What happened to the Snowden archive

Hanlon's Razor is the domain of fiction authors. It sounds sophisticated but has no basis in reality.

> "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

The consistent through-line of Greenwald's journalism from the Bush era through to the Trump era is an anti-u.s pro Russia narrative.

  > I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.

The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.

Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.

It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.

That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.

You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.

> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections

Have you seen the midterms polling?

> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.

People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.

here's a bogeyman for you, accepting money in a representative democracy for political action is maybe mere nanometers from the definition of bribery.

Perhaps a bit ahistorical, but I'm put in mind of the quote "Not even Masada began as a suicide attempt."

Interesting times indeed.

You're clutching your pearls far too hard.

> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)

It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.

The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.

The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".

> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.

The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.

> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)

And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.

I have a clear, experience based understanding of my personal limits that makes me feel entitled to comment.

Cowardice is the greatest of the sins for it begets many of the others. Or if you insist on colloquial Russian: не можешь срать - не мучай жопу.

I could swear "in the US" part wasn't there when I replied. Oh well.

Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."

Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.

He could have returned to the US. His citizenship wasn’t revoked.

I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.

> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.

Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.

Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016

The lesson in all this? Stay in school.

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Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...

Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.

Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.

It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...

In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:

* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]

* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.

* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.

* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.

* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.

This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...

Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?

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>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges

He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy

> Assange didn't commit a crime

Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is

He's now spent years and is looking at spending the rest of his life in Russia.

For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.

He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question

There isn’t one under the law so no.

Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.

He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow

> It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.

I wholeheartedly disagree :)

If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...

                 Don't be there
     I am here → Don't be seen
                 Don't be acquired
  You are here → Don't be hit
                 Don't be penetrated
                 Don't be killed

One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’ lol

if you visit wikipedia.org/whistleblowing, what exactly value is there from hiding content but force revealing you visited it, making sure it can't be retrieved from a cache within your organization/school network?

and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?

i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.

  - you visited Wikipedia
  - you edited Wikipedia
  - what you wrote on Wikipedia

  - you visited Wikipedia

Doesn't encrypted DNS make a lot of that metadata moot ?

And of course the additional options available

I see what you’re saying, but true stateless people often have a different problem on their hands, because most countries won’t allow them entry at all unless they can get refugee status, and they will often be denied basic rights.

Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness

Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.

He wasn’t stateless. Stateless means no country recognizes you as a citizen. He just faced arrest if he returned. Same as any other fugitive. People seeking asylum still have a country and citizenship. Also he wasn’t facing treason charges. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. There were others in similar situations that faced up to 45 months in prison and Eric Holder was willing to make a deal in 2015.

He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.

It's not a "false equivalence". Multiple people are trying to explain to you what "stateless" actually means and how's it's materially different than being a fugitive, but you are refusing to listen.

He wasn’t being abused.

> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.

The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.

> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.

Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.

Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.

Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.

Many believed the women who accused Assange of rape also that led to the bogus charges that had him imprisoned in an Embassy and then a British dungeon for years.

>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.

The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.

Here is him ranting about how destructive "peak wokeness" is because apparently we need to save black people from each other, not from white people or the cops: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-a...

Conservative enough for you?

Unfortunately to many, everything is a team sport, and that isn't an accident. It is a result of decades of carefully crafted propaganda by the powers-that-be. It's why otherwise intelligent people repeat idiotic tropes like "echoing propaganda", because a designated bad person says something, by definition that statement is false and making any similar statement puts you in league with that bad person and makes you bad. It's also an easy way to dismiss objectively factual statements and arguments without substantively engaging with them in any way. The same goes for appearing on outlets that are considered to be on the other team, working with someone on the other team on an issue (even if that issue isn't itself objectionable) and even talking cordially with members of the other team. It is an incredibly useful way to keep people on board with whatever team play is called by the team owners and also keep them from developing or expressing any independent thoughts whatsoever.

By 2023, it's not "hosting interviews with political opponents" - it's obvious that giving a voice and publicity to people like RFK Jr. is actively harmful to society. Freedom of speech means we don't throw RFK in jail, but no one has to publicize his views.

RFK is a socialite born into centre left 'American Nobility', who, throughout his life was able to get by by being 'the face' of whatever organization, on the magazine cover of whatever.

Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.

He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.

Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.

RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.

Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).

>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.

You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.

So why was he arrested in 2008 if there was no evidence? And again in 2019? And why would he hang himself if there was no evidence against him? That's a wild conspiracy theory you have, bud.

Ok, so Trump continues to flout the law in order to conceal the files, and had his AG lie that there were no files, and had FBI redact the files for months, and 'accidentally' failed to release the specific files of witness testimony naming Trump in the sexual assault of a minor ... why?

Exactly the behaviour you'd expect of a convicted sex offender and best friend of a paedophile, husband to an illegal immigrant apparently trafficked by that paedophile who was not covering anything up, huh. /s

I guess you also think the early closing of Congress to prevent any vote on Hegseth and Trump's war crimes to also just be a coincidence?

Aside from everything else, Trump is a convicted rapist - it's just shocking to me that people like yourself choose to support a person like that who is entirely unrepentant.

I mean about the historiography, and your personal verdict on whether those systems were active, based on the evidence Snowden provided.

A wiki is a summary, of the available evidence, but from what I've seen, I'm not 100% confident the systems were active and deployed to the claimed maturity level.

that's an interesting perspective thanks for sharing

> maintain a territorial monopoly on legitimate violence

For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.

We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".

The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.

This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".

Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.

Humorous rejoinder to complain of my own lack of citation and then responding with an ostensibly competing theory while offering no citation of your own.

Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?

As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.

I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.

If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.