This, among a few other nuggets of which I was unaware, are described in Snowden’s book Permanent Record (although briefly, it’s a biography first and foremost) which I enjoyed.
Given the extreme asshattery history of Assange, it seems just as probable that he was mostly trying to get some attention with guesses and then later claimed that it was a deliberate disinformation campaign.
Unless you are quite rich and powerful, saying that what Assange has done is mostly "asshattery" is dishonest, yes he has had flukes but consider the mental state of someone being prosecuted and hunted by the most powerful and corrupt people in our planet, mostly what Assange has done s good and denying and calling him an asshat is dishonest and shows a clear bias on your part
We don't expect public figures to be humans anymore. You're never allowed to make mistakes and some video of you from 2-yrs ago in college can be a reputation killer.
This is a very irrational mindset and we'd have no great minds of history because they were immature at a young age.
People constantly grow, learn, and improve themselves. They also make mistakes or act emotionally.
I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.
> I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.
It has nothing to do with flawless. Nobody is flawless. Even if they were, half the things people are now being condemned for aren't even rooted in fact.
You can't attack someone like Assange for revealing official misconduct. That's against the rules, and unsympathetic. But you can attack him for <something else>. The something else is irrelevant. It's only the proffered reason for the attack, not the real one.
Your defense seems to boil down to asshattery being understandable when one is persecuted by national security organisations.
That would be a valid defense of Assange -- if the asshattery had come after the persecution. But from all I've read about him, it was the other way around. He has always been a humongous asshat.
No, colluding with the GRU to create false documents interfering with the US Presidential election, resulting in the disaster that was Trump's election can not, in any sense, be called 'good'.
Yes, that is very bad. It also never happened. There are only vague claims from the US intelligence services to this effect, which mean less than nothing.
this has never been proven. but it was the final blow to his public image after the rape charges. from then on most intel / infosec people who still remained partial moved on to condemning him.
Even if he had collaborated would it matter? what it proves is that you can not do OSINT and be "independant/neutral". bellingcat and all other self-proclaimed citizen journalists know it too. the message here is "if you stand up against the US and hang out in a FVEY country you're dead".
collaborating with enemies of US (no matter if DPRK, Iran or whoever) would be justified considering the nature of the material which was exposed. but doing so without thinking about his location and safety is the most "I can fix society because I'm a hacker" thing I've ever seen. it is a small crime though in comparison to the shit the US has gotten away and still does so until today. e.g. Gitmo and black sites are still operating, drones still kill civilians, their war on terror will go unpunished, people are still being brainwashed into believing "US army good", the CIA is still executing people overseas the same way as the FSB, while they shout "terror" or talk a big game about "law and justice" their crimes can't be held accountable in the ICC: pot. kettle. black.
Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power. A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last.
In terms of your broader point, something about restricting the authority of a law-giving entity via the law seems paradoxical. An example of this paradox is the fact that it's difficult to have standing to sue the government over an illegal spying program that is classified.
The best we seem to be able to do is the future-government holding the past-government accountable.
> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power
Power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission, which radiates out. When some people voluntarily submit to the putative leadership, including in its request to back up the leaders orders with force when necessary, to report violations, etc., it increases the inclination of other people of others to submit without force being directly applied, and so on.
This is a semantic argument. I agree that power flows from consensus. When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power. But the word power is often used colloquially to mean those things: coercion, force, violence, and that's how I was using it.
> When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power
“Power”, at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish; idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
First you said "power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission". Then you said "'power', at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish".
These are not commensurate statements. If submission is voluntary, you aren't "getting people" to do anything...they're doing it voluntarily. Anyway, from what you write, it's clear you don't believe that anything is voluntary.
> Idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
Power is the possession of a group of people rooted in their ability to act in concert (i.e. their voluntary submission or assent to something). "Persuasion," moral or immoral, rational or irrational, doesn't come into it. And power is never the possession of a leader or a party or anything like that. You mistake power for authority, coercive force, and violence.
For you, all political categories run together in a category you call "power". This view does not acknowledge the fact that people can voluntarily choose to act together. Everything for you is about "persuasion," "threat of violence," "influence," and so on. As I said, you don't believe that anything is voluntary. This is a political philosophy that cannot make meaningful distinctions between political things.
Those are all forms or uses of power. Where English uses one word, "power," the French use two, puissance and pouvoir, referring to "strength/energy" and "influence/control" respectively (and very roughly translated).
The problem is that certain of our laws are written in a way that makes them hard to enforce, especially when the people breaking those laws are part of the government. Often the problem is that the only people with the authority to charge someone with a crime are specific people in a specific government organization. If those are the people breaking laws, there may literally be no outside party with the legal authority to charge them with the crime they've done. That can be changed, it just takes a lot of work and understanding. People generally don't have a very good understanding of the law, and part of the reason is that law is pretty much intentionally complex and obfuscated.
> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power.
Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.
The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.
If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines.
This isn't a personal philosophy as much as it is a statement of truth: it's really expensive to enforce laws.
>The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― A.I. Solzhenitsyn
>the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them.
a) technology exists where you can just record license plates and send speeding tickets automatically - which is a nice prallel for mass surveilance tech - it makes large scale enforcement much cheaper
b) you don't really need to enforce on everyone, a high deterrant + random enforcement creates strong incentives against doing something (ie. making examples)
The state is definitely capable of detecting every single speeder and sending them a ticket. You just need some smart centralization, wire traffic cameras and doppler radars on every corner, program tracking algorithms and decode the license plates to match them with the owner and record a fine.
Sometimes it does, which provides an interesting case study that proves slibhb's point -- "A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last."
One example is a portion of interstate near the St. Louis airport that runs through St. Ann, MO. (right next to Ferguson, MO), which resulted in changes to state law [1].
Many other munis in that region -- most notably Ferguson -- went far beyond strips of interstate and handed out fines as abundantly as possible, enforcing every law with an iron fist. And then the whole area exploded into chaos, reverberating out of the local community and, over a period of years, boiled over in dozens of communities.
It may have been a bit overstated, but the core point is solid.
One of the main reasons the war on drugs failed is a lack of voluntary submission. Pure enforcement, even with the progressive strengthing of enforcement powers, was simply unable to stop drugs being widely available in the USA.
Our society runs on trust and voluntary submission to the rule of law. If either of those went away in a signifant fashion, the our legal system and society in general would cease to function in it's current form.
Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities.
> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I'm not sure I'd accept the family's statement at face value. In fact that's the statement I'd expect out of them completely orthogonally to it's veracity.
Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.
On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.
Interesting, would you mind to point to one of such edit you mention? I cannot see to what you refer. I see removal of newsmax URL few times, however that linked article is not supporting of Harper's original as I read. Perhaps I am not viewing enough backwards in history.
I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.
You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.
"voluntary submission" sounds like people that walk around claiming to be a sovereign citizen thereby exempt from "laws". i always find it funny that the ones screaming this the loudest are usually in the midst of some sort of legal troubles.
> This isn't true, look at for example the nineteenth amendment (men giving up power).
That wasn’t giving up power, it was trying to regain power by no longer claiming power through the abstraction of law that there was insufficient support to practically exercise and which claiming, as a result, merely diminished the general power of the State, because it reinforced in the public eye the gulf between law and power, reducing willingness to defer t9 the former in general.
Not everyone + you is "we". Lots of people are hurt by bad laws; your appreciation for your government's laws tends to correlate to how much money or clout you have. Mainly because it allows you to ignore them.
Parent post isn’t arguing against the existence of laws. They’re illustrating that laws have limits and can be overcome by entities that wield enough power.
Look at the post above yours. Yes, some want to make the case that laws on the whole are essentially oppressive. Whether of not foucault made that case precisely, or whatever, is totally irrelevant if it’s what most people actual mean, viz that laws are the tools by which the powerless are oppressed.
The US government was hacking Google by tapping cables between its data centers with direct access to Google accounts. The US government was paying tech companies for data on their customers. The US government had Verizon turn over phone records on millions of their customers daily. The US government used other countries spy agencies to spy on US citizens.
Law is enforced via power. When it meets a greater power then the law is contravened.
Look at the US and how it broke international law to force a plane down that it thought had Snowden.