Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

Couldn't agree more, but not for the reason you think

> The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.[13]

Sorry, couldn't help myself

On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.

You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

  >  in retrospect was this actually huge news?

Nothing jaw dropping but he surprised on what get through

During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.

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I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines.

Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute.

[*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.

I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.

Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.

I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.

Yes it does.

Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information.

The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission.

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This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding.

Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg

Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.

Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of his actions like an adult.

Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.

Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.

Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.

If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.

While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.

Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.

Here's a good starting point if you're not familiar with the second source https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...