I wasn't aware society had agreed that war journalism or photojournalism should be neutered.
Maybe I challenge the premise of the article in the sense that... Yeah. No shit?
Honestly... These days I'm so emotionally exhausted that I just see an article like this as a way to get a good by line. Shut up we know kids are being blown up.
Right now I just want to eat maple syrup greek yogurt and listen to pop music while I browse HN. I just can't with the dead kids 24/7 any more.
Same here. I know the kids are dying, some of my closest friends share pictures every day and then denounce everyone who unfollows them for being against their existence. I'm sorry. What do all the journalists and activists want me to do? Odds are I've already done it. Please stop telling me about it, I know. I'm not turning away because I don't care about the kids, I'm turning away because the more we keep this up the less I'm able to care about anything. I just need a break but they make you feel like shit for it. And maybe I should feel like shit for choosing to ignore suffering because I can't keep looking idk. I'm just so tired.
In any case, I thought the place with articles about the intricacies of pointers in C++ would be safe from the politics and dead children. Clearly I was wrong.
This article, had you read it, underscores the “yous” in the world who “know,” but make excuses about emotional exhaustion to take a pass on confronting the actual horror of it. If you really “knew”, you’d want everyone to stand up and demand it stop.
There are only so many hills one can afford to die on before hitting emotional burnout. It's not an "excuse" for the parent, it's simply an acknowledgement of the emotional reality.
This is not particularly well written or enlightening. It’s almost ChatGPT-esque in its wandering tone and flowery prose. Makes the post-script chatGPT section even more strange.
Flagging a post to prevent review from more is considered peer review now? Removal of posts about censorship is a pattern now, similar to how GPTs have been aligned to prevent portrayal of censorship in a negative light.
Journalistic integrity balancing with the national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated. I am comfortable trusting the NYT to do their job.
I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.
The NYT has a long history of being pro-war. People who dislike US using military force to enforce global hegemony would probably disagree with many of the editorial choices they are making behind closed doors.
The Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the US nuclear triad mean that there is nothing in those documents that could pose any significant threat to US national security.
The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state with top-notch intelligence services can only do so much to prevent attacks. I think that adding more and more surveillance has diminishing returns in preventing attacks, meanwhile its existence is a threat to free society both directly, in that it could theoretically be used against political dissidents, and indirectly, in that it encourages a culture of self-censorship that is antithetical to political freedom.
If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
> there is nothing in those documents that could pose any significant threat to US national security.
You are saying that because if anyone attacks us with conventional forces we will nuke them/invade them then we have no nation security interest concerning anything in classified documents compiled by our espionage services?
Is this a correct interpretation and if so do you stand by it? If not can you please clarify what you meant?
Revealing what is in those documents might threaten US power projection in the world, but it would not threaten US national security in any significant way. That is, it might hurt the US' ability to shape the world as it desires, but it would not make the US significantly more vulnerable to being attacked because no matter how much people know about the NSA's activities, groups that want to attack the US would still be confronted by the US' overwhelming national security strengths of being surrounded by huge oceans, having a nuclear deterrent, and also having the world's most powerful conventional military.
I can imagine there being classified documents that pose an actual significant national security risk. Perhaps some details about how nuclear plants are secured, or the details of the mechanisms by which authorization to fire nuclear missiles is given. Stuff like that. But there should be nothing like that in the NSA documents. Maybe there is something in there that would tip people off about the NSA's encryption-cracking capabilities. But no system that is actually critical for national security should be vulnerable to such information being revealed. And if there is some system that is vulnerable because of it, more surveillance is not the answer anyway.
> Perhaps some details about how nuclear plants are secured, or the details of the mechanisms by which authorization to fire nuclear missiles is given. Stuff like that. But there should be nothing like that in the NSA documents.
You are wildly incorrect. NSA does lots to help secure the homeland.
Whether or not that justifies mass surveillance is a different question. I don’t think so. The NSA is a really, really big place. You could work there for a lifetime and not engage in illegal surveillance. I think getting rid of the bad parts shouldn’t require us to get rid of the good as well.
Yep, I agree with that last sentence. The only thing on that list that I think has to do with a significant national security threat is the nuclear command and control systems part. And we could have that without the mass surveillance.
One of the big Snowden revelations was that NSA can literally do whatever they want without needing any kind of government or public approval. There is zero transparency and accountability.
I know you’re being facetious when you say “literally whatever they want” but that’s not true even in jest. Congress approves their budget, they have to justify it like every other part of the government. I think the NSA should have less power and more accountability, but they’re not dictators.
Of course it's true. Most of congress doesn't even have security clearance to know what exactly the NSA is doing, and the ones that do technically have the clearance can really only questions things they are already aware of - there is no onus on the NSA to report anything themselves. Just look at the response by congress and the whitehouse to the Snowden leaks - they all claimed to be completely unaware of what was going on. If you actually read Snowden's book and leaks you will see very clearly that the NSA can launch a program that is classified from congress, that they literally do not need to report on to anyone including the president.
> national security interests of the most powerful nation on the planet is complicated
It's actually the opposite
National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others.
The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stupidity or malice.
So we should actually be publishing almost everything from US/Russia/China because they often ruin millions of lives, but in practice ofcourse we do the opposite.
You're basically just saying that you're okay with CIA/NSA doing whatever they want and manipulating public opinion however they want without any accountability whatsoever.
Just like they did in 2003 with WMDs in Iraq?
Or when they said that Trump colluded with the Russians and that's why he got elected?
At least the journalists who said Saddam had WMDs didn't get a Pulitzer Prize, like those reporting on Russiagate did back in 2018.
https://nypost.com/2022/02/20/the-absurd-russiagate-pulitzer...
Meanwhile NYPost breaks the Hunter Biden Laptop story and gets banned from every major social media and tech site for saying the truth, while NYT and Washington Post get Pulitzer Prizes for telling lies.
> Meanwhile NYPost breaks the Hunter Biden Laptop story and gets banned from every major social media and tech site for saying the truth, while NYT and Washington Post get Pulitzer Prizes for telling lies
"Truth" and "lies" mean something different than "things that emotionally resonate with me based on my a-priori beliefs" and "things that make me angry". It's weird that it's so easy for us humans to forget that. Or perhaps it's "things the correct people say" vs. "things those other people say"? Not sure which definitions you're using here.
This topic is breaking my soul. So much suffering and death. Why?
Ungh. I need to watch Firefly and drink.