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> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million was an in

> An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 million was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed by Snowden. An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search engine allows partners to collect user data; it does not. The article has been updated. So the author spent all this time writing this article couldn't even bother to confirm how many documents were leaked and seemed to be under the assumption that DDG is data mining it's users? This article just feels like it was written by a 3 letter agency and dropped on someone's desk.

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pvg 8y ago
It was written by a three letter agency because it contained and corrected some relatively minor factual errors?
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Accusing DDG of doing the very thing it claims it does not and will never do is beyond "relatively minor" in my opinion.
  - pvg 8y ago
    It's not 'accusing'. It's just making a mistake. And either way, that's not any sort of evidence of the piece being written by some three letter agency.
  - JoachimSchipper 8y ago
    DuckDuckGo just really doesn’t matter to this piece (which is about ideology and power, not tech). Still an error that they shouldn’t have made, but it is a “minor” error.
tptacek 8y ago
There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.
- plugger 8y ago
  But the flip side of that coin is that to my understanding he disclosed the information to only a handful of journalists and not the entire world. Sure, his decision wasn't ideal, but no situation was given the position he put himself in.
- detcader 8y ago
  > people he barely knew Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they contain --- which is what Snowden did. Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows? That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them characterized... but, this is fine. So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad because it ran with an incorrect count.
    - 8y ago

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pvg 8y ago

It was written by a three letter agency because it contained and corrected some relatively minor factual errors?

yellowapple 8y ago
Accusing DDG of doing the very thing it claims it does not and will never do is beyond "relatively minor" in my opinion.
- pvg 8y ago
  It's not 'accusing'. It's just making a mistake. And either way, that's not any sort of evidence of the piece being written by some three letter agency.
- JoachimSchipper 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo just really doesn’t matter to this piece (which is about ideology and power, not tech). Still an error that they shouldn’t have made, but it is a “minor” error.

tptacek 8y ago

There's a credible argument that Snowden didn't even bother to confirm how many documents he extracted from NSA intranet servers before disclosing them en masse to people he barely knew, so there's an irony to trying to ding this article for getting a count wrong.

plugger 8y ago
But the flip side of that coin is that to my understanding he disclosed the information to only a handful of journalists and not the entire world. Sure, his decision wasn't ideal, but no situation was given the position he put himself in.
detcader 8y ago
> people he barely knew Does this refer to a handful of journalists who are also public figures? If so, who is permitted to leak to well-known journalists and what is the upper limit of how much they may leak under this implied moral framework?
- tptacek 8y ago
  I feel like we don't share the same premises, since I don't start from a place where ultimately you have to be able to leak arbitrary documents. I think leaking government secrets is an extremely big deal, and I can imagine few circumstances in which it's OK to leak them without even knowing what they contain --- which is what Snowden did. Again, it is my claim that Snowden didn't even know how many documents he leaked. There's universal agreement among people with firsthand knowledge of the documents (I'm not one of those) that he clearly couldn't have vetted them. As I understand it, we haven't seen even a significant fraction of the contents, which are now vouchsafed in a private SCIF run by... who knows? That's the situation we're in: a bunch of people none of us had any hand in electing are apparently managing a gigantic tranche of signals intelligence information so sensitive even they agree we can't see them or even have them characterized... but, this is fine. So again, I'm sorry if I'm not moved by the idea that this article is bad because it ran with an incorrect count.
  - 8y ago