This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files, should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my country that they literally said that "spying between friends is a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-pa...
bandofthehawk 5 hours ago [-]
My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.
DamnInteresting 5 hours ago [-]
This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:
> You need to have been convicted to receive a pardon, the petition should be not to prosecute.
Hahaha /
I’ve made myself sad
GuinansEyebrows 5 hours ago [-]
i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?
1 hours ago [-]
nasaeclipse 3 hours ago [-]
unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?
alphazard 4 hours ago [-]
"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included.
Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
OkayPhysicist 1 hours ago [-]
Too radical is in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the most intelligent people I know, people who rather carefully analyze their own beliefs, tend to have at least a few things that they are extremely outside the Overton window on. It's not particularly hard to see why: if you apply even a surface-level analysis of the world around you, a lot of stuff is "we all believe X because we've always done X that way".
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.
Loughla 30 minutes ago [-]
What's the phrase? Think about how stupid the average person is, and then remember that half of everyone is stupider than that.
sholain 1 hours ago [-]
One cannot just release whatever one wants, and some of the docs should not have been released.
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
masfuerte 1 hours ago [-]
I find it very strange that so many people are more exercised by the small crime of Snowden releasing this information than by the large crime of the federal government spying on us all.
nateglims 41 minutes ago [-]
I'm sympathetic to snowden and think he should just be pardoned, but in retrospect was this actually huge news? Other than reaffirming that telcos were a weak link and that we should encrypt everything, what was a major revelation?
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
godelski 27 minutes ago [-]
> in retrospect was this actually huge news?
Yes
SamDc73 5 hours ago [-]
The Wyden–Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that would’ve limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one vote. It would’ve stopped the government from getting American's web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly, I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant to walk into my digital life too.
What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
yogurtboy 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Here's the result of the vote, in case anyone notices these representatives running for reelection:
It's quite surprising that Bernie didn't vote on that bill considering he was vehemently against the Patriot Act. Disappointing.
culi 2 hours ago [-]
Wow it's disorienting to see a vote that's not cleanly split across party lines. Things worked differently back then.
bnolsen 1 hours ago [-]
And they tried to hang him for it. I wasn't particularly pleased with some actions he took after he ran off but the government reaction was truly out of hand and forced him into full survival mode. This part of government is full of weird power crazed spooks.
jjordan 7 hours ago [-]
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
jjtheblunt 6 hours ago [-]
The 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace" from James Bamford covered NSA capabilities (and was sanctioned, nonetheless), etc..
There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
ProllyInfamous 5 hours ago [-]
Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies.
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.
----
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.
To be clear I am NOT endorsing this author/book (even though I've met him, enjoyed conversation, and read this book), I just thought his introduction (10% lies) was a clever way to avoid government censorship. Was actually surprised the rating is >4 stars =P
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
Thanks for the link; I liked the author's introduction more than the rest of the book, and wouldn't recommend it to any casual reader, nor most people.
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
----
Welcome to /hn/
pstuart 4 hours ago [-]
That's a sly workaround, but as it is delivered as fiction imagine that for him it must be a Cassandra-like experience.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
I coincidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, during my first few weeks exploring ChatGPT (~January 2023~). The book explores the rebellion of automated factory workers, drawing inspiration from Vonnegut's own mid-20th-Century experiences working at a GE manufacturing facility.
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
hackernudes 2 hours ago [-]
The Scythe books are written by Neal Shusterman!
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks — corrected!
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for tonight's movie recommendation (Braveheart was sick, I'll give Mel another chance!).
Oh please don’t think I was suggesting it. It’s just what the movie was about. It’s. It on me if it’s not your cup of tea. Brave heart it isn’t.
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
> that's the plot of Die Hard 4
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.
squigz 5 hours ago [-]
It's not a conspiracy - this is why Stargate exists!
bdamm 35 minutes ago [-]
Can you explain the link?
squigz 2 minutes ago [-]
It's the plot of an episode of SG-1 [1]
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
That is largely correct, even if not for that specific purpose/reason. Those people are largely self-discrediting, among other things.
sdoering 6 hours ago [-]
The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1].
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
Tom Clancy also had a similar plot in the Jack Ryan series
timschmidt 5 hours ago [-]
Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
opo 3 hours ago [-]
> ...which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor":
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and
industrial policy will shape the pace and
content of transformation as much as the
requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of
experimentation to investigate the nature of
the revolution in military affairs as it applies
to war at sea, the Navy might face a future
Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the
post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war
at the dawn of the carrier age.
timschmidt 9 minutes ago [-]
> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club states.
DennisP 2 hours ago [-]
And despite the X-files spinoff and the best-selling Clancy novel, the administration kept repeating "nobody could have predicted this!"
throwaway29812 5 hours ago [-]
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6 hours ago [-]
lisbbb 6 hours ago [-]
I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
ForOldHack 6 hours ago [-]
i.e. The movie "The lives of others." :|
radicaldreamer 5 hours ago [-]
If they remade that movie with a modern spin, it would be an AI model deciding who is loyal and who isn't.
mistrial9 2 hours ago [-]
> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it."
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
doctorpangloss 5 hours ago [-]
> you have no privacy, get over it.
> privacy as the basic right it should be again.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
sharttone 7 hours ago [-]
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jeffbee 7 hours ago [-]
I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.
jasonvorhe 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine actually believing all this in 2025.
apical_dendrite 6 hours ago [-]
As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
apical_dendrite 20 minutes ago [-]
Please actually read what I wrote. You are responding to something that I did not write.
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
decremental 6 hours ago [-]
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dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
> If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
culi 2 hours ago [-]
This is a good idea and I'd love to see a series going through the, arguably more significant, Paradise Papers. Part of the problem there was the sheer size of the leak. Now that I think about it, this would actually be a great application of modern AIs for parsing
asdefghyk 7 hours ago [-]
Some what (vaguely) related to this topic
About surveillance.
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government.
Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible
Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow.
Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
wood_spirit 7 hours ago [-]
The Soviets planted listening devices in American embassy typewriters between October 1976 and January 1984 - by intercepting them in the mail!
Wow, back in the 70s the bugs were only detectable by x-ray scan. Makes you wonder what kinds of things can be hidden in the ICs of today.
zewper 6 hours ago [-]
I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this website. There goes my afternoon.
ginush 6 hours ago [-]
We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
ok123456 6 hours ago [-]
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
Yes it does.
ginush 6 hours ago [-]
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
Larrikin 5 hours ago [-]
Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking.
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
ginush 41 minutes ago [-]
An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever.
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
DennisP 2 hours ago [-]
So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
ginush 40 minutes ago [-]
Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
5 hours ago [-]
nhhvhy 5 hours ago [-]
I thought about it, and now I’m even more convinced we are being surveilled.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA).
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.
----
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
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.
jeffbee 5 hours ago [-]
This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
timschmidt 5 hours ago [-]
"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""
Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the huge technical advances in communications over the past few decades.
jeffbee 5 hours ago [-]
What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
timschmidt 5 hours ago [-]
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.
timschmidt 5 hours ago [-]
"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger."
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
Exactly. That is a toy-sized data center. It would fit in the janitor's closet of a real data center.
2 hours ago [-]
walletdrainer 7 hours ago [-]
It’d be nice if someone released the 99% of Snowden documents that remain unreleased
radicaldreamer 5 hours ago [-]
It's weird how the journalists who have access to these files basically stopped reporting on them and joined or started "independent" outfits with massive salaries (500k+ USD)
How can Snowdon possibly feel as the international situation changes so totally since he fled? It boggles the mind.
ok123456 7 hours ago [-]
Probably, that he did the right thing at the right time.
psunavy03 6 hours ago [-]
No, he violated a trust given to him, he deserves to be in jail, and if he had an ounce of moral character he'd come back and face trial like a man.
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.
Larrikin 5 hours ago [-]
Who actually cares if the government can't perform a show trial? He did his duty by getting the information out there
The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
SamDc73 5 hours ago [-]
He violated the trust of whom? The government who was violating the trust of the American People?
And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...
alex1138 3 minutes ago [-]
What you said takes 5 minutes to research, too. But the party line by idiots and currently in-the-CIA people like approved mouthpiece Bustamante say "Well, he fled to Russia"
throawayonthe 6 hours ago [-]
lololol sure
more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower
working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out
reorder9695 5 hours ago [-]
Would you not also say that the US government violated a trust given to them at the time? The government has such an imbalance of power compared to one person that it's only fair to hold them to a higher and much more stringent standard. Except wait no, they're often held to a much lower standard compared to the average Joe.
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
You forget the security-state apparatus has secret courts and secret laws
It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
psunavy03 5 hours ago [-]
That's not how any of that works. Criminal trials are public record and there are no such things as secret laws.
vunderba 2 hours ago [-]
Why are you assuming he'd get a public trial at all? In the current state of unchecked authoritarianism, he'd just as soon be disappeared to a "Homan Square".
I hope he's still not deluding himself into thinking he did anything positive.
sunaookami 6 hours ago [-]
Account created 40 minutes ago, are you sure you are not an NSA employee?
hopelite 6 hours ago [-]
That's rather harsh. Exposing illegal, objectively treasonous activities by the government is not exactly not something positive, regardless of whether the regime has only gotten worse and more totalitarian and tightened its noose even more around the neck of humanity.
By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.
Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.
ginush 5 hours ago [-]
He sought revenge after not getting a desired job promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions, just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world view, saw as unfairness towards himself.
I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.
He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
BLKNSLVR 4 hours ago [-]
> even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.
The US effectively sent him to Russia.
lateralux 4 hours ago [-]
account created 2 hours ago
pathetic
koakuma-chan 7 hours ago [-]
Why isn't Russia torturing him to get all the secrets out of him?
jack_tripper 6 hours ago [-]
Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.
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.
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
John Kiriakou talked about just this on JRE. Everyone should watch it; be warned, you'll be absolutely furious by the end of it
Krasnol 6 hours ago [-]
Because they already had everything he could provide and the embarrassment weights far more then some tiny details they could get by torturing him.
6 hours ago [-]
stefan_ 6 hours ago [-]
He's much more useful being the ultimate tankie online
6 hours ago [-]
paulryanrogers 6 hours ago [-]
There already did? And or little to get since he didn't memorize secrets and most--if not all--his digital copies were given to the press?
dmix 6 hours ago [-]
That sort of thing doesn't stay hidden these days. Especially someone like Snowden who has a hundred friends who are human rights lawyers.
arminiusreturns 2 hours ago [-]
Where are the rest of them? Glen Greenwald has never answered that question well enough for me.
tolerance 6 hours ago [-]
I can’t tell if it’s the author(s) or the content of the actual report but I found this to be underwhelming.
tehjoker 3 hours ago [-]
Very interesting and useful analysis. I am looking forward to more. It was very strange that the Snowden documents didn't get more analysis than they did (even though there was some significant analysis).
I wonder what this organization is though. The stated purpose seems a little anachronistic, similar to the ideas of the early 2010s, which were amply covered by Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018). A number of organizations of that type ended up being funded by U.S. intelligence as it ended up benefiting military intelligence in various ways, e.g. the Tor Project is funded like this and provides chaff cover for intelligence operations (if all Tor traffic was military, there would be little point to it since it would stick out like a sore thumb) and e.g. NSA can de-anonymize Tor traffic since they can correlate entry and exit traffic with total system awareness (an asymmetric capability no other nation or sub-national organization has).
Doing this analysis is a great way to get some credibility, but it also doesn't reveal anything that wasn't publicly available. Nonetheless, I still appreciate it!
ForOldHack 5 hours ago [-]
Is there a mirror for this? my library has FortNight blocking it. ( bad certificate, leads them to believe its a spam site...).
What's FortNight? I tried looking it up but got fortnite as the top result, and forcing a literal search with quotes just brings up the dictionary definition. Sadly I don't know of a way to do a case-sensitive web search
pseudalopex 5 hours ago [-]
They meant Fortinet possibly.
lucb1e 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, that garbage. Should have known it would be a corporate firewall
wiredpancake 2 hours ago [-]
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31337Logic 4 hours ago [-]
We're so fucking apathetic. Organizations that wish to strip your privacy should be treated the same as organizations who commit atrocities towards the planet or their fellow inhabitants. Expose them all. Shame them. Vote against them. Pass laws to weekend their power, etc.
We've totally been down this road before with alcohol, cigarettes, climate control, pollution, trans fats, guns (in some countries), etc.
It's completely possible to do it again for online privacy. Use your voice now, before you find you are unable to do so at all.
inthegreenwoods 4 hours ago [-]
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intelec1 4 hours ago [-]
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reeeli 6 hours ago [-]
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dadrian 7 hours ago [-]
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bagels 7 hours ago [-]
There were plenty of somethings found at the time.
jeffbee 7 hours ago [-]
Ha, right on target. The scariest thing in there was that they managed to tap an undersea cable and find a protobuf that they didn't know how to parse. Profound mismatch between the reputation of the NSA, their willingness to undertake daring physical intrusions, and their total inability to profit from that.
hulitu 7 hours ago [-]
> Surely, this time we'll find something!
You won"t.
CamperBob2 7 hours ago [-]
We saw plenty, but nobody cared. Let's see how that works out for us in the long run.
hulitu 7 hours ago [-]
People forget. Easily. Just bombard their brains with something else and everything is fine.
"You can actually cause the consumer to forget something he has previously learned... by putting into his head a newer and stronger concept... You can actually remove an advertising story from his memory, and in it's place you can substitute one of your own... as we seize a larger and larger share of the consumer's brain box..."
squigz 5 hours ago [-]
I'm always happy to be reminded that HN users are not part of "people"
jokoon 3 hours ago [-]
I've read people say that some of the documents were fake to sensationalize the story.
With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american.
"Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.
Hikikomori 3 hours ago [-]
Whats china invading again?
Rendered at 02:23:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad
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.
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
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.
----
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.
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
https://www.thiemeworks.com
Thanks for the info/rec!
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
----
Welcome to /hn/
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
>Merlin's holly wand
The More You Know™ [0]
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
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.
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode)
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
Edit:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.
You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club states.
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
> privacy as the basic right it should be again.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government. Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow. Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
Yes it does.
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
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.
----
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/layoffs-the-intercept.p...
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.
The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...
more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower
working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out
It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility
By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.
Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.
I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.
He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.
The US effectively sent him to Russia.
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.
I wonder what this organization is though. The stated purpose seems a little anachronistic, similar to the ideas of the early 2010s, which were amply covered by Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018). A number of organizations of that type ended up being funded by U.S. intelligence as it ended up benefiting military intelligence in various ways, e.g. the Tor Project is funded like this and provides chaff cover for intelligence operations (if all Tor traffic was military, there would be little point to it since it would stick out like a sore thumb) and e.g. NSA can de-anonymize Tor traffic since they can correlate entry and exit traffic with total system awareness (an asymmetric capability no other nation or sub-national organization has).
There's a great podcast + transcript with Chris Hedges and author Yasha Levine about this book here: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/04/13/chris-hedges-report-th...
Doing this analysis is a great way to get some credibility, but it also doesn't reveal anything that wasn't publicly available. Nonetheless, I still appreciate it!
We also have Tor onion site: http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...
And I2P: http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
You won"t.
"You can actually cause the consumer to forget something he has previously learned... by putting into his head a newer and stronger concept... You can actually remove an advertising story from his memory, and in it's place you can substitute one of your own... as we seize a larger and larger share of the consumer's brain box..."
With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american.
"Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.