I have very little sympathy for his monetary plight. He made his bed, let him sleep in it.
Or rather, when your giant paycheck comes from the government, maybe torquing off that government in the most flamboyant way possible isn't the best of ideas.
I'm very disappointed with people that share your attitude. He gave up a lot to disclose unethical (and downright illegal) behaviour - for the betterment of society, knowing full-well the consequences. He also explicitly stated that this was not about him - so your flamboyant statements are WAY off the mark.
Here's the tip: research a topic before posting misinformation, unless you endorse breaching the 4th amendment, and lies all the way from Obama down.
But ... i'm heartened that very few people share your view.
If he wanted to do the right thing, he should have gone to his Congressman, or the oversight arm of the NSA (it does exist, regardless of how inefficient it seems to be).
I'm stuck in the odd position of thinking both Snowden and the government are wrong, which seems to piss both sets of hardliners off. I'm not arguing that the NSA is right to slurp our data, and I'm not trying to defend that - I think it's reprehensible. However, I also think that Snowden did not exhaust all his legal options before deciding to play secret agent and scarper off to Hong Kong. I think if it truly wasn't about him, he wouldn't have gone to the press first thing. If he'd been shutdown after going through those channels? Sure, leak everything. He chose instead to play the hero.
So true. The comments section on time.com almost got me a heart attack. Thought that HN would not be infected with that breed of ignorant nationalistic sheeps.. Thank you for restoring my faith
Yeah you are right. There is no doubt that revealing the truth is a disobedient act and must be severely punished in order to restore peace and public blindness. Now watch TV and go to sleep and feed the economy, will ya?
It's not like you're making an argument, you just call what some would consider doing the public a service "torquing off that government in the most flamboyant way possible". If you're gonna dissent, argue... but don't be silly, and then pretend the reaction to that sillyness is an argument ;)
The opposite argument to saying he did the moral thing is to say he did the immoral thing, not to say "serves him right for upsetting the people paying his salary"
I would argue other wise, on two counts. What I said was that I have no sympathy for him biting the hand that feeds.
Second, I think that the situation has been vastly over complicated by attempts to colour matters as some sort of grand moral crusade. Snowden is not a white knight, nor is he a traitor. He's a man who did what he thought was right. I disagree with his methods, and think that his actions (leaking to journalists rather than going through the appropriate oversight channels (or even just dropping a USB drive off at his Congressman's office, with a break down of what it all means)) negates any sort of 'moral right' that the community has been ascribing to Snowden.
The moral crusade is against the NSA, not for Snowden. There's a distinct difference between the two.
Sorry, the comment you're replying to makes an actual argument. Your reply of "wow, you're a dick" does not.
I find no objection that dead_phish should express this view if that's how he feels. It is a valid viewpoint even if it is not shared. I also commend him for expressing it in a community like HN which, let's be honest, does not tolerate dissenting views of Snowden.
It's kind of sad that his dissenting view is downvoted and your name-calling is not.
Thank you. I was a little disturbed by how quickly this turned to "you're an ass for not thinking this way." I expected disagreement, but not, well, so much rage.
Japan's engineering prowess - very distinct from any sort of design prowess. Look at the classic example of Honda and Toyota, two great engineering companies who succeeded in spite of their design. The early Toyotas were derided as ugly little box cars, and their only redeeming value was that they were cheap and well engineered.
How did you incorporate data from Washington DC into this? I can almost guarantee that the reason Maryland has such a high rate on the HIV/AIDS chart is because of the District, and its outlying areas (Prince George's County, Anacostia, etc.)
I didn't include DC data. It does exist if you reference the data PDF put out by the CDC.
I originally had included DC but it's a major outlier since it's almost entirely urban. It's also not a state and doesn't visualize well because of its size, so it's not in the csv I used.
If you go back through his archives (which took more time than I thought it would) you find a FAQ post about an essay concerning alleged sexual discrimination in his wife's tenure hearing [1] (it's referenced here [2]). Both claim to have links to the original article, but they're dead.
EDIT:
Concretely? It seems like his wife was up for tenure and was denied it on account of what the author claims was sexism, based on past actions of the administrators in his department.
I was mostly on board with this, until I saw Crypto-Cat front and center on their 'new projects' page. If anything, it's a step backwards for cryptography. Saying that you're secure and can be trusted, when the underlying model is broken is not a good way to promote 'modern cypherpunk'-ism.
I think there's a heavy dose of self-absorption going on here.
Cryptocat is a little better than it used to be, thanks to the developers dropping most of their homebrew crypto and implementing a version of the OTR protocol. Apparently they've even finally implemented authentication using SMP challenges, which was a major usability issue compared to traditional OTR clients. Until very recently, the only way to be sure someone wasn't running a man in the middle attack was to manually compare key hashes over an authenticated channel (and you had to do this every session at one point). The OTR developers had already discovered years earlier that this was enough of a pain that most people didn't bother and developed a more user-friendly alternative, but sadly it involved some fairly exotic crypto that the Cryptocat developers took an age to implement.
Or rather, when your giant paycheck comes from the government, maybe torquing off that government in the most flamboyant way possible isn't the best of ideas.