
I Knew Snowden. And He’s Not The Story - mncolinlee
https://medium.com/surveillance-state/19c2494940d5
======
drawkbox
Everything in this sums up my feelings on the matter.

It is impossible to get freedoms back, too easy to give them up. And if all
seems well now, you have to understand that decades from now and many leaders
later there is too much trust not to be abused.

If there is question of unconstitutional natures for systems like this, the
authority and agencies need to prove themselves beyond a reasonable doubt in
the open not in secrecy well over anyone calling it into question. You don't
side with authority when freedoms are at risk, those don't come back.

Individuals are innocent until proven guilty, authority has to be guilty until
proven innocent due to the sensitive nature of freedoms going away. It seems
people have this flipped.

People think that the law or the Constitution will always provide a failsafe,
but that is only a piece of paper if the people have no backbone and don't
push back. It can happen here and is well on the way if we don't watch out.
There are lots of patriots and good people in the CIA/NSA/FBI but it is not
their job to contain overreach, it is the people.

------
nostromo
I'm not particularly interested in the Snowden play-by-play and backstory, but
I think it's probably good for his cause.

The story would already be dead if he was extradited or simply disappeared
quickly after the leak. Instead the US is getting daily "Where's Waldo"
stories in the New York Times along with stories about the relationships
between the US, China, and Russia. Having all of these angles from which to
write about the story is giving it legs; and the longer it stays in the
public's mind, the better.

~~~
rtpg
Definitely.

The best thing about these leaks is the discussion it's making. Hopefully
people will become more informed from it (but the number of "ARGHHHH MY FOURTH
AMMENDMENT" style comments instead of more specific comments is
disheartening).

This is actually so surreal. I don't think the US is ever going to try _that_
hard to get him back to try him, but the entire spectacle / Assange-style
"THEYRE GOING TO KILL HIM FOR TREASON" around this guy, along with the
supposed strain on relationships this is going to make is stranger than
fiction. What is happening

~~~
bmelton
Odd. I was actually somewhat relieved to see people actually caring about
their fourth amendment rights in a way that they haven't in far too long.

In all honesty, I think that Snowden's continued media presence is actually
hurting his cause. Between the smear campaign by the current administration
(and press) and the casual comments he's made that has lost people on his
cause, he might be keeping the story going, but the story is shifting more to
one of _ad hominem_ , and less of one on the issue at hand.

The populace at large is terribly bad at keeping issues like this in pragmatic
focus. Too few realize that even if Satan himself had been the one to leak
this information, that we're all better off for having known it; and I'd hope
that it would give some Americans pause enough to consider the actual
implications of the Constitution; whether or not the government can govern
through the consent of the governed, for example, if they have secret
governings, or whether or not the non-delegation clause of the Constitution
should actually allow for the NSA (staffed with officials we can't vote in or
out) to write laws, when the Constitution specifically enumerates that law-
making power resides in Congress alone.

So while ultimately, all that boils down to is ARGHHHHH MY FOURTH AMENDMENT,
it's also an opportunity to have a larger discussion on what that fourth
amendment actually means, and what other parts of the Constitution might come
into play, and whether or not it's fair that the government has extended its
power to such the degree that we can have 300 different "agencies" like the
CPPABSD (Committee for Purchase From People who are Blind or Severely Disabled
-- they regulate how many coke and vending machines _other_ government
agencies should purchase from strictly blind or severely disabled sources),
each of which is allowed to write laws that do not pass Congress, do not pass
the house, and aren't subject to the oversight of the citizenry. The FTC, FDA,
EPA, NTSB, etc., have all arguably affected each of our lives in some non-
trivial ways, and those officials are just there, persisting, whether we like
it or not.

~~~
seferphier
Snowden's continued media presence is advancing his cause.

For common people to care, we need a victim. A victim creates a story that the
media can report on. The moment we lose our victim, people stop caring.
Discussions on what the fourth amendments mean will not capture the hearts of
the people for a month or half a year to make changes possible.

For example: If you want to rally the gov to legislate a law to make people to
seat belt on buses. Discussion of scientific reports or statistics of seat
belts in the press will not go very far. In contrast, a story about a 5 year
old that lost both her leg will go a long way.

------
marshray
So far Snowden hasn't revealed much that wasn't already said by NSA
whistleblowers Drake, Binney, et al. Yet most folks had never heard of them or
much about the issues they were trying to raise.

Yet Snowden is an international superstar and the substance of his disclosures
are, in fact, front page news on a regular basis. If it takes paying some
attention to the fact that his girlfriend was a pole dancer, I guess that's OK
with me.

~~~
saraid216
...this is the first I'd heard of the detail that his girlfriend was a pole
dancer. I'm profoundly amused to discover it like this.

~~~
Amadou
Not that kind of pole. As far as anyone has said publicly she was not a
stripper. She was part of a dance troupe while living in Hawaii and the about
page on her blog she described herself as “a world-traveling, pole-dancing
super hero.”

[http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/edward_snowdens_girlfriend_p...](http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/edward_snowdens_girlfriend_probably_wasnt_a_stripper/)

~~~
marshray
So more like artsy acrobatic dancing that just happened to involve the
occasional pole.

Got it. Glad we got this sorted out. :-)

------
joshuaellinger
Personally, I think he's playing his side of the story pretty well. It's hard
to demonize the nice geek kid, a least with the tech community.

The espionage charges reveal how awful Obama, really all of Washington, is on
the Bill of Rights. I think this whole thing is going to backfire on them.

~~~
alexqgb
It's already started. Tonight, on stage at the Verizon center in DC, Mick
Jagger said "I'm not sure if President Obama is here tonight, but I'm sure
he's listening in."

Maybe it's just me, but this comes across as far more damaging than garden-
variety mockery. It's like the authority and mystique of the office are just
evaporating. And forget about "repairing relations with the rest of the
world." Unlike the cock-up in Iraq, this effects everyone, everywhere,
directly.

Backfire squared.

~~~
joepub
Heh. In all fairness, it's arguable the UK does even more spying that the US.
But your point is well taken. The US is supposed to be a model for a free
society. Mass surveillance could be imagined as "un-American". But the
president thinks it's an acceptable practice. Obama followers: You've been
had.

~~~
alexqgb
Update: Apparently Jagger's jab drew boos. I suspect there were a lot of
people in the room who are deeply invested in the politics that were being
mocked from the stage.

------
zenocon
It is so disheartening to see the media bicker all day about Snowden and
Greenwald. What can be done to steer the story back to the travesty at hand?

~~~
pvnick
More leaks, this time something _huge_ , which I certainly expect Greenwald
and Snowden are sitting on

~~~
declan
Agreed. The Snowden leaks to date have exposed programs whose outline we*
guessed at years ago -- but details matter and written confirmation matters.
The Patriot Act 215 order against Verizon is arguably illegal and
unconstitutional; it exceeds the statutory authority and requires prospective
data be divulged instead of merely retrospective. The FAA 702 orders, well,
we'll see. Remember even the provider liability immunization is not unlimited.

But these are legal arguments. So far there has been no dramatic evidence that
the NSA's sweeping surveillance powers have been abused in the way the IRS
abused its authority -- examples would be snooping on politicians, blackmail,
listening to sex chats, etc. We've learned more about abuses of this sort
(politicians and sex chats, not blackmail) from scattered reports in the NYT
half a decade ago then we have from Snowden so far.

* We == people who have been following these topics.

------
gosu
Snowden is a story too. As someone who considers him a hero, and one of the
rare few who I can relate to, I'd like to know more about him views so that I
can learn from him. That's not irrational, unless you think biographies are a
waste.

In this regard, I wonder if any potential underhanded focus on character
rather than message in the media might have the ironic effect of empowering
more young people. "You can do good and be brave even if you play WoW".

~~~
hobs
The thing is, most of the stories are not him coming off as a a hero, but as a
dropout, a weirdo, and generally someone who didnt fit in. They are not
positive biographies but more subtle character assassinations.

------
gasull
A hierarchical organization that centralizes so much unchecked power as the
NSA will attract a good share of sociopaths. Sociopaths seek power over
others. Then it's a matter of time until a sociopath manages to climb to the
top, and then you have a full-blown tyranny.

[http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2013/05/centralization-...](http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2013/05/centralization-
and-sociopathology.html)

~~~
gasull
[https://twitter.com/SCClemons/status/343392529913356289](https://twitter.com/SCClemons/status/343392529913356289)

------
skwirl
"The technology that the NSA now wields far exceeds Senator Church’s most
excessive dreams of a surveillance state."

The author apparently thinks Senator Church didn't have much of an imagination
or had never heard of the Soviet Union or China.

~~~
Zigurd
The Soviet Union, nor the notoriously efficient Stasi, had anything like our
automation. You have to wonder if The Wall would have come down if they had
our tools.

~~~
skwirl
Surveillance has kept pace with technology. I doubt Mr. Church really imagined
the Internet. Do you really think that China today has nothing like our
automation? And do you actually think the way China acts on this information
and the way we act on this information are comparable?

~~~
Zigurd
So the question is: Do we build an internet that is inherently private and
secure and blinds the censors in the despotic regimes, or are we too afraid of
that freedom now?

~~~
mpyne
We've been able to build that Internet for years. The people didn't want it.
They wanted GMail and Facebook and Flickr and Instagram and all the rest of
the magic of the Cloud.

We could possibly start shifting to federated models but honestly I've quite
enjoyed being able to easily talk with people from outside the U.S. and I
worry it would be that much more difficult in such a scheme. We'd essentially
all be going isolationist at the same time, building some digital Berlin
Walls.

What I think would be most feasible is bilateral "Internet privacy" treaties
that define what requirements are necessary to intercept traffic (which is
something that every nation _wants_ to do but none are able to easily ask
for). But at the same time I don't think European countries would be happy
with the idea that the NSA could even theoretically obtain their citizens'
info from cloud providers, and I don't think the USA would ever completely get
rid of FISA while they still have the KICK ME target painted on their backs.

I wish I had a good answer for this. :-/

------
mpyne
I was really digging the article until right near the end.

If you think all the NSA could do with extra information is add more "hay"
you're not thinking creatively enough.

For example, if you had a system that could scour through essentially infinite
amounts of hay and be able to spit out each brown needle that passed through
(think keyword filters), then definitely you'd want all the hay you could
find, and then even more hay. Of course, keyword filters are fairly easy to
avoid if you know they're there, so perhaps we'd call that a wash or even
negative overall, as all the false positives make it impossible to be
selective to the actual needles.

But there's another use for hay, quite brilliantly demonstrated in Iraq (or
maybe it was Afghanistan, or even both, I forget). The idea was that some
roads were more likely to have IEDs emplaced than others. So what the Army
eventually did was to blanket the area with drones and record along those
roads, trails leading to the roads from the nearby cities, etc.

When an IED inevitably exploded, they would _go back to the tapes_ , rewind
them until they found the bomber. Keep rewinding (tracking on different feeds
if necessary) all the way back to the staging point. Rewind further, all the
way back to the cell's meeting site, and the bomber's home.

Repeat this for enough IEDs and you have a picture of where the cell
assembles, where they stage out of, who they visit for support, etc.

And then you send teams in all at once to detain that cell, get more intel to
piece together what they can of the rest of the network.

The sad reality is that you cannot _prevent_ all terrorism from ever
happening, but if you can "play back" a person's interaction with foreign
agents you can use that to bootstrap intelligence seeding on that foreign
agents other contacts within the U.S. to root out that terror network before
they strike again.

Doing all of this requires a _lot_ of hay. Obviously there is a very large
risk to civil liberties in the wrong hands if that system is simply left as-
is, but it is at least possible to put procedural, legal, and technical
safeguards if the people decide that kind of system is worthwhile.

The other part of the article I was disappointed about was the mention of how
the _NSA_ (of all agencies) failed to prevent the Boston marathon bombing.
Responsibility for _domestic antiterrorism_ would properly fall with the FBI.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a permanent resident, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a
naturalized citizen. All indications that I've heard were that Tamerlan
essentially self-radicalized (possibly while abroad). Unless one thinks that
the NSA is able to read minds of people in Chechnya I'm not sure what the
author thinks could have been done.

Russia did warn the FBI (again, _not_ the NSA), that much is true. But in our
land of the rule of law, we don't arrest people _just_ because Putin said that
they are unreliables. It is unclear exactly how many people Russia have
'warned' the FBI about anyways, or what their criteria are for making those
warnings.

But either way, blaming the NSA for missing an attack by domestic terrorists
is almost completely missing the point of why we have the NSA, CIA, and FBI
all as different agencies. As far as I'm aware no one from any of those
agencies has ever claimed that systems as strong as PRISM or even 641A-type
arrangements would 100% prevent terrorism, just like our police don't claim to
be able to 100% prevent crime.

That doesn't mean that we should simply never try to prevent terrorist attacks
from occurring, just as it doesn't mean it's a good idea to fire all the
police. You have to evaluate the risk/reward and ROI of each program, keeping
in mind that some things are hard to measure in dollars.

For instance, keeping terrorism from becoming so prevalent that the people act
for the police state we all want to prevent is a pretty big motivator by
itself.

~~~
sjtgraham
Without answering whether the Iraq war is justified; justifiable tactics in a
theatre of war != justifiable tactics at home.

The amount of intrusion and disappearing civil liberties is far too high a
cost to pay to try prevent essentially unpreventable terrorist attacks.

I was surprised to read the other day that I have a better chance of dying
from cancer caused by airport body scanners (1 in 60,000,000) than I do from
dying in a terrorist attack (1 in 90,000,000). Lets "evaluate the risk/reward
and ROI" of that program!

~~~
mpyne
Where did 1/90,000,000 come from? Is that per-lifetime, per-person-yr,
something else?

Going just from 9/11 a rough estimate give 1:75000 U.S. citizens died, which
is significantly different.

But besides, you're looking only at body count... do you think that if major
terrorist events were happening with regularity that people wouldn't
eventually start to take matters into their own hands?

Even with _just 9 /11_ we in the U.S. saw a wave of anti-Muslim violence,
which never really fully stopped. Just ask the Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin.

So part of that risk evaluation needs to include the propensity of the people
themselves to lapse either to vigilantism, or to erect the police state
_themselves_ , in response to high-frequency terror attacks. The problem being
that such a thing will hopefully never have enough evidence to fully support
one assumption or the other.

~~~
aqme28
_Going just from 9 /11 a rough estimate give 1:75000 U.S. citizens died, which
is significantly different._

This is cherry-picking. 1 in 75000 died on a given day, but there have been
tens of thousands of days where no americans were killed.

~~~
mpyne
That's why I asked for the units, especially as your example is itself a
different form of cherry-picking. Most people aren't concerned about being
killed by terrorists on each individual day, they're rather not be killed on
_any_ of the days. If you include ten years' worth of days in your cohort then
you could conceivably kill all Americans in the nation on one bloody day and
still be able to say that it only happens 1 time out of 3650.

~~~
ekianjo
No, that's exactly what cherry-picking means, because you select the most
significant data out of a small, irrelevant sample.

If you want units you should compare risks at least on a yearly basis per
person, or on a lifetime basis per person. Then you will see how ridiculously
low are the figures for terrorism. But we all know terrorism is not about
killing many, it's about generating fear and inducing political effects. And
it's used precisely for that by both parties (the aggressor and the victim).

------
joepub
I agree Snowden or Greenwald or whoever has the classified stuff needs to tell
a compelling story, with a chronology.

Mr. Lee is absolutely spot on when he reminds us that the media and the White
House are stealing the narrative. We're now totally focused on a random
sysadmin trying to guess what makes him tick. Who cares? What about the
criminal activity by the US government he's laid bare for all to see?

I kept hearing all this talk of "free speech" and the 1st Amendment today
(thanks Carney), as it is supposed to exist in other countries, even when they
lack anything like a US Constitution... good luck with that, and that
Snowden's choice of destination is somehow symbolic of his motives. Maybe he's
just trying to stay out of jail. Is that so hard to understand?

So I guess we're forgetting all about the 4th Amendment, which is the whole
reason he's putting his life on the line in the first place. We need more
details from those classified docs, we need a narrative and we need to bring
the focus back to mass scale pen registers and warrantless searches. Snowden's
case is boring. He's guilty. He committed a felony by disseminating redacted
classified material to expose illegality on a much larger scale. Most
Americans would be too frightened to do this. He's not the usual. Get over it.

On the other hand, the case of the US government, their conduct and whether it
breaks US laws or the spirit of US law, is far more interesting.

Stop worrying about the rights of people in other countries and start worrying
about the rights of Americans, who are extremely lucky to have an amazing
Constitution, which used to be a model and the envy of the world.

------
brvs
This reads like an essay from a freshman poli-sci class. The only unique thing
about this post is the lame humblebrag or whatever about the author playing
videogames with Snowden. But of course it's besides the point. It's so
irrelevant that it has to go in the headline and link title.

A software dev speaking outside of his area of expertise to amplify the echo
chamber while getting hits for his blog isn't enriching the debate.

~~~
brvs
Not that my own comment here is helping anything. I'm just weirded out by the
fact that people aren't being critical of these empty echo-chamber posts that
keep popping up. They make this place feel like it's just reddit's politics
section being paraphrased by web developers trying to self-promote.

------
icpmacdo
"I have learned that people decide what they think based upon narratives. A
good story always has better results than merely listing out facts. Every good
narrative has both characters and a plot."

I was listening to a podcast the other day where one of the people said that
if people were solely interested in facts the phone book would be the most
interesting book in the world.

~~~
Qantourisc
Sorry, the phone book contains data (witch should also be facts), but I'd
consider it more data, then facts.

~~~
corin_
Is "fact" not in some cases a synonym of "data"?

"Qantourisc; 144" might be read as data while "Qantourisc registered on HN 144
days ago" might be read as a fact.

------
jmtame
I personally won't be happy until I see all fiber splitters installed by the
NSA completely removed (such as the one at 611 Folsom Street in San
Francisco). Move it back to San Luis Obispo.

I liked the reference to The Spy Factory
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyoeOM22WCc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyoeOM22WCc))
in this article, and I find it interesting that the NSA had been surveilling
Al Qaeda for 3 years leading up to 9/11, and had more than enough data
gathered on them. They were taking photographers and following two key
hijackers--that's like the upper limit of surveillance, and they hit it. The
mistake was not that they needed more, it was that they intentionally did not
communicate any of those details to the FBI or CIA once two key hijackers were
in the U.S. Fix the communication, not the collection.

------
immigrantsheep
I see a lot of articles about who is or isn't Snowden, what he did, where he
was and where he'll go. But I don't see anything about the NSA and what's
going to change with PRISM. A lot of noise about him just to hide the fact
that in the end nothing will really change?

------
d23
> I Knew Snowden. And He’s Not The Story

And yet this article seems to add nothing new to the discussion other than
some nice anecdotes about how Snowden played video games and was an everyday
person like us. Not much substance here.

------
ttflee
I recalled the dialogue from the film The Watchmen.

> The Comedian: What happened to the American Dream? It came true! You're
> looking at it!

------
runn1ng
I am sorry, I know that it's not that important, but I just find Where Is
Snowden Adventures so _exciting to watch_. It's like reading an adventure
novel, only in real time, real life and with larger-than-life characters like
Assange and that NSA general.

------
unknownian
Somewhat irrelevant but anyone else think Medium's URLs are really ugly? Why
can't you just get a plain pretty subdomain? I'd use it if it were that.

~~~
baby
Are you working for the government?

