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Why is it that only the US, but not china, russia, U.K, germany, etc., out of all the strong countries, have these leaks? U.S needs to take a good look at itsel

Why is it that only the US, but not china, russia, U.K, germany, etc., out of all the strong countries, have these leaks? U.S needs to take a good look at itself and find the reason that their intelligence organizations are like a leaky bucket. It seems as if americans don't care and don't even see it as a bad thing when traitors sabotage entire organizations years of work. In any other sane country, the outrage against such leakers would be far greater than the outrage against the government for doing its job. If a person was as a big traitor as snowden in my country, you'd see his whole family and friends deny him, he would think twice before doing it not only because of the chance of getting caught and going to jail, but from the actual embarassment and shame from all the people close to him. Yet look at snowden, acting like he's some hero. Look at all the other leakers. They are barely ashamed. Your society hates the government so much you're turning traitors into heroes. Your security screening process is probably failing hard with so many leaks. How can the US allies trust it when everything leaks one way or the other. Leaking should be considered such a horrible treason the only the most psychopathic person would do it, and the screening should screen those out. But when society views leakers as heroes, and even the president freely leaks other countries intelligence to russia, followed by even more leaks than what he actually said, when it's justified as long as 1 in the 1000 documents they leaked shows some government wrongdoing (and statistically this will ALWAYS happen), they aren't traitors they are heroes. Then you don't need be a huge psychopath to betray your country. You just need some nudge in the 'right' direction. If any of you think the right approach is to have no secrets (a.k.a. no vulnerabilities. Today it's vulnerabilities, tommorow it's CIA agents identities), you're naive. If you think your enemies will be as righteous as you, you are naive. If you think that if you disclose all vulnerabilities, nobody will have them, you are naive because russia and china will find their own different vulnerabilities.

swiley 9y ago
The USG has traditionally not kept secrets from the populous (or not for very long.) The idea that they are not only keeping secrets but that these secrets are evidence of corruption and violation of our trust means that it is, in fact, a good thing they where leaked.
- bronzeage 9y ago
  This is exactly what I'm talking about. Look at you. You think your government is bad? Look at russia. Look at china. You have the privilege of being in one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there, yet you hate the country and its government more than the people in worse countries. A russian civilian has 10 times more reasons than you to hate the government. It's a fact. But he's also much more loyal to his country than you. Corruption or not, he won't hurt his country as much as your leaks are doing right now. The only reasonable conclusion is that it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the government, and everything to do with the loyalty of its people.
  - corndoge 9y ago
    There's always room to improve. Leaks exposing corruption and to a lesser extent critical software vulnerabilities are a good thing. I don't think anyone would argue that exposing the identity of, for example, undercover agents is a good thing. As another commenter said, you seem to lack color vision and only see black and white. Also, patriotism as a justification for not exposing a corrupt government is a load of shit.
    - bronzeage 9y ago
      Did any leakers care to leak only the information relevant to the corruption? No. I do have color vision. I see the most blackish grey. And so should you. Yet you all cling to that little white spot in the middle of all the blackness, and using it to justify everything. You're sending a very clear message to all would-be traitors: as long you throw us a little bone of government wrongdoing, you're wellcome to burn the whole house down. You think this makes any sense at all?
      - derefr 9y ago
        You know that there can be more than one "patriot" in any given scenario, right? The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist. Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots... In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."
mmagin 9y ago
You must live in a terrible, sad world where only brutal strength has value. I'm sorry.
- abootstrapper 9y ago
  OP's comment smacks of propaganda.
  - bronzeage 9y ago
    I'm not from the united states. I'm saying this from the perspective of an outsider, and most of the people here think the same. Americans have serious loyalty issues, coming from self hatred. I'm watching from the outside, seeing things like snowden, and judging by how I would've reacted to a similar story in our country compared to how the U.S people reacted. A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad. This is not the way to change things.
    - seandougall 9y ago
      There are certainly a number of Americans who feel the same way. Most of us, though, like to believe we value liberty above loyalty. Both are valuable, but where the two conflict, the former takes precedence (even if we sometimes end up in a messy debate over the interpretation of "liberty"). If that attitude has yielded "one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there", as you called it elsewhere, I don't see that as a bad thing.
    - derefr 9y ago
      > A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad. That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse. (The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)
abootstrapper 9y ago
This "all leaks are bad" mentality is fascist bullshit. If someone commits a crime and you know about, you have a moral obligation to report it. Some leaks are benifical and others are detrimental. Some leakers are heros, some are traitors, and others are somewhere in between. It's not black and white.
willstrafach 9y ago
> tommorow it's CIA agents identities I spotted two names in the Vault 7 leaks which WL failed to redact. Metadata from Shadow Brokers leaks gave Equation Group member identities, and additionally the Shadow Brokers twitter account directly called out a former Equation Group operator who is a part of the Information Security community (currently private sector / pen-testing). So this is already starting to happen. Dangerous path, especially considering the indifference you mention.
darawk 9y ago
I agree that Snowden's disclosures went too far. But to be honest, that was more on the journalists that released them than him. Ultimately I think it was important that Snowden disclose the existence of many of these programs. In so doing the journalists he entrusted with his materials unfortunately ended up disclosing more details of specific techniques and methods than I would have preferred. However, I think the basic idea that he informed the US public of the types of bulk collection that were going on is important, and ought to be praised.
xorium 9y ago
I agree with your assumption that most US leakers being treated like heroes/celebs will put the US in a disadvantage against geopolitically rival countries, where leakers are considered to be traitors. But I'm not American and neither are you. Why do we care?
schoen 9y ago
Although I don't care for your rhetoric and I wish you could tone it down a bit, I think you raise interesting and important points throughout this thread which I hope people can discuss further. I am someone who is clearly in the camp that you criticize (in fact, more than the average of HN commenters) and I think there's a lot to talk about, including American anti-government and anti-military cultural and political traditions (which are extremely important for American society and history, but also very diverse, and not easy for Americans to find consensus about) How are those currents different, differently expressed, or absent in other parts of the world? Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on a national level (Americans vs. the U.S. government) Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on an international level (people vs. governments in general) All of these issues are interesting and can be much more complicated than the simple accounts that we might tend to give of them at first. I don't feel like I have time to do justice to these topics at the moment, but hopefully this thread or a future one will give an opportunity to go further into these things.
rasz 9y ago
>traitors read US constitution so you actually know who is the traitor here
jknoepfler 9y ago
I'm mildly surprised you can't process why many in the United States (including myself) praise Snowden. The United States is a country founded on distrust of power. Nevertheless, it is a state, and its function is to protect its citizens through monopoly of force. That tension is central to our political consciousness. Sometimes people argue that "secrecy" is required to fulfill the duties of the state. Secrecy is required, sometimes, but secrecy requires trust, and trusting the powerful is not something we do. If we 'must', then we demand checks to prevent its abuse. In the mythos of the United States, the government (county, state, federal, doesn't matter) is always viewed as a potential threat. America-worshiping morons notwithstanding, there is a deep moral undercurrent in this country that views the state as intrinsically corrupt, simply because it has power. Many felt that the Snowden leaks showed that whatever mechanisms were supposed to be in place to check overreach by a potential enemy were not functioning. People who view Snowden as a hero believe that he was fulfilling his duty as a citizen to his fellow citizens. If you wonder why someone might be paranoid about their own government in the 21st century, I think its sufficient to point out that governments killed several orders of magnitude more of their own citizens in the 20th century than they did foreign citizens in wars. I personally believe that a turn to an unchecked security state in the United States is a bigger threat to my children and children's children than a war with China (or wherever), and a vastly larger threat than "terrorism". I hope that helps clarify why a reasonable citizen of the United States might be at least ambivalent towards leaks. Also I hope its clear that this is a discussion about what is fundamentally a fiction: the people (myself in particular) have a bullshit narrative about governments and corruptions and heroes, you have some bullshit narrative about spies and the CIA. Both are very thinly connected to reality, because the reality we're describing is vast and overwhelmingly complicated. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have any well-researched constructive suggestions about what I would do to fix the mechanisms of verification that should be in place to check secrecy in our security apparatus. But this isn't a conversation about mechanisms and policies, it's one about narrative, and one compelling narrative in the United States is that we owe our duty to our compatriots not the government, and government is always the first and most likely place to look for something evil.
deanCommie 9y ago
2 things you're missing: 1) The majority of what got people riled up about Snowden's revelations was that the US government was spying ON THEIR OWN CITIZENS. In places like China and Russia nobody batted an eye because the expectation is obviously the government already does that. Call it naive, but the majority of the US population believed (and still believes) that their government is above that. That regardless of whatever questionable evil the US military conducts abroad in the name of "democracy", domestically people have freedom and liberty. Sure, the post 9/11 world eroded it somewhat, but GENERALLY there is still the concept of privacy. Snowden shattered this fantasy. Everyone is being watched. All those conspiracy whackjobs, all the hollywood "worst nightmares" turned out to be true. That the government was doing this, and that it reacted to the leaks with extreme prejudice and desire to treat Snowden like a traitor rather than a patriot is what led to people considering him a hero. I could go deeper into the other arguments like "I have nothing to hide so why should I care that the government is monitoring what I'm saying", but I'd like to know more about your stance first. Do you think that the domestic surveillance is justified for the greater good of international security? Or do you simply believe that it's obvious and expected of the government to take on this role, and fighting it is ridiculous.

swiley 9y ago

The USG has traditionally not kept secrets from the populous (or not for very long.) The idea that they are not only keeping secrets but that these secrets are evidence of corruption and violation of our trust means that it is, in fact, a good thing they where leaked.

bronzeage 9y ago
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Look at you. You think your government is bad? Look at russia. Look at china. You have the privilege of being in one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there, yet you hate the country and its government more than the people in worse countries. A russian civilian has 10 times more reasons than you to hate the government. It's a fact. But he's also much more loyal to his country than you. Corruption or not, he won't hurt his country as much as your leaks are doing right now. The only reasonable conclusion is that it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the government, and everything to do with the loyalty of its people.
- corndoge 9y ago
  There's always room to improve. Leaks exposing corruption and to a lesser extent critical software vulnerabilities are a good thing. I don't think anyone would argue that exposing the identity of, for example, undercover agents is a good thing. As another commenter said, you seem to lack color vision and only see black and white. Also, patriotism as a justification for not exposing a corrupt government is a load of shit.
  - bronzeage 9y ago
    Did any leakers care to leak only the information relevant to the corruption? No. I do have color vision. I see the most blackish grey. And so should you. Yet you all cling to that little white spot in the middle of all the blackness, and using it to justify everything. You're sending a very clear message to all would-be traitors: as long you throw us a little bone of government wrongdoing, you're wellcome to burn the whole house down. You think this makes any sense at all?
    - derefr 9y ago
      You know that there can be more than one "patriot" in any given scenario, right? The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist. Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots... In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."

mmagin 9y ago

You must live in a terrible, sad world where only brutal strength has value. I'm sorry.

abootstrapper 9y ago
OP's comment smacks of propaganda.
- bronzeage 9y ago
  I'm not from the united states. I'm saying this from the perspective of an outsider, and most of the people here think the same. Americans have serious loyalty issues, coming from self hatred. I'm watching from the outside, seeing things like snowden, and judging by how I would've reacted to a similar story in our country compared to how the U.S people reacted. A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad. This is not the way to change things.
  - seandougall 9y ago
    There are certainly a number of Americans who feel the same way. Most of us, though, like to believe we value liberty above loyalty. Both are valuable, but where the two conflict, the former takes precedence (even if we sometimes end up in a messy debate over the interpretation of "liberty"). If that attitude has yielded "one of the least corrupt, most democratic country out there", as you called it elsewhere, I don't see that as a bad thing.
  - derefr 9y ago
    > A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad. That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse. (The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)

abootstrapper 9y ago

This "all leaks are bad" mentality is fascist bullshit. If someone commits a crime and you know about, you have a moral obligation to report it. Some leaks are benifical and others are detrimental. Some leakers are heros, some are traitors, and others are somewhere in between. It's not black and white.

willstrafach 9y ago

> tommorow it's CIA agents identities I spotted two names in the Vault 7 leaks which WL failed to redact. Metadata from Shadow Brokers leaks gave Equation Group member identities, and additionally the Shadow Brokers twitter account directly called out a former Equation Group operator who is a part of the Information Security community (currently private sector / pen-testing). So this is already starting to happen. Dangerous path, especially considering the indifference you mention.

darawk 9y ago

I agree that Snowden's disclosures went too far. But to be honest, that was more on the journalists that released them than him. Ultimately I think it was important that Snowden disclose the existence of many of these programs. In so doing the journalists he entrusted with his materials unfortunately ended up disclosing more details of specific techniques and methods than I would have preferred. However, I think the basic idea that he informed the US public of the types of bulk collection that were going on is important, and ought to be praised.

xorium 9y ago

I agree with your assumption that most US leakers being treated like heroes/celebs will put the US in a disadvantage against geopolitically rival countries, where leakers are considered to be traitors. But I'm not American and neither are you. Why do we care?

schoen 9y ago

Although I don't care for your rhetoric and I wish you could tone it down a bit, I think you raise interesting and important points throughout this thread which I hope people can discuss further. I am someone who is clearly in the camp that you criticize (in fact, more than the average of HN commenters) and I think there's a lot to talk about, including American anti-government and anti-military cultural and political traditions (which are extremely important for American society and history, but also very diverse, and not easy for Americans to find consensus about) How are those currents different, differently expressed, or absent in other parts of the world? Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on a national level (Americans vs. the U.S. government) Civilians and civil society defending themselves against state power on an international level (people vs. governments in general) All of these issues are interesting and can be much more complicated than the simple accounts that we might tend to give of them at first. I don't feel like I have time to do justice to these topics at the moment, but hopefully this thread or a future one will give an opportunity to go further into these things.

rasz 9y ago

>traitors read US constitution so you actually know who is the traitor here

jknoepfler 9y ago

I'm mildly surprised you can't process why many in the United States (including myself) praise Snowden. The United States is a country founded on distrust of power. Nevertheless, it is a state, and its function is to protect its citizens through monopoly of force. That tension is central to our political consciousness. Sometimes people argue that "secrecy" is required to fulfill the duties of the state. Secrecy is required, sometimes, but secrecy requires trust, and trusting the powerful is not something we do. If we 'must', then we demand checks to prevent its abuse. In the mythos of the United States, the government (county, state, federal, doesn't matter) is always viewed as a potential threat. America-worshiping morons notwithstanding, there is a deep moral undercurrent in this country that views the state as intrinsically corrupt, simply because it has power. Many felt that the Snowden leaks showed that whatever mechanisms were supposed to be in place to check overreach by a potential enemy were not functioning. People who view Snowden as a hero believe that he was fulfilling his duty as a citizen to his fellow citizens. If you wonder why someone might be paranoid about their own government in the 21st century, I think its sufficient to point out that governments killed several orders of magnitude more of their own citizens in the 20th century than they did foreign citizens in wars. I personally believe that a turn to an unchecked security state in the United States is a bigger threat to my children and children's children than a war with China (or wherever), and a vastly larger threat than "terrorism". I hope that helps clarify why a reasonable citizen of the United States might be at least ambivalent towards leaks. Also I hope its clear that this is a discussion about what is fundamentally a fiction: the people (myself in particular) have a bullshit narrative about governments and corruptions and heroes, you have some bullshit narrative about spies and the CIA. Both are very thinly connected to reality, because the reality we're describing is vast and overwhelmingly complicated. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have any well-researched constructive suggestions about what I would do to fix the mechanisms of verification that should be in place to check secrecy in our security apparatus. But this isn't a conversation about mechanisms and policies, it's one about narrative, and one compelling narrative in the United States is that we owe our duty to our compatriots not the government, and government is always the first and most likely place to look for something evil.

deanCommie 9y ago

2 things you're missing: 1) The majority of what got people riled up about Snowden's revelations was that the US government was spying ON THEIR OWN CITIZENS. In places like China and Russia nobody batted an eye because the expectation is obviously the government already does that. Call it naive, but the majority of the US population believed (and still believes) that their government is above that. That regardless of whatever questionable evil the US military conducts abroad in the name of "democracy", domestically people have freedom and liberty. Sure, the post 9/11 world eroded it somewhat, but GENERALLY there is still the concept of privacy. Snowden shattered this fantasy. Everyone is being watched. All those conspiracy whackjobs, all the hollywood "worst nightmares" turned out to be true. That the government was doing this, and that it reacted to the leaks with extreme prejudice and desire to treat Snowden like a traitor rather than a patriot is what led to people considering him a hero. I could go deeper into the other arguments like "I have nothing to hide so why should I care that the government is monitoring what I'm saying", but I'd like to know more about your stance first. Do you think that the domestic surveillance is justified for the greater good of international security? Or do you simply believe that it's obvious and expected of the government to take on this role, and fighting it is ridiculous.