to do so), and that because of that same level of international infrastructure and modern technology it should be just as possible to recognise everyone's basic rights by default and collaborate to go after legitimate surveillance targets anywhere instead of drawing artificial borders that are mostly accidents of history and creating a them-and-us culture that serves no-one.
Modern politics reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, which seemed amusing at the time:
Interesting, are you using the word "warrantless" as a synonym for "baseless" or as meaning "without a warrant granted by a court of law"? If it's the first, I agree wholeheartedly - it's both unethical and just plain stupid for my government to spend time, money, political capital, and the ability to look itself in the mirror without cringing on being able to access the pornography of private citizens of ally countries. If it's the latter, I disagree - I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.
I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like?
The reason that international human rights treaties exist is that adopting isolationist policy in the area of human rights is a move that creates no winners. We just seem to have forgotten that in the context of the Internet, because the violations take place at home while the immediate victims are abroad. But the indirect consequences will probably come back to haunt those who don't respect citizens of other nations all too quickly, whether it is in loss of tourist trade, or loss of control of technologies like the Internet because a single nation is no longer trusted to administer that technology impartially, or more direct consequences to the bottom line if for example technology companies with cloud-based offerings are no longer trusted by foreign customers.
The US seems to be particularly at risk today, because it has been a natural leader in some of these fields and has been trusted to act responsibly in that capacity. That trust is rapidly being eroded, and the US has more to lose as a consequence than most. Still, the general us-and-them attitude in today's international politics is a plague on all our houses.
"And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like?"
Well, something like that is already considered quite legal, right? A Uruguayan citizen who buys some pot from his local government store and then boards a plane to Singapore isn't going to have a nice time in Singapore, even though by Uruguayan standards he's done nothing wrong: his property rights in that pot will not be recognized, at the very least, and probably he will be severely punished for something not considered a crime in his home country.
When country A is doing violence to the citizens of countries B and C inside country A, the usual response is merely that B and C recommend that their citizens not go to A. If the citizens were considered important, sometimes there's a protest of some sort.
> I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
I think there is a difference between committing illegal actions when they are inevitable (I can understand that, eg, the US would want to conduct targeted surveillance on known AQ members abroad). It's another thing to make it into an all-encompassing, industrial activity. And clearly, the distinction between "national" and "foreign" is rather... blurry. The US, the Europeans, the Australians, I assume Japan, Korean, Taiwan... look like they have a good working relationship, in which everybody can spy on everybody else, as long as you can pretend it's about security.
it should be like in war, bombing civilians is a war crime, spying on even foreign civilians should never be legally accepted. ever. otherwise we re on the fast track toward another catastrophe for the human race and one of its unique features, freedom.
It would seem to me that it's two orthogonal questions, where the probable harm is related to their product. They shouldn't be mass collecting data; they should be competently protecting data they collect.
She was probably right about the systems she used. I clearly remember be stunned, and initially not believing, that any one person, even a sysadmin, would have such broad access to systems at the NSA. It goes against everything that intelligence agencies have learned about compartmentalization of information and "need to know" access controls.
"Need to know" apparently is no longer in fashion in either the civil or military intelligence communities, in any way whatsoever. Bradley Manning convinced me of that. As a low-level private, he was able to download megabytes of sensitive material completely unrelated to his job, and that he couldn't possibly have had any need to access. Regardless of whether you think he (she) did the right thing, it's just insane that it was even possible. It speaks of outrageous incompetence at the highest levels of the organization, incompetence that's likely to be a greater security threat than anything else under discussion.
Same story with Snowden, a low-level contractor who was apparently able to walk away with the whole store. Love him or hate him, he's not the Agency's real problem.
Much much more amusing to see how random college drop outs can so deeply compromise national security. Imagine what trouble we'd be in if a motivated nation state tried to get the USA's secrets?
She's probably right in thinking that policies and procedures exist for these things. She's woefully naive if she thinks the systems used to insure those policies and procedures are followed are up to the task, or that the executives and project managers who sign off on them give a shit whether they actually work or not (they don't--they get paid either way, and keep the gravy train rolling).
My experience with DoD contractors is that they are the worst sort of government contractors. They'll do anything to get extensions, add-ons, and other lucrative contracts while providing the absolute bare minimum necessary to meet the strict letter of existing ones.
As long as our government contracting system is run as a font of graft and corporate welfare, all the policies, procedures, and regulations in the world aren't going to stop the Snowdens and Private Mannings of the industry from having access to things they may not need to have access to.
Well they seem to have put enough pieces together to run a training exercise with the same details as 9/11 on the same day, as well as warn the President of the attack a month earlier.
My guess is that compartmentalization was given as an excuse in order for the government to expand power during a time of 'crisis'. Today they lie to you about what the NSA does, 10 years ago it was lying to you about what caused 9/11, including lying about the memo, and the training exercise.
Remember that before the memo and the training exercise were public knowledge that 'no one could have predicted 9/11'.
Funny, that doesn't answer my question. I was already aware of the letter released by Senator Grassley[1] and none of the stories in that letter match those referenced by the GP.
so you're linking to a letter with TWELVE different cases of NSA employees spying on people for "romantic" reasons and that doesn't answer your question? are you playing some kind of semantic game where you narrowly select the meanings of words to exclude the piles and piles of evidence and so "win" some pointless argument?
because if so, i'm thinking you might be keith alexander?
It might be that the person you are responding to is making an effort to enforce a social more against defending spying that is clearly out of control. In which case the necessity of nastiness should be clear.
That said, we know that the US government has carried out propaganda operations "on the homefront" to normalize and legitimize illegal and unconstitutional behavior. And it's pretty obvious when an army of blog commenters and twitter handles are all pushing the same talking points at the same time and don't seem to be active outside of business hours on the east coast...
Being a dick to people on Hacker News is never necessary. If anything it's counterproductive. People used to get downvoted into nothing just for posting a lmgtfy link.
It's definitely the case that the quality of discourse has declined on this site in the last few years. However that has more to do with the fact that it's now seen as an important mechanism for shaping public opinion amongst an important constituency; and it's popularity.
As the person whose comment was singled out, can you explain how was my comment "defending spying that is clearly out of control"? I wasn't intentionally. As pointed out below, I assumed the GP knew of a story that I didn't, so I wanted to learn about it.
One tends to realize only in retrospect that it's a very curious experience to go from normal life to the military before having any other real responsibilities in life. One very much gets the feeling of being a Platonic "guardian" and the access to information only heightens that experience. It is likely quite similar to the way some folks in IT talk perceive "sheeple" and doctors sometimes perceive patients, and even the UPS guy perceives your package as he congratulates himself for the hard work even as he drop kicks your computer into your screen door.
Couldn't I fairly easily replace "military" with "profession"?
I think going to medical school and being indoctrinated into a second professional culture is what gave me an opportunity to see the experience for what it is. The striving, the late nights, the urgency, the aspirations, the sense of responsibility, they all play in to a larger story of self where one paradoxically may not appreciate their own larger role at the time. I also submit your immediate seniors also may not appreciate their own roles.
I submit any differences you saw in her were side effects of the history of the institutions, the policies that govern them, the nature of the work, and the point in time at which your paths crossed.
Look at General Petraeus, compare him to Lincoln's string of generals, or just the number of military officers who will never make general, fired one after the other, and consider, how many months or years of conflict did Petreaus save after the civilian leadership made the decision to go to war? How many soldiers and civilians were killed or saved? How many lives has his work touched?
Look at Drew Houston. Compare him to the many careers burned out in failed startups, the customer data lost in security breaches. How many lives has his work touched?
Look at Paul Farmer. Compare him to the many careers burned out in medicine, the patients who died in clinical trials while they took sugar pills, the failure of relief agencies to effectively coordinate supply chains. How may lives has his work touched?
Look at Fred Smith. Compare him to the many careers burned out in aviation and business. The pilots of passengers who have died in flight, or been affected by the failure of a supply chain to deliver the right item to the right place. How many lives has his work touched?
Now think about the soldiers, the code monkeys, the nurse's aids, the FedEx delivery drivers, living in the shadows of these names. What cultural influences are the same?
If you started on any one of these paths at 18 or 22, are you so certain that you would be mentally and emotionally prepared to resist the onslaught of cultural decisions you would be expected to participate in on a daily basis? Are you so sure that you so reliably see the forest for the trees?
As a matter of interest about whether and how people change their views in light of revealed facts, have you any means of following up with her to see how she new views the matters on which she opined then? I would find this exercise informative and interesting. Tnx.
Bullshit. They're adults who chose to do what they did and work where they work.
They did, but that presumes they knew all that was going on. I suspect that very few people did. Ask people at Microsoft and Google if they were servicing these FISA requests from the govt and I bet very few had any knowledge about it until the stories broke. Or ask someone in the Air Force if they know about random secret op anywhere in the world and they probably don't know.
Now you might say, "they should have known". I don't know if they should have. Someone later in the thread mentioned a female that thought the systems would be better locked down -- and I suspect they are for most employees. But there probably are some people for whom needed the system for their day job, but it wasn't properly locked down so they couldn't check on their 'ex'.
At the end of the day how much more to blame is a Chinese language translator at the NSA than someone who does crypto at DIA, or a FISA judge, or a US citizen who continues to pay taxes, rather than change residence...
They did, but that presumes they knew all that was going on. I suspect that very few people did.
I agree, but doesnt't that just imply that the "compartmentalization" system can be used for more than limiting damage due to disclosure? A compartmentalized organization can be led down the proverbial primrose path, responsibility is so diffuse that accountability and even ethical behavior is impossible.
I think it also implies an ethical duty not to work in a compartmentalized organization. You can't know if you're doing ethical work if you can't know all that's going on, even theortically.
How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? Not every single person in the Army needs to know that Bin Laden is getting rolled on tonight.
I think what happened is the citizenry picked security over privacy. And our elected officials who oversee these organizations thought they were making the right tradeoff.
"Need to know" is just a doctrine, not a physical or mental necessity. I thought compartmentalization (a.k.a. "need to know") exists pretty much so that it's easier to determine who leaked, not so much to prevent leaks completely.
But even if I treat "need to know" as something sacred, sure, not every member of the US Army needed to know that. But compartmentalized programs or agencies are totally different. As soon as the SEALs came back, everyone did know, and that didn't affect the success of the mission. In compartmentalized programs, you're prohibited from knowing, ever. That's a big difference.
>How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security?
You can't. The notion that you can know everything your organization does is ridiculous and naive. It might work if you restrict yourself to tiny companies, but it doesn't if you ever work for the government or any sizable company.
Yes, but there's a big difference between "can't legally know, and in fact the knowledge about what knowledge is compartmentalized, too" and "MegaCorp, Inc has 45,000 employees, who work in 19 different divisions". Most ordinary corporations don't have formal compartmentalization. Compartmentalization would be too costly, and prevent any kind of synergy or economy of scale.
There's nothing preventing a telco's outside techs from talking to the IT people that build and maintain the DSL testing app, other than inertia.
The last 50 years of U.S. public administration has truly been a master course in how to completely destroy public faith in large government.
As of right now, it seems the U.S. government has two paths it can take -- a) Begin the long and difficult process of restoring faith in the system, or b) tighten their stranglehold on power.
More like "USA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, much of U.S. population says," I'd say.
I suppose you and I meet different subsets of the United States population in our daily lives. I am on record here on HN as having participated in the Take Back the Fourth protest in Minneapolis about overreaching NSA surveillance. I was not afraid to go out in public in view of TV cameras and the police (the protest location was a plaza across the street from the headquarters of the Minneapolis police deparment, and I saw officers with cameras overlooking the protest location) to indicate that I think governmental surveillance, if it occurs at all, should be according to law, and strictly limited by law.
That said, I don't treat Snowden as a hero, and I hope no one else in the United States emulates him, ever. He would have done a lot more good for humankind by increasing the NSA's ability to conduct surveillance in China and in Russia (the two countries that have protected him so far) and in central Asia in general. And what has most struck me as I have conversations with American adults of approximately my age (birth years in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s) who remember more history is that they are mostly very eager to see Snowden prosecuted to the full extent of the law, which would probably mean spending the rest of his life in prison.
Yes, people choose where they work. And some people remember not to stab their co-workers in the back when they go to work. I have never chosen to work for NSA, and I would be glad to see NSA have more effective oversight from Congress and a more limited role in data-gathering. But the United States (like every other country in the world) needs some intelligence-gathering capabilities, and I seem to be joined in my daily activities by a lot of Americans who think that Snowden didn't help anyone by revealing official secrets and that he has a very misguided set of priorities about which governments to oppose. My morale decreases to know that anyone who was contracting for NSA wasn't checked out well enough to detect that tendency to treachery in advance.
The day the news broke that Edward Snowden had left Hong Kong, I was out of town at a soccer tournament with my daughter. The parents of her teammates, mostly younger than I am, heard me announce that news, and when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.
AFTER EDIT: I see the downvotes indicating disagreement are already coming here, and that is not a surprise here on Hacker News, but do we have strong evidence that the general opinion of the American public is united in supporting the HN community view of Snowden's conduct as an NSA contractor? That's one factual question worthy of factual discussion here, whether you agree with my opinion or not.
AFTER FURTHER EDITS: I appreciate the replies to my comment, practicing free speech to help me understand other people's perspectives. I would say that it's quite possible to be a genuine whistleblower without disclosing the degree of operational information that Snowden disclosed. And it is possible--it has been done--to decry current NSA practice and still stay in the United States, as some NSA officials have done in the last few years. I'll check the polling data kindly shared in one reply. I'll note that Americans my age and older (well above the modal or median age of HN participants) have multiple sources of information through which to form opinions on this issue, and don't rely solely on governmental statements or influence from political leaders to make up our minds on these issues.
...when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.
I find that reaction quite horrifying. It is appalling (although not surprising) to me that supposedly educated people are willing to support extrajudicial process and treatment amounting to torture because they don't agree with the way someone has acted. Even if they think a crime has been committed this sort of blasé Bush-style attitude that "you're with us or you're against us, and if you're against us you deserve everything we can dream up to do to you" contributes a lot to foreign disgust at the US attitude.
Couldn't agree more. The Bush years were a plague on not just the U.S., but the rest of the world. It represented time and time again, across all spectrums of society, the worst of humanity. Power and corruption on all levels of government over the people.
I can appreciate that things cannot stay static and that we must keep evolving and changing. But what the NSA does now and Bush, Gitmo, etc - these are not progression, but regression. I think what Assange and Snowden have done are highly respectable since a real democracy can only function at its highest level with a true open society and a government for people, not corporations or oligarchs. All these secrets and spying just serve to keep the boot of those with power tight against the neck of those who have less or none. Sad.
So you're saying that if the government is passing the boundaries of legality and morality, people should just keep their heads down and not say anything?
Frankly, I'm disgusted by you "American" attitude towards this. I've seen more non-Americans who support Snowden than Americans, which is really very depressing. Because those are supposed to be your American values, of freedom, privacy and basic human rights. But it's like after 9/11 you've all been brainwashed to believe those aren't very important, and what matters most is "national security" at all costs.
Do you really think most of that spying is done to catch terrorists? How naive, are you, really? Is the spying on every single European to catch the terrorists? The spying on EU and Latina American countries to catch terrorists?
When secrets are dirty, they should be exposed - at all costs. Yes, even if it means endangering people's lives. Why? Because people have also given their lives in the past to earn those rights. Their lives shouldn't be wasted because "governments knows best".
> I am on record here on HN as having participated in the Take Back the Fourth protest in Minneapolis about overreaching NSA surveillance.
Let your argument stand on its merits, not on what the argument-maker has or hasn't done in the past.
> He would have done a lot more good for humankind by increasing the NSA's ability to conduct surveillance in China and in Russia...
The United States has done tremendous good for humanity. But given our history of extralegal, unaccountable meddling in the foreign policy of other countries and how spectacularly it's blown up in our faces over and over again, I must absolutely disagree with you.
> the two countries that have protected him so far...
Every time a Snowden discussion comes up this point also bubbles to the top, as if people actually thought Snowden chose to flee to those countries because he felt that Russia and China had better support for freedom...as opposed to those two being practically the only possible countries he could flee to without being assured of his extradition.
> I seem to be joined in my daily activities by a lot of Americans who think that Snowden didn't help anyone by revealing official secrets
I think the NSA didn't help anyone by grossly overstepping its mandate and doing things which only tinfoil-hat cranks would have claimed the government did five years ago.
> which governments to oppose
This sort of belief, where government wrongdoing can never be exposed because the United States is implicitly locked in some sort of existential crusade against foes which do even worse (and exposing it would undermine this crusade), can be used to justify all sorts of evil, totalitarian actions. I don't think our moral yardstick should be set relative to the worst country(ies) in the world. I don't think our ideals (the ones tested by the War of 1812, the Civil War, WWII, the fight against segregation, and countless other times) are so fragile that we need to sink to the bottom of the barrel in order to guarantee our national survival.
> another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there
If this is the mindset of the "general opinion of the American public", I fear for the long-term future of rule of law in this country.
>The United States has done tremendous good for humanity. But given our history of extralegal, unaccountable meddling in the foreign policy of other countries and how spectacularly it's blown up in our faces over and over again, I must absolutely disagree with you.
Source that shows where US surveillance has spectacularly blown up?
>If this is the mindset of the "general opinion of the American public", I fear for the long-term future of rule of law in this country.
Slippery-slope fallacy. No one cares about your fear of some scenarios you imagined.
What is the recourse when no one (except a few powerless individual) in either the legislative or judicial branches will hold any government agency or participants accountable for such blatant violations of law?
Snowden was not the first NSA whistle blower. Others, like William Binney understood that this was not just a violation of unlawful search & seizure, but a complete usurpation of representative government itself.
Snowden's extreme actions finally resulted in bringing semi-known NSA abuses to the American people as fact without debate. Enough so that the co-author of the PATRIOT Act once the NSA's director imprisoned (that is either public theatrics or meaningful progress.)
Do all government whistle blowers deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison? Snowden, presumably, believed that what was being done was so appalling amoral, he put everything he had on the line. Then he did what little he could do to secure some very basic level of personal autonomy for whatever remains of his life. I would only accept criticism from others in the same position.
As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.
The shocking level of quiet acceptance and resignation is to me indication we need many more like Snowden, not only in the US. And frankly, I've come to think that the most important form of political activism is not to agitate for change at this point, but to build up support structures for whistleblowers and find ways of actively encouraging whistleblowing. Not just technical infrastructure for anonymous leaks, but physical protection, escape routes, and support networks.
Not just to get leaks, but to destroy morale in these organizations by making everyone worry about whether their co-workers will turn. Make these agencies consume themselves.
I do recognize that states needs intelligence to protect their interests, but that does not make it right. In fact, I see it as a symptoms of a fundamentally broken system, and yet another reason why the state can never avoid becoming a tool of oppression.
One thing that makes me happy about recent developments though, is that while I used to be far out on the fringe when it comes to my views on the immorality of US foreign policy (I used to regularly face people who refused to accept that CIA actions that past CIA directors had publicly admitted to in broadcast TV interviews ever happened, that's the extent of the trust the US used to have with the European right), here in the UK I now meet people far, far right of me politically who now agree with me or even are more negative to it than me where they'd previously have refused to acknowledge it even as a possibility.
The view of the US as "land of the free" is rapidly disappearing amongst the type of people I meet, and it is more and more common to hear people across the political spectrum refer to the US a police state or complain about increasing authoritarianism. It's not long ago since the idea of meeting Europeans who refuse on principle to travel to the US would be utterly bizarre - now it is relatively commonplace.
As for a "tendency to treachery", I find that description disgusting. Anyone going into public service has a duty first and foremost to the people. No matter what they might sign or what other promises they might make. In that respect he did his job far better than most other NSA employees, whether or not the public are grateful for it now.
> As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.
I agree, it's terribly depressing. There is this narrative of "the NSA is spying on us" when Europeans should wake up and realize that their domestic security service are doing exactly the same, either secretly (France, UK...) or openly (Sweden). But considering how both the moderate right and the moderate left have been perfectly accommodating about it, people, provided they are even aware of it, are left with little legal recourse.
I'm Norwegian, and the most horrifying demonstration of how weak the press is we got when one of the major newspapers (Dagbladet) published claims that the Norwegian intelligence services (without specifying which one - there are 3) handed over millions of call records per months to the NSA (EDIT: specifically claiming this was about surveillance in Norway).
The response was downright scary:
All the three agencies denies that there was any surveillance of Norwegians in Norway, as one would expect them to do.
But the agency responsible for foreign military surveillance "admitted" to handing the NSA tens of millions of call records from conflict areas. Now, Norway is a small country, with limited military involvements: The only areas we are active in are areas where the US is active too. They wanted us to believe that Norway has a foreign surveillance capability where we are able to collect that kind of call volume in places like Afghanistan, that the NSA does not already have.
If we do, that too should be news, and should have led to further reports and political questions raised. And it should have led to questions over how, then, the domestic intelligence couldn't make do with far less money, as military intelligence apparently manages to do a massive amount of surveillance in war zones on what suddenly looks like a shoestring budget... But the press response was to parrot what military intelligence said.
They held a press conference - something they hardly ever do - and made what appeared to be revelations about operational ability - something they never do - and courted media all day.
Meanwhile, the Police Security Service, which in the past have been caught red-handed carrying out substantial illegal surveillance, kept extremely low profile despite the fact that the allegations made by the newspapers (and reiterated in a piece by Greenwald) was that this was about surveillance in Norway which means it is the Police Security Service's "table". They were able to get away with a denial through a press contact and were then out of the news picture with no further questioning.
Apparently not a single news source saw it as odd enough to question why military intelligence was all over the news and why they might want to push for further responses from the people actually responsible for surveillance in Norway. The people who (under their previous name - the Police Surveillance Service) not only spend decades carrying illegally political surveillance of the Norwegian left, but were even caught carrying out illegal surveillance of the member of parliament who led the parliamentary commission investigating their illegal surveillance while he was investigating them.
The press did not apply any pressure at all. Not publicly at least. They just immediately accepted the claims from military intelligence. Dagbladet folded immediately and backtracked. And the major papers subjected their online forums to the harshest moderation I've ever seen in Norwegian papers.
Frankly, no event in Norwegian politics in the last 30 years have scared me more than how that was treated: Whether or not Dagbladet's claims were true or not, it demonstrated either a scary ability of the establishment to shut down any kind of real journalism around it, or a scary level of apathy and disinterest. I'm not sure which is worse.
You don't say. Being a French expat in DK, I found the apathy of the French public in answer to allegations of internal, warrantless surveillance appalling. Apparently, gay marriage is more important. The Danish government has kept mum about the subject, as far as I know, and I haven't heard anything in the Snowden documents concerning DK, but considering how eagerly the Conservatives previously in power went to look for WMDs in Iraq, I fully expect PET to be carrying out the same operations.
Regarding the press and the government, what are their usual working relationship? My impression here is that Danish people are much less cynical about the government than the French are. Combined with a culture of consensus-seeking, this could lead to the press not being as incisive as it could be (though on the other hand, it's apparently possible for politicians to be evicted over scandals that would make the French barely bat an eyelid).
> The day the news broke that Edward Snowden had left Hong Kong, I was out of town at a soccer tournament with my daughter. The parents of her teammates, mostly younger than I am, heard me announce that news, and when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.
In 20 to 30 years, when this becomes part of history, I would be interested in tokenadult asking those same people what they thought of "Gitmo". Then they should ask their children. Later, they should ask their grandchildren.
One hopes that it will be a feeling of shame, or at least outrage. Sort of like hearing how Rosa Parks was treated when she tried to get a seat on the bus.
He does an awful lot of work to build credibility and then try and use it to spread fud around Snowden. Would there even have been a "Take Back the Fourth" without Snowden? Perhaps next year we will all be at the "Remove the 4th" rally instead.
Also, when you have a concerted effort by the administration, congress, and the security industrial machine to pariah Snowden, then it affects the polls. Without the smear campaign, we'd be united.
"But the United States (like every other country in the world) needs some intelligence-gathering capabilities."
But the United States(like every other country of the world) needs control by the people who supposedly controls the country in a democracy.
If all the people is spied, and the people has no way of controlling it, then it is not a democracy anymore.
Remember that absolute power is way more dangerous than terrorists. Terrorist killed 3000 people in 9-11, Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot killed tens of millions after taking control of the State.
Remember Hitler took control of an advanced democratic republic with the excuse of going after terrorism.
My guess is those who want to see Snowden put in jail for life are victims of lifelong conditioning as, whether you agree with him or not, he's clearly someone who has been prodded by his conscience to defend what one would think is a Western value (the freedom not to be spied on in an open society). Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history knows a state with an unchecked domestic surveillance apparatus will end up dysfunctional and corrupt. What most people don't understand is how much power surveillance capabilities grant to whoever has access to the information.
If you take a peek at history, you will see that we never learn from it and repeat the same mistakes. That's a thing a historian friend of mine says a lot.
What strikes me is this:
when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there.
It's terrifying how people silently consent to putting people in prisons that are above the law and feel smug about it. It shows they truly never bothered taking a lesson from even recent history.
Very terrifying... the Milgram experiment shows the average person has little conscience. Most people value a sense of order, and the illusion of stability it implies, above all else.
> And it is possible--it has been done--to decry current NSA practice and still stay in the United States, as some NSA officials have done in the last few years.
Those NSA officials made no headway. Snowden's method will change things, even if it's just to lock down access to sensitive materials at the NSA. By your logic Rosa Parks should've stayed at the back of the bus and made a polite complaint to the bus dept.
At minimum, due to the failure of due process in the Bradley Manning case, Snowden is entirely immune to criticism for his choice to leave the country. And after the Bolivian presidential plane was forced to land, he gained immunity to criticism for staying in Russia. Anyone who fails to concede these points is in possession of a malfunctioning brain and/or does not have the interests of the American people at heart.
Joining the armed forces voluntarily means you voluntarily entered UCMJ jursidiction. Espionage is illegal under UCMJ. That's the actual, formal law. It's not a failure of due process.
Manning's torture after his arrest can hardly be considered any part of due process. Obama's refusal to intercede in that situation was what finally soured me on him for good.
Exactly. I would not have objected to Manning receiving multiple life sentences for his violation of the law, if due process had been respected. But it wasn't.
In his defense of Snowden's decision to flee the country, Daniel Ellsberg elaborates more on what's different between now and when he made the decision not to flee in 1971.
What should Snowden have done? Filed a complaint with the grievance committee, and then gone about his merry way? Don't be naive, even these bombshells are not enough to shake most people out of their stupors.
> I'll note that Americans my age and older (well above the modal or median age of HN participants) have multiple sources of information through which to form opinions on this issue, and don't rely solely on governmental statements or influence from political leaders to make up our minds on these issues.
That happens when you do something most people would feel shame for.
A major difference between NSA employees and the rest of us is that they can easily stop what they're doing. Let's hope their pitiful loss of morale leads them to develop a conscience, respect for the law, or whatever it takes to stop doing things that lead to feeling so bad.
> “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.”
Bullshit. They're adults who chose to do what they did and work where they work.
We have emotions to guide our behavior. If they feel bad for the environment they chose to work in and the work they chose to do, maybe they should look in the mirror and ask if they ought to reconsider their choices and do something that doesn't draw shame and contempt from the rest of the world while undermining their county's interests.