I don't think that's much of a revelation. Every time national security information falls into the hands of a news org, the government will ask them not to publish it. Sometimes appealing to them on civic grounds that it will weaken security or probably threatening legal action. The NY Times famously sat on the warrantless wiretapping story for nearly a year because they were lead to believe it could compromise ongoing investigations. Although it was never proven true, the Washington Times was accused of helping Osama bin Laden by revealing that US intelligence could track his satellite phone. In the US or UK media orgs generally has very little to fear in terms of actual punishment, but they do have to make a very real calculus over whether they're serving the public interest.
>In the US or UK media orgs generally has very little to fear in terms of actual punishment, but they do have to make a very real calculus over whether they're serving the public interest.
not true. media organizations that do not report in accordance with and to the governments favour may lose preferential access to press conferences as retaliation. their parent companies, viacom, CBS, and Warner for example, may lose the cooperation of the government on their next latest action film which may deny them access to state parks or military equipment and bases for filming and props. When you publish something the government doesnt like, they can also just straight up seize your profits from that material as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/us-government-can-seize-prof...
television news in the united states is under no objective requirement to serve the public interest in the 21st century. the news was originally provided as part of a service to the mandate from the FCC that license holders contribute to the public good, but modern news is partisan, divisive, appeals extensively to emotion, and uses manipulative scare tactics to drive viewership and ratings with a combination of conjecture and talk shows.
I didn't say "television news" I said "reputable media". And no, none of them have any legal obligation whatsoever to do anything really (aside from slander/libel). What they do and don't publish is weighed against their mission and their reputation. If the mission is "spread outrage and generate ad revenue" they'll publish whatever sounds sexy. I (full disclosure) work for a non-profit newsroom that has a genuine mission to serve public interest and if we were ever perceived not to be, we'd be abandoned by our donors and disappear. But even orgs that have genuine principles guiding them can still make mistakes.
You never said "reputable media" you said "news organizations". Specifically you said that news organizations have some kind of real calculus about the public interest when deciding whether to publish a story and what OP is saying is that said calculus is fairly superficial compared to the very real calculus of losing out on profits due to lack of access.
> what OP is saying is that said calculus is fairly superficial compared to the very real calculus of losing out on profits due to lack of access.
The readers are an important part of that calculus. How would your readers react when they know that information have been hidden? Some newspapers have readers that will feel betrayed and lose interest in the news outlet, others have more sectarian readers that do not care about such high quality news as long as it follows some ideological line. Lack of access is important, but readers are way more important.
Yes, paying customers and advertisers are a very important part of that calculus, I agree. We know from the work done by Soley and Craig [1] that newspapers will refrain from publishing unflattering stories that could jeopardize major sponsorships. None of this changes the principle argument that the driving calculus for major news organizations is profit driven instead of driven by public interest.
There are real cases where this is true and it's the responsibility of a news organization to weigh the public good against the consequences of sharing information and being very selective about what secrets to publish.
You should not want a news organization to err on either extreme by publishing literally everything they get their hands on (Wikileaks) or acting as a de facto arm of the state (state media outlet of choice).
I would argue that neither extreme count as journalists.
>I don't think that's much of a revelation.
Absolutely, they basically wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't ask. Asking is a lot different than many other tactics.
> very real calculus over whether they're serving the public interest.
I would reformulate that so that security agencies have to do that calculus too and it is suspected that they do often calculate wrongly.
There is not a single example contrary to more information available to the public. There can be exceptions for immediate cases, but if you rely on information to stay hidden from the public for an extended period of time, it is a fault in your security architecture.
The word national security used to mean protecting a country just invaded, then moved to troops on the border looking like they'll invade. Now you've stretched it to the government doing mass surveillance on its citizens (and storing it forever). During COINTELPRO, Hoover and his secret political police in the FBI spied on and worked to anonymously disrupt feminist groups and other political organizations, and this is just a continuation of that - set up in secret incidentally. I don't see how some elite trying to set up a police state to exert political control has anything to do with national security. Luckily the FBI raided Trump recently, so Republican wariness may have them go back to that old idea of a Republican secretary of state that "gentlemen do not read each others' mail".
Of course and that’s how we get our civil rights eroded. Revolving door between security apparatus and news agency. Why do the media have fifth amendment protection then I may ask.
It is pretty ironic the other nations in the five eyes were outraged at contractors. The UK at least certainly does not have a leg to stand on: there are plenty of defence contractors that routinely work with and for GCHQ, and big government contractors are just as much a part of the UK industry as they are the US.
I wish we could have a honest discussions about the pro and cons of the panopticon the internet has become.
Not just the usual "Might makes right" glue moral flaws to the person putting questions to power oppossed by fierce "liberty at all cost aka anarchism".
It seems pretty obvious that the individual can not be trusted with the power modern technology hands to it, but then again, i find the three letter agencies to be entrusted with surveilance of the masses, to be the most useless and untrustworthy stewart of the public imagineable.
It seems pretty obvious that the individual can not be trusted with the power modern technology hands to it
Hard disagree. Modern technology is mishandled most intensely by large organizations. When it's misused by individuals it's usually based on information freely given. An individual might send your employer an insensitive tweet you made ten years ago but an organization can do anything from unmasking an anonymous product review for the purpose of suing you to operating a massive surveillance state to fuel a "social credit" system.
I think you are just making a joke, which is fine, but I would reassert the point I think the OP was making that there is a qualitative difference in the nature of the abuses committed by individuals and firms.
I’m not sure individuals -or- organizations can be fully trusted. It’s one reason for the 4th amendment, or the requirements for auditing of companies by independent accounting firms, or all sorts of laws restricting individuals, organizations and even governments in one way or another.
Unfortunately with the various moral panics going on, folks who lean towards the middle / nuanced balanced thoughts are more afraid and reluctant to put their thoughts out there. It just isn't worth the brain-width or having potential people yell at you for toeing various party lines. The death of questioning is imo one of the more disheartening things in the last 5-10 years.
To your last point, I personally skew towards being deeply suspicious of institutional power being able to have more tools to further leverage the tilt against the individual, but you're also not wrong with individuals being deeply flawed beings too.
As an anarchist, I wish we could have conversations on any topic about something other than two contrived polar opposite positions. Life is not neat dichotomies. People are just trained to take a simpleton's view of things.
No group of individuals can be trusted more than the individual. Groups of individuals who claim the right to enforce their will on other individuals by means of violence (e.g. governments) can be trusted least of all.
I think the panopticon is unavoidable (I'll expand below) so the question is how to harness it to get a humane techno-totalitarian system?
People have pointed out that "humane totalitarian" is an oxymoron, and I agree, but I think it's the challenge we face.
It seems to me that we can and should ensure that the people in power are themselves subject to the panopticon. Literally politicians should be 24/7 live streaming their lives. (This is in the context where we are all live-streaming 24/7 whether we want to or not, which is pretty much the case today at least in high-tech nations.) Police badges should be integrated with cameras, the badge IS the camera, the camera IS the badge, and if the camera is off the officer is off-duty.
Thoughts?
- - - -
I think the panopticon is unavoidable due to technological and economic considerations. The technology is only getting smaller, cheaper, lower-power, etc. and it's already ubiquitous. (See "sensing for WiFi if you really want to freak out!) Our phones already monitor and report our location in near realtime. Smart cars and traffic systems are a de facto surveillance system even for people who don't carry phones. The economic benefits are inarguable, and only going to get better.
And really, if you could trade your privacy for an end to almost all crime, isn't that worth it? Considering that you wouldn't be alone, that everyone else's privacy is gone too, it's not so bad?
> It seems to me that we can and should ensure that the people in power are themselves subject to the panopticon. Literally politicians should be 24/7 live streaming their lives.
This all sounds equally as feasible as simply rolling back the surveillance in the first place. The whole point of these systems is to subject the hoi polloi to constant and intrusive surveillance as a counterinsurgency tactic. Why in the world would they agree to do that to themselves as well?
I'm saying that the economics will drive adoption regardless of political structures. The folks in power will be surveilled too, whether they like it or not (if nothing else they have to surveil each other!) The more power you have, the more people study you.
The "constant and intrusive surveillance as a counterinsurgency tactic" is a side-effect. And frankly, we should be so lucky that it works (when it works.) I personally think the time for deciding things by violence-- any violence --has passed.
In re: political power, we'll see how it plays out in different systems. In China the question is, Will CCP members be subject to the Social Credit System?
In democracies we should be able to reshape our systems to take advantage of modern technology to make boring, functioning governing bodies that "just work", but we have to get from here to there.
Police are, in theory, already subject to the same physical tracking by automatic license plate readers as the rest of the population. But, police are able to get a pass from other cops when they employ counter-measures to defeat the tracking, so the reality is that the tracking does not apply to them. E.g., cops foiling automatic license plate readers[1] using methods that would cause non-police to be ticketed.
And, if somehow you manage to prevent abuse like the above, laws will be passed that grant exceptions for the powerful and their enforcers[2][3]. Many of the existing laws in this category recognize that privacy is essential for personal security and safety-- but only grant that security and safety to the privileged few.
We need to enshrine a strong right to privacy in law-- attacking surveillance head on (in the US, this means a constitutional amendment, or it will be [more] vulnerable to laws/courts granting exceptions). While sympathetic, I don't think that trying to reign in surveillance through making it equitable (on paper), are going to succeed.
> ... i find the three letter agencies to be entrusted with surveilance of the masses, to be the most useless and untrustworthy stewart of the public imagineable
What makes you think so? For example, the German government prevented a number of terror attacks by monitoring electronic chat and mail exchange.
The problem is that every democratic government is ultimately based on the idea to give some people enough power so they can govern, but not so much that they cannot be removed from power again.
That balance is not something that would remain uninfluenced by giving the executive the power to surveil the population that brings a government into power.
There's a tweet from him on February 11th that says the media's gross for pushing for a war. Beyond that, all he does is suggest we should be demanding more evidence for claims of an impending war that Biden and the intelligence community were pushing. He's even talked about the invasion as recently in June in a way that suggests he doesn't think it's invented[1] by media.
Do you actually have a specific example of Snowden saying that "the Russian Invasion of Ukraine was invented by the American media"?
That is because he deleted a lot of his tweets. For example
> Now that the promised invasion has failed to materialize, maybe we could take another look at the story that was breaking when the White House was suddenly overcome with a mysterious and inexplicable desire to change the news cycle: [1]
> So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3AM, I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility. [2]
edit: browsing archive.org for deleted tweets isn't a great experience, anyone know of a an easier way?
He went very quiet after that, and after a tweetstorm to the effect of "are you even alive" he eventually posted quite testily that he'd got it wrong and was now proceeding to shut the hell up: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1498049577131208705
A more thorough mea culpa would certainly have been nice, but the man was clearly quite rattled that his own "journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns". It's hard to appreciate what pressures he might be under.
Most of the revelations are not at all about domestic spying and instead revealed details about doing what the NSA is chartered to do: international spying.
You can consider it immoral that the NSA monitored the communications of Angela Merkel or the italian ministry of defense, but that isn't whistle-blowing. It's the reason that the NSA exists.
> You can consider it immoral that the NSA monitored the communications of Angela Merkel or the italian ministry of defense, but that isn't whistle-blowing. It's the reason that the NSA exists.
It is definitely whisteblowing to reveal that a country has been secretely wiretapping the communications of its (supposed) allies – one can blow the whistle on things which are "legal" especially when their legality has been surreptitiously pushed through the back door.
The US and its allies did that damage to themselves by doing the things detailed in Snowden's leaks. Snowden is not a traitor because he swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution, and he did just that by leaking. If anyone is a traitor, it's the people who gave and followed unconstitutional orders.
> - Snowden did enormous damage to US and allies with his indiscriminate distribution of classified information
That would be something like "telling the police about your abusive husband hurts your family". Yes, it did hurt intelligence agencies and their beneficiaries. That is not the same as "the US". The victims of the indiscriminate surveillance were largely American and are much more plentiful than the perpetrators.
He also should have had some help from the news agency in them asking him for his opinion and using some of their own judgment about which parts of it to publishin case he accidentally shared anything in such a large group of documents. That probably also happened.
I think it's telling that multiple administrations have failed to come forward and promise him a fair trial, let alone any sort of deal, commutation, or pardon.
