
Edward Snowden Reconsidered - mitchbob
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/13/edward-snowden-reconsidered/
======
dandare
> The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has
> been raised and debated. No evidence has been found that he was, just as no
> evidence has been found that he was a spy for China. ... We can’t know.

Wikipedia: Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a
disinformation strategy...

~~~
notafraudster
This claim struck me as especially dumb. We can easily determine whether or
not he was a Russian asset by asking the question "Why is he in Russia?" He is
in Russia because the U.S. cancelled his passport after he left China and
before he got to Ecuador. He hasn't been able to leave because the U.S. won't
restore his passport. And he's still on a temporary Russian visa. And even if
he found a way to fly, the last time the United States thought (incorrectly)
he was on a plane, they forced the plane (which was registered as a diplomatic
flight) to land.

The conspiracy that he was flipped by Russia after he got there is at least
not contradicted by the obvious facts, but a claim that he was a Russian agent
all along is asinine.

~~~
perl4ever
If we posit that his being in Russia _is not_ good evidence _for_ him being a
Russian agent all along, that does not mean it _is_ good evidence he _was not_
a Russian agent all along.

~~~
notafraudster
Parsimony would dictate that a plan that involves them getting their asset
back through a convoluted series of timing decisions the U.S. made that were
completely beyond Russia's control is a terrible plan, and one that could have
easily been replaced with him simply flying directly to Russia the first time
and not leaving.

~~~
perl4ever
Why assume that things happened according to a/the plan? Things often don't
happen according to plan. I was just reading that some people think Guccifer
2.0 was actually a response to blown cover.

------
pessimizer
Unintelligible and endless. I don't know what's being "reconsidered" because
this adds nothing other than an weird-ass attempt to associate Wikileaks,
Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald with Putin and Russia, Nazism, and the
Australian far-right(?!).

~~~
shard972
The Australian far right, also known as the shooters and fishers party...

Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on
recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.

Also the claim of "alignment" comes from preference runoffs, because wikileaks
put them ahead of the greens. Seems like a lot of bias packed just in this one
sentence.

~~~
plugger
> Yea I don't know if I can take someone serious who thinks a party focused on
> recreational hunting and gun rights is some fringe far right party.

Are you Australian? The shard in your username makes me think you might be.*
Regardless, down here the handful of people who would be considered as
proponents of gun rights would also most likely align with the far right (One
Nation, Shooters and Fishers, etc).

* Don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia "shards" is a slang term for ice/crystal meth.

------
NN88
So we're supposed to be OK with this?

> _Snowden’s tweets and lectures have real-world impact. After his
> disclosures, Tor’s usership shot up from a million to six million. He
> repeatedly tweeted to his followers that they should use Tor and Signal.
> Tor’s default search engine DuckDuckGo, which claims to protect privacy by
> refraining from the profiling that other browsers do in order to provide
> personalized searches, saw a 600 percent increase in traffic over just a few
> months. One of DuckDuckGo’s partners is Yandex, Russia’s government-
> controlled search engine, although the company says it does not allow the
> collection or sharing of user data by its partners. Certification by the
> Snowden brand may well be the chief reason that so much faith is now placed
> uncritically in these platforms._

Really?

------
shard972
> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that
> Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million
> was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed by Snowden.
> An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search engine allows
> partners to collect user data; it does not. The article has been updated.

So the author spent all this time writing this article couldn't even bother to
confirm how many documents were leaked and seemed to be under the assumption
that DDG is data mining it's users?

This article just feels like it was written by a 3 letter agency and dropped
on someone's desk.

~~~
tptacek
There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how
many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them
en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this
article for getting a count wrong.

~~~
detcader
> people he barely knew

Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If
so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper
limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?

~~~
tptacek
I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place
where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think
leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few
circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they
contain --- which is what Snowden did.

Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know _how many_ documents he
leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of
the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted
them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the
contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows?
That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in
electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence
information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them
characterized... but, this is fine.

So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad
because it ran with an incorrect count.

~~~
detcader
I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count
of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to
"released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article
bad.

I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials
engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised
concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of
whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action:
supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and
splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms
go off.

"They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker
says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said.
"And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later,
this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But
let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to
the discourse tree and stake the claim that _this_ is the correct depth of
nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied
with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that
the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad
situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where
all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.

~~~
tptacek
The first paragraph of this comment responds to things I actually said. The
second looks like you may have accidentally spliced a reply to a different
comment into this one.

------
Aqueous
I can come up with no better summation of the damage Snowden has done to
liberal democracies and the rule of law than his quote near the end:
"...Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are
the least reliable means of achieving effective change"

In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that
working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't
create the lasting change they hope for.

This is not only incredibly childish and destructive - it's inaccurate.
Politics and the rule of law have have provided protections for racial,
sexual, religious minority populations in dozens of countries around the
globe, have destroyed institutional slavery, and have created the largest
sustained creation of broad-based wealth in human history. It's provided
universal health care for millions of people across Europe and the Americas,
defeated totalitarianism in two global conflicts, launched people into space,
and created the technological revolution without which we wouldn't be having
this debate today.

We're not perfect. Nobody claims we are. But politics and law are how we
improve ourselves.

~~~
rtisdale
>In other words Snowden's taught millions of young people he influences that
working within the frameworks of politics and the law is pointless and can't
create the lasting change they hope for.

Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional
surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately
ignored.

This security apparatus undermines the very fabric of law and government that
you speak so highly of.

In case you've forgotten the 4th Amendment.

>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things

So what's your suggestion?

Silently put your head down and continue to breach the Constitutional rights
of the American public?

Maybe you'd have kept fighting the man from within a system that clearly
ignores one of the most fundamental pieces of our democracy, our Bill of
Rights?

Sure, peoples rights are being trampled on but at least the youth wouldn't get
any funny ideas.

Snowden gave up more for the USA than you, me, and many people on HN likely
ever will by exposing an unconstitutional surveillance system so vast it'd
give the Stasi a wet dream.

Edward Snowden is a patriot and I say that without reservation.

~~~
dx87
>Snowden attempted to expose an incredibly corrupt and unconstitutional
surveillance apparatus by working within the system but was ultimately
ignored.

He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided
0 evidence to back it up. Considering he says that he only leaked information
because internal methods had failed him, you'd figure he would have saved at
least a single shred of proof that he tried to handle things internally, but
he didn't.

He's already admitted during interviews that he applied for the job
specifically to gather information to leak, and the majority of the
information had nothing to do with the surveillance program in the USA. He's
far from a patriot, and anyone who believes he leaked all of the sensitive
information out of the goodness of his heart is just being naive.

~~~
rtisdale
>He says he tried to work within the system and was ignored, but he's provided
0 evidence to back it up.

Thanks to another one of the cornerstones of our democracy, Freedom of the
Press, here is an article to refute your point.

[https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-
snowden...](https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-
tried-to-tell-nsa-about-his-concerns)

>Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director
Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior
NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all
the details about Snowden’s communications with NSA officials regarding his
concerns over surveillance.

>The trove of more than 800 pages [see the pdf at the end of this story],
along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented
insight into the NSA during this crisis within the agency. And they call into
question aspects of the U.S. government’s long-running narrative about
Snowden’s time at the NSA.

In short, it would seem that there is pretty ample evidence that some
significant conversations took place between Snowden and the NSA.

You can even view the FOIA requests that revealed this information at the end
of the above article.

------
twblalock
This is a pretty smart article. The author makes a solid attempt to explain
one of the weirder things about Snowden, Assange, and Greenwald, and the other
people in their orbit — why do people who care about transparency and
revealing government wrongdoing appear to defend and/or support Putin?

I’m not entirely convinced by the explanation, but it’s the best one I’ve seen
so far, and a lot of these people’s actions make more sense if the author is
right about what motivates them.

~~~
kgarten
Can you point to one instance where Snowden supported/defended Putin or
opinions of Putin? Couldn’t find one in the article.

~~~
pvg
Several such instances are listed in the article, the argument is pretty
clearly stated. If you don't find it convincing, that's one thing but claiming
it's not there when it plainly is is just odd.

~~~
kgarten
The article claims a lot ... yet I cannot find any source interviews where
Snowden defended Putin.

~~~
pvg
That's not what you asked. The article lists several occurrences which the
author interprets as support for Putin. You said you read the article and
found no such thing. That's not a reasonable representation of the article. Or
of reading.

~~~
kgarten
Several? Snowden is brought into association with Assange and Greenwald, a lot
of the instances you are talking about mentioned in the article are not
related to Snowden but to Wikileaks etc. I don’t know any instance where
Snowden was in direct support or defended Putin (even from the article). The
only “Support” from Snowden was showing up in a TV show with Putin asking him
2 questions.

Still my question holds: when did Snowden defend Putin? (and can you get a
source interview or statement directly from Snowden … not associations over
actions of 3rd parties).

~~~
pvg
I'm not really interested in hashing out whether you think Snowden does or
does not support Putin by your personally chosen criteria of the meaning of
'support' and proof. I'm happy to agree that you think he doesn't in advance.

------
the-red-herring
Well, there is always some degree to "fake news" in every article you read,
but yes I agree that Edward Snowden is a patriot. William Binney probably had
the perfect solution to counter domestic and international terrorism, however
his program was shutdown because the majority of the people working for Uncle
Sam at the time wanted something far more than stopping terrorists. Sure, they
may have had good intentions, but with power like this, there is no stopping
others from coming along and corrupting it for their own purposes.

