4 ms·

> 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

> 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.
- detcader 8y ago
  I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article bad. I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off. "They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    The first paragraph of this comment responds to things I actually said. The second looks like you may have accidentally spliced a reply to a different comment into this one.

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.

detcader 8y ago
I agree that the incorrect framing of what I understand is the claimed count of which documents Snowden "accessed" during his job (as opposed to "released," with an implied "to the public") does not make the entire article bad. I would also agree that it's a tragic situation when unelected NSA officials engaged in massive violations of privacy and didn't take internally-raised concerns seriously. It's tragic that Obama's extremist prosecution of whistleblowers may have created the only workable course of action: supermarket-sweep all the documents you can in a short amount of time and splash them against the vetting filter of the fourth estate before the alarms go off. "They turn around in their chair and show their coworker. And their coworker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great — send that to Bill down the way,'" Snowden said. "And then Bill sends it to George. George sends it to Tom. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." But let's shoot the messenger? It's always tempting to add another leaf node to the discourse tree and stake the claim that this is the correct depth of nuance to apply and path to end up at relative to the root. But I am satisfied with conclusion that Snowden was smart enough to know his options, and that the karma of the US government's culture of authoritarianism created this bad situation, and we should be having at least two opinion pieces demanding where all the reform went per one "Reconsidering Snowden" contrarianism-fests.
- tptacek 8y ago
  The first paragraph of this comment responds to things I actually said. The second looks like you may have accidentally spliced a reply to a different comment into this one.