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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

759 points by peterkelly 7y ago

OrgNet 7y ago
"I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that the NSA will still be standing tomorrow." Ed being sarcastic?
onetimemanytime 7y ago
IRS is counting your book sales Edward, CIA and FBI might be the least of your worries ;)
- fb03 7y ago
  I don't think he's ever going to come back to the US. He would be arrested on the spot.
- faet 7y ago
  Macmillan is probably withholding taxes for him. If he publishes directly on amazon, they would withhold 30% and send it to the IRS.
sleepychu 7y ago
Customers who bought this item also bought - ALFA AWUS036NEH Long Range WIRELESS 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi USBAdapter - Yubico - YubiKey 5 NFC - Two Factor Authentication USB and NFC Security Key, Fits USB-A Ports and Works with Supported NFC Mobile Devices EDIT:formatting
- csunbird 7y ago
  Offtopic: You were faster than my comment! I understand the Yubikey is popular but I do not understand the why the Wi-Fi dongle is popular. Any ideas?
  - matchai 7y ago
    That wifi dongle in particular supports packet injection, and supports aircrack-ng for penetration testing.
    - thelittleone 7y ago
      Indeed and cheap enough to throw away after each project for improved opsec.
      - Godel_unicode 7y ago
        Given that you can change the MAC address, how does throwing it away improve opsec...?
        diminoten 7y ago
        Makes you feel more like an operator, I guess?
        jascii 7y ago
        It seems good practice not to assume there are no other ways to id/fingerprint a device then by mac address..
        Godel_unicode 7y ago
        That's actually the opposite of good practice; good practice in security is to base your planning off of facts and research. Throwing away your whole setup after every gig works for Mission: Impossible, and I guess it makes people feel extra-super-ninja, in practice it just perpetuates the endless (and pointless) culture of I-know-something-you-don't. Opsec should be based on reality and threat modeling, not endless rounds of whatabout. Edit: if you (the rhetorical you, not parent specifically) actually know something here, chime in!
        jascii 7y ago
- turk73 7y ago
  Oh man, that's hilarious! I fucking hate the Yubikey my company makes me use.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elbasti 7y ago
  Is it even safe to buy yubikeys on Amazon given the counterfeit problem?
  - capableweb 7y ago
    Guess there could be two attack vectors, one that is easier to avoid and the other not so much. The first one being a targeted attack. Then any ordering of Yubikeys can leave to vulnerable as the supply chain can be intercepted (because they see it's you and switch out the key to a counterfeit one). This can be solved by going to a in-person store and buying it there. Then there is no risk of you being personally targeted as you can go to any store. The second one, is where all keys sold being counterfeit, which you cannot solve by going to a in-person store or ordering online. Not sure how you could avoid this vector.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      >Not sure how you could avoid this vector. While this is a theoretical problem anywhere, it's a practical problem when ordering from Amazon far more often than anywhere else. Going to a reputable physical store likely shields you from the second scenario nearly as well as the first. Also, in the case of Yubico at least, you can order directly from their website, which presumably minimizes the number of hands the product has to go through, thus minimizing opportunities for a counterfeit to be swapped in.
  - jolan 7y ago
    You can verify whether you received a genuine key at: https://www.yubico.com/genuine/ https://www.yubico.com/genuine/
    - willismichael 7y ago
      Unless some entity can man-in-the-middle attack your attempt at verifying it.
    - OrgNet 7y ago
      https is not safe against the government....
- AzzieElbab 7y ago
  send from my KaliPhone
- jonahbenton 7y ago
  Recommended products: Alexa
- mercules 7y ago
  It's probably part of the reading material for military cybersec.
- mises 7y ago
  It recommended me "20 ORANGE SNAPPY GRIP -Bucket Handles -Mining-Gold Prospecting-Gardening" under the customers also bought... I guess I'm just not leet enough. This in spite of the fact that I've actually bought a few external wifi adapters from amazon.
- csomar 7y ago
  No kidding. I got the same: https://imgur.com/a/jroD1Ji https://imgur.com/a/jroD1Ji
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  More interesting is what the people who will go to their local book store to buy it with cash will also buy, but we'll never know.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonahbenton 7y ago
I really only want read the story told by Snowden's bank accounts and use of cash. Pretty sure this isn't that.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  What are you implying?
  - jonahbenton 7y ago
    Sources and uses of funds are a much more reliable indicator of who someone is, who their friends are, and what they believe than the stories they publicly vocalize to themselves and others.
    - efdee 7y ago
      What are you implying, really?
      - sigzero 7y ago
        That he is indeed a traitor maybe?
      - jonathanstrange 7y ago
        It doesn't matter what he says anyway. You'd need to see his bank account to get the real picture.
        hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
        Are you implying you've seen it?
        jonathanstrange 7y ago
        I'm being sarcastic. By "he" I mean jonahbenton's bank account.
Noxmiles 7y ago
Does anyone know how much money he gets from every book / ebook? I think buying it is, at least for some people, very much a support Snowden thought.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  I vaguely remember 10% as a ballpark for most authors
  - iandinwoodie 7y ago
    What happens to the other 90%? Is this typical for book authors?
    - faet 7y ago
      It is very typical. Assuming Print on Demand w/ amazon. He's not doing that but we'll just assume to keep it easy. And list price of $24 Amazon takes $5 to print Amazon takes $9.60 royalty That leaves $9.40 or 40% available. Of that Macmillan takes their cut to cover editing, covers, advertising, etc. And what is left is probably $2.40 for each sale. For Self published folks (going eBooks this time). Assuming you list for $10 and get a 70% royalty from amazon. You'll earn $7 for each sale. But, then once you factor in advertising (on amazon which goes to amazon), your earnings for each book drop to maybe a 5-30% royalty range. And that assumes you can sell your book for $10, which most self published cannot. I have friends who sell $10k worth of eBooks/mo who make $2k/mo. So 80% goes to amazon and 20% goes to them.
      - iandinwoodie 7y ago
        That's insane. Thank you for the detailed insight.
      - anchpop 7y ago
        He's using a traditional publisher which means he likely got a decent advance. Even if he didn't, he was likely able to negotiate a better deal than most authors because of his fame
apercu 7y ago
<RANT>US expatriates are the only expats in the world that have to file annual taxes (and report foreign bank accounts). It's ridiculous for most of us (99% are not tax exiles or tax evaders, we just left the USA for our own reasons). </RANT> I wonder if Snowden files taxes?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > US expatriates are the only expats in the world that have to file annual taxes Did Eritrea cleanup their act?
- teddyuk 7y ago
  Can you give up your american passport and then stop or do you have to do it for the rest of your life?
  - ummwhat 7y ago
    It costs over a grand to quit the club known as "citizenship" you're going to want citizenship in wherever you reside first when you give up US citizenship (you could choose to be stateless, but that makes more problems than it solves). Doing this does not absolve you of existing debts in the eyes of the IRS. And finally, you'll be interviewed at the consulate and if your stated reason for giving up citizenship is "the overseas tax thing", you'll be denied a visa if you ever want to visit the US again.
    - mosselman 7y ago
      Did you actually mean 1.000.000 (a thousand grand) or did you mean 1000. > you'll be denied a visa if you ever want to visit the US again. Do you have a source for this?
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      Apparently, you can run for any government office in a foreign state and it immediately nullifies your US citizenship. I have only heard this as rumour, and I don't have time to confirm / deny this, but it may be worth looking into.
octosphere 7y ago
I'm going to 'recycle' an older comment of mine, pertaining to the comments about the book. The original comment can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363 I was annoyed that someone called Ed Snowden a 'Traitor'. Hopefully it gets a bit more recognition in this thread __________________________________ For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him. Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...
- tomatotomato37 7y ago
  Wow, I thought Binney was just some random analysist news shows brought on to discredit the 2016 hacking thing. Didn't realize he was the key catalyst for the Snowden leak after the government shafted him when he tried to reveal the same NSA overreach using the "proper" channels.
  - ev0lv 7y ago
    Bill Binney is an American patriot and a hero.
- dx87 7y ago
  Honestly, saying that the NSA has done maybe one useful thing in its entire existence and that everything it does could be replaced by "simple detective work" just shows you to be incredibly uninformed and ignorant about what the job of the NSA actually is.
matt_morgan 7y ago
Or how about from a library. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=edward+snowden+permanent+record https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=edward...
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Given that there are like... seven copies in U.S. libraries, I think that's probably terrible advice.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Won't they order more on request? I thought that's how libraries work. Also there are more than seven copies on order in the Brooklyn library system alone: https://borrow.bklynlibrary.org/r1s/iii/encore/record/C__Rb12228423 https://borrow.bklynlibrary.org/r1s/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1...
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    Since Amazon says it's not available until September 17th and you can only pre-order it now, I think probably even those 7 are records inaccurately registered before the book is actually there, and there are probably 0! Or did some libraries get the book earlier than Amazon can? Possible, but my guess is not.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      Fair enough! I was thrown off the fact that it hasn't been released by the Worldcat page saying that there were three editions. I assumed that it was not possible to have data quality issues of that magnitude.
      - jrochkind1 7y ago
        Oh, Worldcat data quality is definitely very problematic. At it's best, it definitely doesn't represent _every_ library copy. It requires libraries to register their copies with the central database. All of these libraries are different organizations with different software, at varying stages of 'legacy', trying to interoperate with each other, usually without very well-resourced IT teams. Then WorldCat has got to figure out when copies at different libraries are copies of the "same" thing, and what "same" means. The worldcat database is very useful, but it certainly has data quality problems. Amazon also says "4 formats and editions": hardcover, paperback, kindle, audiobook. Technically I'd say these are "formats" not "editions" -- the text is the same in each, although you might consider the audiobook a separate "edition" maybe, as it's not text at all, it's a whole different sort of thing. (And the Amazon UI hides it behind a 'more' link, although still just referring to the whole list as "4 formats and editions"). I'd guess Worldcat knows 3 of those 4 -- maybe all except kindle. Worldcat, like Amazon, is not really capable of distinguishing "editions" from "formats". I'm not sure I'd consider the "3 editions" a "data quality" error exactly, in this case. It does point to some of the complexities of figuring out what's out there in the bibliographic universe, and how to model it in a consistent way that makes sense to users. (What _is_ an edition vs a format anyway?). Amazon gets data and corrections from people trying to sell books there providing some data entry/correction labor for free. And Amazon's website and data are _core_ to their business. As well as from other DBs like ISBN. Worldcat has to try to piece things together from a bunch of disorganized under-funded non-IT-expert nonprofits, who may consider "getting good data to WorldCat" not the highest among competing priorities, along with other DBs like ISBN. Neither WorldCat nor Amazon are _great_ at determining "what separate editions/formats exist of this thing, and how do they relate to each other" in the general case. Cause it's a hard problem. Amazon does well enough to sell books apparently. They each have strengths and weaknesses. For things published decades before Amazon existed and/or no longer in print, WorldCat will do better in some ways.
apexalpha 7y ago
I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.
- kevando 7y ago
  For me in the US I went from talking like a lunatic to talking about yesterday’s news. Frustrating to say the least.
- jonahbenton 7y ago
  Is that the case for both govt and private corporate surveillance? How widespread is the use of Alexa in your area?
  - ptero 7y ago
    The key difference is that you can decide not to buy corporate products you do not want, but have to comply with the laws. I am a lot less concerned about stupid things done by a majority for convenience (and I can choose whether to do participate or not) than about the law that forces the same stupidity down my throat. My 2c.
    - kareemm 7y ago
      The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate database, identifying you using photo recognition algorithms and your location using the home's address, and using that information to sell you things.
      - roenxi 7y ago
        > using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happen here" they can just ignore the possibility. Then it turns out that that sometimes it can. Privacy isn't just about the world as it stands today. Privacy is an acknowledgement that the present and the future are linked and that the future may be profoundly different from today. People aggressively selling you things is more harassment.
stef25 7y ago
Before his story broke there was an AMA on Reddit about govt surveillance, I'm 90% this was Snowden. Does anyone else remember this? The person spoke of these things happening in ways we "couldn't imagine". People were guessing at what he meant and his responses were mostly "it's much worse". One redditor posted some highly technical speculations to which the author responded "you're getting close". Reddit's search isn't good enough to retrieve this but I would LOVE to find that post again.
- INTPenis 7y ago
  Funny enough Google has great tools for searching within that time period. Snowden broke around Q1 2013 right? So I tried searching from Q4 2012 to Q1 2014 and the first thing that came up on government surveillance was actually this[1]. Which I assume is not what you meant but it's pretty early in the timeline of Snowden's revelations. Setting the timeline to 2012-01-01 - 2013-07-03 is just before Greenwald broke Snowden's story and those results are very different. Interspersed are results that were likely updated in Google's index after july 3rd so there are some false positives so to speak. You'd have to browse more of those results. I've only got 3 pages in.[2] Edit: Actually this IAmA from Cory Doctorow could be it.[3] He's definitely in the know about what the government is capable of and speaking from that experience. Which pretty much predicts Snowden's revelations. Of course I remember when AT&T was implicated in mass surveillance by a former employee back around 2004, that story just got lost in the ether. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_... 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22IAmA%22+government+surveillance&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/2012,cd_max:7/4/2013&ei=TyJ5XeX6EICDk74P-JawyAo&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwil3pjemcnkAhWAwcQBHXgLDKkQ8NMDCJkB&biw=1527&bih=1336 https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22IAmA%22+g... 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11bm9i/iam_cory_doctorow_writer_blogger_and_activist_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11bm9i/iam_cory_docto...
  - stef25 7y ago
    It was an anonymous AMA, author specifically stated he was "inside" so not Doctorow
fasinfranco 7y ago
Customers who bought this item also bought: YubiKey
hsavit1 7y ago
Any links posted to amazon.com from HN should be to smile.amazon.com -> .5% of your purchase will be donated to a clarity of your choice.
- irq11 7y ago
  Better yet, don’t buy the book, and donate the money you would have spent to charity.
  - sousavdouglas 7y ago
    okay
  - Zelphyr 7y ago
    Can't we do both?
    - irq11 7y ago
      Nope. Because then you could donate the price of two books, and not buy one!
- NilsIRL 7y ago
  I wouldn't see any reason not to. Though please keep in mind that smile.amazon.com is a marketing stunt. Firstly, it makes people less reluctant to buy increasing Amazon's revenue and secondly, Amazon is donating the money, so they get to pay less tax.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
We were called "paranoid lunatics" even when we started speaking about ECHELON in the '90ies. Same with the clipper chip. Same with TPM/DRM/ME. Same with Internet centralization. It's worth asking why the general public keeps trusting authorities and distrusts techies, even those among us with a career in security.
- berdon 7y ago
  The answer seems straight forward. The term "authorities" comes with the assumption that they're the ones "leading". We've been taught for most of our lives the person up-front (parent, teacher, president) is always right and the vast majority of people won't question that.
- vaylian 7y ago
  Good question. There are probably similar psychological mechanisms at play when you try to explain to smokers why their habits are bad.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- qroshan 7y ago
  I'll trust techies the day they actually are in the job of protecting people and have to deal with real danger of bad actors continuously trying to blow up Western democracies. It's funny the tech/security/sysadmin guys complain that their work is appreciated only when things go wrong, but fail to give the same benefit of the doubt for US law and order.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Maybe the "US law and order" shouldn't be acting like Stazi all the time and spying on citizens and tracking them without warrants.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
    The FBI sat on incriminating info about Epstein for years and even still has yet to raid his New Mexico ranch for evidence. Given that he had damaging info on many people with their hands directly on the levers of power in "Western democracies" you'll have to excuse my skepticism that these agencies are acting in the interest of their common people.
pdm55 7y ago
Another new book just published on data privacy: Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age Hardcover – September 10, 2019 by Brad Smith (Author), Carol Ann Browne (Author), Bill Gates (Foreword) https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Weapons-Promise-Peril-Digital/dp/1984877712 https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Weapons-Promise-Peril-Digital/d...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The contrast between Brad Smith's title, and Gates's The Road Ahead (1996), speaks worlds. (Gates writes a foreward to Smith's book. I've not yet seen it.)
pastor_elm 7y ago
This guy is such a fame hog. Do you really need a full page face shot on the cover of your book? C'mon dawg. As a side note, I wonder if he feels obligated to keep the stubble goatee since it's part of 'his look.'
xparco 7y ago
Snowden is a cartoon psyop like Manning and others. They give hope to cubicle slaves.
empath75 7y ago
I think the administration badly, badly mishandled Snowden and Assange, and allowed Russia to coopt them by isolating and threatening them. If they had treated them as whistleblowers and journalists (even if they had nefarious motivations), they could have kept them in "the west" instead of driving them into the arms of Russia. I don't believe that Assange was a Russian agent at the beginning but he was surely one by the time of the 2016 election. There's a reason we have laws around a free speech and a free press-- they make the country stronger, even if they make it harder to govern.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  An agent? No. But friendly towards those friendly to him? Who in the world doesn't do that? After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Seems like a difference without a distinction, and I'm not even sure it's correct. If he's acting in the interest of Russia, he's a Russian agent.
    - mLuby 7y ago
      The distinction is responsibility. If he were operating under orders from Russia, Russia bears ultimate responsibility for his actions. If they have no control over him and his actions merely benefit them, he bears responsibility for his own actions.
    - not_a_cop75 7y ago
      Going by that standard, 95% of all Russian peasant farmers are "Russian Agents" and that's pure ridiculousness from any angle.
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        >Going by that standard, 95% of all Russian peasant farmers are "Russian Agents" and that's pure ridiculousness from any angle. Oh please, you're the one being ridiculous. I think we all know there's a line between farming for the good of civilization and actively working to push an agenda. C'mon.
milquetoastaf 7y ago
Snowden will absolutely be revealed as a HUMINT asset. I am extremely grateful for his revelations but I always found his justification for his actions to be rather flimsy. He worked as a CIA operative and then NSA contractor helping build global surveillance infrastructure (as well as allegedly designating targets for its use) but only realized his actions were unethical because they spied on US citizens and lied about it? What about all the other people he spied on or stripped of their privacy and rights? They don't count because they weren't born on the right soil? Suddenly lying becomes an ethical issue for someone who worked in the espionage world... He took a lot more documents than just the NSA surveillance disclosures. Thousands of emails, IMs, and other correspondence between DoD officials unrelated to NSA that blew several agents cover. These fell into the hands of Russian and Chinese agencies..somehow
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
This made me realize I have heard ZERO news on Assange after his arrest, and the likelihood of him being tortured and rendered and railroaded of course means our nation (US) of laws and rights is a sham. Don't tell me it's boring, this should be a sideshow for the media like OJ. Rape trial? Russian meddling? Little guy vs the government? International intrigue? Crickets. A truly independent media would be tracking his case to make sure due process is followed, but we all know what media is in the age of corporate conglomeration and oligarchy.
- nabla9 7y ago
  He is sitting his 50 week sentence in HM Prison Belmarsh in UK and has access to lawyers. Media is tracking his case. There is nothing to report. There are people who spew up conspiracy theories on the spot when they have not heard anything, from pure ignorance, yet they speak ill of mainstream media.
  - IronWolve 7y ago
    Hes also sitting in the medical ward due to multiple issues, including mental issues. I dont think the news wants to report on his declining health.
    - AlexCoventry 7y ago
      How did you learn that?
  - seppin 7y ago
    > There are people who spew up conspiracy theories on the spot when they have not heard anything, from pure ignorance, yet they speak ill of mainstream media. It's much easier than knowing what you're talking about.
  - reeves23423 7y ago
    If they are tracking where is the news about Jullian Assange.
- 7y ago
OrgNet 7y ago
anyway to avoid the middle man ?
- simsla 7y ago
  Email him? He might send it to you for free. Or just pay the middleman, and he'll get paid too.
jjtheblunt 7y ago
I genuinely don't understand why Snowden is treated as more shocking than things published in the open by James Bamford years earlier. https://www.amazon.com/James-Bamford/e/B000APPIUM/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 https://www.amazon.com/James-Bamford/e/B000APPIUM/ref=dp_byl...
wannabcodr 7y ago
Anyone have a link to steal and read the book for free? I don’t support his cause but wouldn’t mind reading the book. Yes I’m admitting to intent to pirating Ed Snowden’s book. It’s not like I’d be stealing sensitive military secrets and selling them to Omidyar for a pledge up to $250MM. How many Russian speaking people were in his orbit in Hawaii from 2011-2013? How many of them had the operational capacity to pull off a conspiracy to guide Ed to Mother Russia undetected?
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  How about you answer some of your own questions.
  - wannabcodr 7y ago
    1) I don’t have a clean link to the book 2) Yes Russian speaking folks are in our IC, military, private sector etc. and are certain to have been in his orbit 3) someone could ask mr Omidyar Given his connections to Booz and his level of intelligence (punahou grad along with Obama etc) He could be a total patriot at heart and it would be difficult to know the difference. Shit, maybe Pierre is a triple agent, a regular Bond good guy. But I’ll tell ya when I heard he bought up the secrets I was sure at that moment that he is either a total patriot or is part of a conspiracy. Probably just an opportunist though. Kind of like the geniuses who foresaw bitcoin’s rise.
    - Synaesthesia 7y ago
      So, all speculation? I mean based on what he has released he's an american patriot. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary. Of course the US govt will try smear him and cover up after he exposed their actions.
      - wannabcodr 7y ago
        It’s impossible to tell without access to the full trove. He could be releasing things in a way that either minimizes or maximizes damage (or anywhere in between) to the US. Yes, we can only speculate. I’m not in the intelligence community and those who are aren’t likely to voice things publicly. The whole situation seems odd. A calculating genius spends months planning what is ostensibly a haphazard plan to wind up in Russia supposedly not by choice? Then Omidyar also in Hawaii and connected to Booz buys up the secrets. Seems odd to me. If Mr. Omidyar were patriotic maybe he would have bought up the secrets and kept 100% of them private, thus extending the oath of secrecy that military officers all take. Mr. Omidyar has come forward as an agent of the free press, not as a sworn patriotic military officer. Difficult to tell his motivations from the outside yet worthy of speculation.
mengibar10 7y ago
I wonder what if he would mention anything about 5G in the book. As far as I understand, all the fuss US making against Huawei is actually due to its (future) crippling of its eavesdropping capability. Not that 5G is a panacea for that but Huawei is augmenting their equipments against such attacks, and they will be the main supplier.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  This is interesting. Does anyone have further reading to recommend about this?
  - mengibar10 7y ago
    https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/huawei-calls-the-us-intel-communitys-bluff/ https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/huawei-calls-the-u...
dblohm7 7y ago
Are his broken glasses just a prop at this point? Dude, you can buy new frames in Russia!
robmiller 7y ago
Seems odd that every picture of Edward Snowden shows one of the nose pads on his glasses missing.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  That does bug me now, having just looked at a lot of pictures, but it does appear you can find pictures where this is not the case, eg, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/national-security-agency-contractor-edward-snowden-release-memoir-1228550 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/national-security-age...
  - robmiller 7y ago
    I did a photo search too and decided to use "every" anyway. But hey, I got you to investigate it yourself and you'd have to agree on "most."
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      It also made me stumble across his interview from a couple years back talking about the "why" but I didn't dig enough to find out of the unbroken glasses are purely a time-series thing, or if he finally got tired of it and got his glasses fixed / got new glasses.
YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
Snowden is being prosecuted for being first to reveal things that everyone knows now
Clubber 7y ago
Just in case you read this, thanks, Edward Snowden. You left it all on the line to help us. The fact that we're still talking about it 6+ years later shows it's importance.
einpoklum 7y ago
A bit ironic that it's suggested to us to buy the book through Amazon, a cloud services provider for the CIA (and otherwise shady mega-corporation) See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
- autoexec 7y ago
  Amazon controls so much of the internet that it's increasingly hard for anyone to avoid them. The deal they struck is far more involved than your typical company using AWS, but I wouldn't look to Amazon's customers to make any assumptions about Amazon's motivations beyond their lust for more money. The reality is that this book doesn't pose any meaningful threat to the US government's mass surveillance programs and having impotent critiques of the US Government openly available as opposed to outright banned gives us a false sense of security in our freedoms.
ordinaryperson 7y ago
Unpopular opinion destined to attract downvotes but: IMHO the NSA spying program was outrageous...for the colossal waste of money and time it was. First, if you're really worried about privacy, why is it not a DEFCON 1 outrage that state DMVs are selling your info to private investigators? [1] Or if you're really worried about your personal liberty, isn't your local police force a greater threat then NSA eavesdroppers? Back in 2013 the NSA claimed it was spying on 29 petabytes of internet data (out of 1826) a day [2], or 1.6%. That's both a trivial amount of overall traffic and an insanely large dataset at the same time (since it accumulates every day). Isn't a big chunk of that traffic encrypted? Even if it's not, how do you find terrorists in that data? Do they self-identify? Even if they use a trivial substitution cipher ('cupcakes' instead of 'bombs') it would evade these billion-dollar supercomputers. To me the NSA's spying program was security theater akin to airport security: expensive machines that don't even catch terrorists. They fail their own internal tests 95% of the time! [3]. I personally would like to know what algorithms the NSA was using to successfully identify terrorist data in exobytes of (possibly encrypted) datasets. Sounds like billions spent on airport scanners to me. Finally, on a political level, Snowden seems like a massive hypocrite to me for hiding in China, which harvests the organs of political prisoners [4] and Russia, which routinely assassinates political opponents and journalists [5]. But he's mad that what, the US was reading his Gmail? I realize he's super popular among the HN crowd and the libertarians for whom all gov't surveillance is evil but I, for one, am not a Snowden admirer. Downvote away. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-private-investigators-making-millions-of-dollars https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-hunger-demands-29-petabytes-of-data-a-day/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-hunger-demands-29-petabyte... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests-organs-detainees-tribunal-concludes-n1018646 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests... [5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-shows-us-what-happens-to-enemies-of-the-people-bloodied-heads-murdered-reporters-poisoned-dissidents https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-shows-us-what-happens-t...
terrycody 7y ago
the 1st humanity king, we should remember!
trustlyppp 7y ago
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759 points by peterkelly 7y ago

"I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that the NSA will still be standing tomorrow." Ed being sarcastic?

onetimemanytime 7y ago

IRS is counting your book sales Edward, CIA and FBI might be the least of your worries ;)

fb03 7y ago
I don't think he's ever going to come back to the US. He would be arrested on the spot.
faet 7y ago
Macmillan is probably withholding taxes for him. If he publishes directly on amazon, they would withhold 30% and send it to the IRS.

sleepychu 7y ago

Customers who bought this item also bought - ALFA AWUS036NEH Long Range WIRELESS 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi USBAdapter - Yubico - YubiKey 5 NFC - Two Factor Authentication USB and NFC Security Key, Fits USB-A Ports and Works with Supported NFC Mobile Devices EDIT:formatting

csunbird 7y ago
Offtopic: You were faster than my comment! I understand the Yubikey is popular but I do not understand the why the Wi-Fi dongle is popular. Any ideas?
- matchai 7y ago
  That wifi dongle in particular supports packet injection, and supports aircrack-ng for penetration testing.
  - thelittleone 7y ago
    Indeed and cheap enough to throw away after each project for improved opsec.
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      Given that you can change the MAC address, how does throwing it away improve opsec...?
      - diminoten 7y ago
        Makes you feel more like an operator, I guess?
      - jascii 7y ago
        It seems good practice not to assume there are no other ways to id/fingerprint a device then by mac address..
        Godel_unicode 7y ago
        That's actually the opposite of good practice; good practice in security is to base your planning off of facts and research. Throwing away your whole setup after every gig works for Mission: Impossible, and I guess it makes people feel extra-super-ninja, in practice it just perpetuates the endless (and pointless) culture of I-know-something-you-don't. Opsec should be based on reality and threat modeling, not endless rounds of whatabout. Edit: if you (the rhetorical you, not parent specifically) actually know something here, chime in!
        jascii 7y ago
turk73 7y ago
Oh man, that's hilarious! I fucking hate the Yubikey my company makes me use.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
elbasti 7y ago
Is it even safe to buy yubikeys on Amazon given the counterfeit problem?
- capableweb 7y ago
  Guess there could be two attack vectors, one that is easier to avoid and the other not so much. The first one being a targeted attack. Then any ordering of Yubikeys can leave to vulnerable as the supply chain can be intercepted (because they see it's you and switch out the key to a counterfeit one). This can be solved by going to a in-person store and buying it there. Then there is no risk of you being personally targeted as you can go to any store. The second one, is where all keys sold being counterfeit, which you cannot solve by going to a in-person store or ordering online. Not sure how you could avoid this vector.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    >Not sure how you could avoid this vector. While this is a theoretical problem anywhere, it's a practical problem when ordering from Amazon far more often than anywhere else. Going to a reputable physical store likely shields you from the second scenario nearly as well as the first. Also, in the case of Yubico at least, you can order directly from their website, which presumably minimizes the number of hands the product has to go through, thus minimizing opportunities for a counterfeit to be swapped in.
- jolan 7y ago
  You can verify whether you received a genuine key at: https://www.yubico.com/genuine/ https://www.yubico.com/genuine/
  - willismichael 7y ago
    Unless some entity can man-in-the-middle attack your attempt at verifying it.
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    https is not safe against the government....
AzzieElbab 7y ago
send from my KaliPhone
jonahbenton 7y ago
Recommended products: Alexa
mercules 7y ago
It's probably part of the reading material for military cybersec.
mises 7y ago
It recommended me "20 ORANGE SNAPPY GRIP -Bucket Handles -Mining-Gold Prospecting-Gardening" under the customers also bought... I guess I'm just not leet enough. This in spite of the fact that I've actually bought a few external wifi adapters from amazon.
csomar 7y ago
No kidding. I got the same: https://imgur.com/a/jroD1Ji https://imgur.com/a/jroD1Ji
quickthrower2 7y ago
More interesting is what the people who will go to their local book store to buy it with cash will also buy, but we'll never know.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jonahbenton 7y ago

I really only want read the story told by Snowden's bank accounts and use of cash. Pretty sure this isn't that.

hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
What are you implying?
- jonahbenton 7y ago
  Sources and uses of funds are a much more reliable indicator of who someone is, who their friends are, and what they believe than the stories they publicly vocalize to themselves and others.
  - efdee 7y ago
    What are you implying, really?
    - sigzero 7y ago
      That he is indeed a traitor maybe?
    - jonathanstrange 7y ago
      It doesn't matter what he says anyway. You'd need to see his bank account to get the real picture.
      - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
        Are you implying you've seen it?
        jonathanstrange 7y ago
        I'm being sarcastic. By "he" I mean jonahbenton's bank account.

Noxmiles 7y ago

Does anyone know how much money he gets from every book / ebook? I think buying it is, at least for some people, very much a support Snowden thought.

ramraj07 7y ago
I vaguely remember 10% as a ballpark for most authors
- iandinwoodie 7y ago
  What happens to the other 90%? Is this typical for book authors?
  - faet 7y ago
    It is very typical. Assuming Print on Demand w/ amazon. He's not doing that but we'll just assume to keep it easy. And list price of $24 Amazon takes $5 to print Amazon takes $9.60 royalty That leaves $9.40 or 40% available. Of that Macmillan takes their cut to cover editing, covers, advertising, etc. And what is left is probably $2.40 for each sale. For Self published folks (going eBooks this time). Assuming you list for $10 and get a 70% royalty from amazon. You'll earn $7 for each sale. But, then once you factor in advertising (on amazon which goes to amazon), your earnings for each book drop to maybe a 5-30% royalty range. And that assumes you can sell your book for $10, which most self published cannot. I have friends who sell $10k worth of eBooks/mo who make $2k/mo. So 80% goes to amazon and 20% goes to them.
    - iandinwoodie 7y ago
      That's insane. Thank you for the detailed insight.
    - anchpop 7y ago
      He's using a traditional publisher which means he likely got a decent advance. Even if he didn't, he was likely able to negotiate a better deal than most authors because of his fame

apercu 7y ago

<RANT>US expatriates are the only expats in the world that have to file annual taxes (and report foreign bank accounts). It's ridiculous for most of us (99% are not tax exiles or tax evaders, we just left the USA for our own reasons). </RANT> I wonder if Snowden files taxes?

mieseratte 7y ago
> US expatriates are the only expats in the world that have to file annual taxes Did Eritrea cleanup their act?
teddyuk 7y ago
Can you give up your american passport and then stop or do you have to do it for the rest of your life?
- ummwhat 7y ago
  It costs over a grand to quit the club known as "citizenship" you're going to want citizenship in wherever you reside first when you give up US citizenship (you could choose to be stateless, but that makes more problems than it solves). Doing this does not absolve you of existing debts in the eyes of the IRS. And finally, you'll be interviewed at the consulate and if your stated reason for giving up citizenship is "the overseas tax thing", you'll be denied a visa if you ever want to visit the US again.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    Did you actually mean 1.000.000 (a thousand grand) or did you mean 1000. > you'll be denied a visa if you ever want to visit the US again. Do you have a source for this?
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    Apparently, you can run for any government office in a foreign state and it immediately nullifies your US citizenship. I have only heard this as rumour, and I don't have time to confirm / deny this, but it may be worth looking into.

octosphere 7y ago

I'm going to 'recycle' an older comment of mine, pertaining to the comments about the book. The original comment can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363 I was annoyed that someone called Ed Snowden a 'Traitor'. Hopefully it gets a bit more recognition in this thread __________________________________ For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him. Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...

tomatotomato37 7y ago
Wow, I thought Binney was just some random analysist news shows brought on to discredit the 2016 hacking thing. Didn't realize he was the key catalyst for the Snowden leak after the government shafted him when he tried to reveal the same NSA overreach using the "proper" channels.
- ev0lv 7y ago
  Bill Binney is an American patriot and a hero.
dx87 7y ago
Honestly, saying that the NSA has done maybe one useful thing in its entire existence and that everything it does could be replaced by "simple detective work" just shows you to be incredibly uninformed and ignorant about what the job of the NSA actually is.

matt_morgan 7y ago

Or how about from a library. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=edward+snowden+permanent+record https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=edward...

microcolonel 7y ago
Given that there are like... seven copies in U.S. libraries, I think that's probably terrible advice.
- geofft 7y ago
  Won't they order more on request? I thought that's how libraries work. Also there are more than seven copies on order in the Brooklyn library system alone: https://borrow.bklynlibrary.org/r1s/iii/encore/record/C__Rb12228423 https://borrow.bklynlibrary.org/r1s/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1...
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Since Amazon says it's not available until September 17th and you can only pre-order it now, I think probably even those 7 are records inaccurately registered before the book is actually there, and there are probably 0! Or did some libraries get the book earlier than Amazon can? Possible, but my guess is not.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Fair enough! I was thrown off the fact that it hasn't been released by the Worldcat page saying that there were three editions. I assumed that it was not possible to have data quality issues of that magnitude.
    - jrochkind1 7y ago
      Oh, Worldcat data quality is definitely very problematic. At it's best, it definitely doesn't represent _every_ library copy. It requires libraries to register their copies with the central database. All of these libraries are different organizations with different software, at varying stages of 'legacy', trying to interoperate with each other, usually without very well-resourced IT teams. Then WorldCat has got to figure out when copies at different libraries are copies of the "same" thing, and what "same" means. The worldcat database is very useful, but it certainly has data quality problems. Amazon also says "4 formats and editions": hardcover, paperback, kindle, audiobook. Technically I'd say these are "formats" not "editions" -- the text is the same in each, although you might consider the audiobook a separate "edition" maybe, as it's not text at all, it's a whole different sort of thing. (And the Amazon UI hides it behind a 'more' link, although still just referring to the whole list as "4 formats and editions"). I'd guess Worldcat knows 3 of those 4 -- maybe all except kindle. Worldcat, like Amazon, is not really capable of distinguishing "editions" from "formats". I'm not sure I'd consider the "3 editions" a "data quality" error exactly, in this case. It does point to some of the complexities of figuring out what's out there in the bibliographic universe, and how to model it in a consistent way that makes sense to users. (What _is_ an edition vs a format anyway?). Amazon gets data and corrections from people trying to sell books there providing some data entry/correction labor for free. And Amazon's website and data are _core_ to their business. As well as from other DBs like ISBN. Worldcat has to try to piece things together from a bunch of disorganized under-funded non-IT-expert nonprofits, who may consider "getting good data to WorldCat" not the highest among competing priorities, along with other DBs like ISBN. Neither WorldCat nor Amazon are _great_ at determining "what separate editions/formats exist of this thing, and how do they relate to each other" in the general case. Cause it's a hard problem. Amazon does well enough to sell books apparently. They each have strengths and weaknesses. For things published decades before Amazon existed and/or no longer in print, WorldCat will do better in some ways.

apexalpha 7y ago

I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.

kevando 7y ago
For me in the US I went from talking like a lunatic to talking about yesterday’s news. Frustrating to say the least.
jonahbenton 7y ago
Is that the case for both govt and private corporate surveillance? How widespread is the use of Alexa in your area?
- ptero 7y ago
  The key difference is that you can decide not to buy corporate products you do not want, but have to comply with the laws. I am a lot less concerned about stupid things done by a majority for convenience (and I can choose whether to do participate or not) than about the law that forces the same stupidity down my throat. My 2c.
  - kareemm 7y ago
    The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate database, identifying you using photo recognition algorithms and your location using the home's address, and using that information to sell you things.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      > using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happen here" they can just ignore the possibility. Then it turns out that that sometimes it can. Privacy isn't just about the world as it stands today. Privacy is an acknowledgement that the present and the future are linked and that the future may be profoundly different from today. People aggressively selling you things is more harassment.

stef25 7y ago

Before his story broke there was an AMA on Reddit about govt surveillance, I'm 90% this was Snowden. Does anyone else remember this? The person spoke of these things happening in ways we "couldn't imagine". People were guessing at what he meant and his responses were mostly "it's much worse". One redditor posted some highly technical speculations to which the author responded "you're getting close". Reddit's search isn't good enough to retrieve this but I would LOVE to find that post again.

INTPenis 7y ago
Funny enough Google has great tools for searching within that time period. Snowden broke around Q1 2013 right? So I tried searching from Q4 2012 to Q1 2014 and the first thing that came up on government surveillance was actually this[1]. Which I assume is not what you meant but it's pretty early in the timeline of Snowden's revelations. Setting the timeline to 2012-01-01 - 2013-07-03 is just before Greenwald broke Snowden's story and those results are very different. Interspersed are results that were likely updated in Google's index after july 3rd so there are some false positives so to speak. You'd have to browse more of those results. I've only got 3 pages in.[2] Edit: Actually this IAmA from Cory Doctorow could be it.[3] He's definitely in the know about what the government is capable of and speaking from that experience. Which pretty much predicts Snowden's revelations. Of course I remember when AT&T was implicated in mass surveillance by a former employee back around 2004, that story just got lost in the ether. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_... 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22IAmA%22+government+surveillance&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/2012,cd_max:7/4/2013&ei=TyJ5XeX6EICDk74P-JawyAo&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwil3pjemcnkAhWAwcQBHXgLDKkQ8NMDCJkB&biw=1527&bih=1336 https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22IAmA%22+g... 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11bm9i/iam_cory_doctorow_writer_blogger_and_activist_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11bm9i/iam_cory_docto...
- stef25 7y ago
  It was an anonymous AMA, author specifically stated he was "inside" so not Doctorow

fasinfranco 7y ago

Customers who bought this item also bought: YubiKey

hsavit1 7y ago

Any links posted to amazon.com from HN should be to smile.amazon.com -> .5% of your purchase will be donated to a clarity of your choice.

irq11 7y ago
Better yet, don’t buy the book, and donate the money you would have spent to charity.
- sousavdouglas 7y ago
  okay
- Zelphyr 7y ago
  Can't we do both?
  - irq11 7y ago
    Nope. Because then you could donate the price of two books, and not buy one!
NilsIRL 7y ago
I wouldn't see any reason not to. Though please keep in mind that smile.amazon.com is a marketing stunt. Firstly, it makes people less reluctant to buy increasing Amazon's revenue and secondly, Amazon is donating the money, so they get to pay less tax.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

We were called "paranoid lunatics" even when we started speaking about ECHELON in the '90ies. Same with the clipper chip. Same with TPM/DRM/ME. Same with Internet centralization. It's worth asking why the general public keeps trusting authorities and distrusts techies, even those among us with a career in security.

berdon 7y ago
The answer seems straight forward. The term "authorities" comes with the assumption that they're the ones "leading". We've been taught for most of our lives the person up-front (parent, teacher, president) is always right and the vast majority of people won't question that.
vaylian 7y ago
Good question. There are probably similar psychological mechanisms at play when you try to explain to smokers why their habits are bad.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
qroshan 7y ago
I'll trust techies the day they actually are in the job of protecting people and have to deal with real danger of bad actors continuously trying to blow up Western democracies. It's funny the tech/security/sysadmin guys complain that their work is appreciated only when things go wrong, but fail to give the same benefit of the doubt for US law and order.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Maybe the "US law and order" shouldn't be acting like Stazi all the time and spying on citizens and tracking them without warrants.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  The FBI sat on incriminating info about Epstein for years and even still has yet to raid his New Mexico ranch for evidence. Given that he had damaging info on many people with their hands directly on the levers of power in "Western democracies" you'll have to excuse my skepticism that these agencies are acting in the interest of their common people.

pdm55 7y ago

Another new book just published on data privacy: Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age Hardcover – September 10, 2019 by Brad Smith (Author), Carol Ann Browne (Author), Bill Gates (Foreword) https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Weapons-Promise-Peril-Digital/dp/1984877712 https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Weapons-Promise-Peril-Digital/d...

dredmorbius 7y ago
The contrast between Brad Smith's title, and Gates's The Road Ahead (1996), speaks worlds. (Gates writes a foreward to Smith's book. I've not yet seen it.)

pastor_elm 7y ago

This guy is such a fame hog. Do you really need a full page face shot on the cover of your book? C'mon dawg. As a side note, I wonder if he feels obligated to keep the stubble goatee since it's part of 'his look.'

xparco 7y ago

Snowden is a cartoon psyop like Manning and others. They give hope to cubicle slaves.

empath75 7y ago

I think the administration badly, badly mishandled Snowden and Assange, and allowed Russia to coopt them by isolating and threatening them. If they had treated them as whistleblowers and journalists (even if they had nefarious motivations), they could have kept them in "the west" instead of driving them into the arms of Russia. I don't believe that Assange was a Russian agent at the beginning but he was surely one by the time of the 2016 election. There's a reason we have laws around a free speech and a free press-- they make the country stronger, even if they make it harder to govern.

not_a_cop75 7y ago
An agent? No. But friendly towards those friendly to him? Who in the world doesn't do that? After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Seems like a difference without a distinction, and I'm not even sure it's correct. If he's acting in the interest of Russia, he's a Russian agent.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    The distinction is responsibility. If he were operating under orders from Russia, Russia bears ultimate responsibility for his actions. If they have no control over him and his actions merely benefit them, he bears responsibility for his own actions.
  - not_a_cop75 7y ago
    Going by that standard, 95% of all Russian peasant farmers are "Russian Agents" and that's pure ridiculousness from any angle.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      >Going by that standard, 95% of all Russian peasant farmers are "Russian Agents" and that's pure ridiculousness from any angle. Oh please, you're the one being ridiculous. I think we all know there's a line between farming for the good of civilization and actively working to push an agenda. C'mon.

milquetoastaf 7y ago

Snowden will absolutely be revealed as a HUMINT asset. I am extremely grateful for his revelations but I always found his justification for his actions to be rather flimsy. He worked as a CIA operative and then NSA contractor helping build global surveillance infrastructure (as well as allegedly designating targets for its use) but only realized his actions were unethical because they spied on US citizens and lied about it? What about all the other people he spied on or stripped of their privacy and rights? They don't count because they weren't born on the right soil? Suddenly lying becomes an ethical issue for someone who worked in the espionage world... He took a lot more documents than just the NSA surveillance disclosures. Thousands of emails, IMs, and other correspondence between DoD officials unrelated to NSA that blew several agents cover. These fell into the hands of Russian and Chinese agencies..somehow

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

This made me realize I have heard ZERO news on Assange after his arrest, and the likelihood of him being tortured and rendered and railroaded of course means our nation (US) of laws and rights is a sham. Don't tell me it's boring, this should be a sideshow for the media like OJ. Rape trial? Russian meddling? Little guy vs the government? International intrigue? Crickets. A truly independent media would be tracking his case to make sure due process is followed, but we all know what media is in the age of corporate conglomeration and oligarchy.

nabla9 7y ago
He is sitting his 50 week sentence in HM Prison Belmarsh in UK and has access to lawyers. Media is tracking his case. There is nothing to report. There are people who spew up conspiracy theories on the spot when they have not heard anything, from pure ignorance, yet they speak ill of mainstream media.
- IronWolve 7y ago
  Hes also sitting in the medical ward due to multiple issues, including mental issues. I dont think the news wants to report on his declining health.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    How did you learn that?
- seppin 7y ago
  > There are people who spew up conspiracy theories on the spot when they have not heard anything, from pure ignorance, yet they speak ill of mainstream media. It's much easier than knowing what you're talking about.
- reeves23423 7y ago
  If they are tracking where is the news about Jullian Assange.
7y ago

OrgNet 7y ago

anyway to avoid the middle man ?

simsla 7y ago
Email him? He might send it to you for free. Or just pay the middleman, and he'll get paid too.

jjtheblunt 7y ago

I genuinely don't understand why Snowden is treated as more shocking than things published in the open by James Bamford years earlier. https://www.amazon.com/James-Bamford/e/B000APPIUM/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 https://www.amazon.com/James-Bamford/e/B000APPIUM/ref=dp_byl...

wannabcodr 7y ago

Anyone have a link to steal and read the book for free? I don’t support his cause but wouldn’t mind reading the book. Yes I’m admitting to intent to pirating Ed Snowden’s book. It’s not like I’d be stealing sensitive military secrets and selling them to Omidyar for a pledge up to $250MM. How many Russian speaking people were in his orbit in Hawaii from 2011-2013? How many of them had the operational capacity to pull off a conspiracy to guide Ed to Mother Russia undetected?

Synaesthesia 7y ago
How about you answer some of your own questions.
- wannabcodr 7y ago
  1) I don’t have a clean link to the book 2) Yes Russian speaking folks are in our IC, military, private sector etc. and are certain to have been in his orbit 3) someone could ask mr Omidyar Given his connections to Booz and his level of intelligence (punahou grad along with Obama etc) He could be a total patriot at heart and it would be difficult to know the difference. Shit, maybe Pierre is a triple agent, a regular Bond good guy. But I’ll tell ya when I heard he bought up the secrets I was sure at that moment that he is either a total patriot or is part of a conspiracy. Probably just an opportunist though. Kind of like the geniuses who foresaw bitcoin’s rise.
  - Synaesthesia 7y ago
    So, all speculation? I mean based on what he has released he's an american patriot. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary. Of course the US govt will try smear him and cover up after he exposed their actions.
    - wannabcodr 7y ago
      It’s impossible to tell without access to the full trove. He could be releasing things in a way that either minimizes or maximizes damage (or anywhere in between) to the US. Yes, we can only speculate. I’m not in the intelligence community and those who are aren’t likely to voice things publicly. The whole situation seems odd. A calculating genius spends months planning what is ostensibly a haphazard plan to wind up in Russia supposedly not by choice? Then Omidyar also in Hawaii and connected to Booz buys up the secrets. Seems odd to me. If Mr. Omidyar were patriotic maybe he would have bought up the secrets and kept 100% of them private, thus extending the oath of secrecy that military officers all take. Mr. Omidyar has come forward as an agent of the free press, not as a sworn patriotic military officer. Difficult to tell his motivations from the outside yet worthy of speculation.

mengibar10 7y ago

I wonder what if he would mention anything about 5G in the book. As far as I understand, all the fuss US making against Huawei is actually due to its (future) crippling of its eavesdropping capability. Not that 5G is a panacea for that but Huawei is augmenting their equipments against such attacks, and they will be the main supplier.

cwkoss 7y ago
This is interesting. Does anyone have further reading to recommend about this?
- mengibar10 7y ago
  https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/huawei-calls-the-us-intel-communitys-bluff/ https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/huawei-calls-the-u...

dblohm7 7y ago

Are his broken glasses just a prop at this point? Dude, you can buy new frames in Russia!

robmiller 7y ago

Seems odd that every picture of Edward Snowden shows one of the nose pads on his glasses missing.

saalweachter 7y ago
That does bug me now, having just looked at a lot of pictures, but it does appear you can find pictures where this is not the case, eg, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/national-security-agency-contractor-edward-snowden-release-memoir-1228550 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/national-security-age...
- robmiller 7y ago
  I did a photo search too and decided to use "every" anyway. But hey, I got you to investigate it yourself and you'd have to agree on "most."
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    It also made me stumble across his interview from a couple years back talking about the "why" but I didn't dig enough to find out of the unbroken glasses are purely a time-series thing, or if he finally got tired of it and got his glasses fixed / got new glasses.

YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago

Snowden is being prosecuted for being first to reveal things that everyone knows now

Clubber 7y ago

Just in case you read this, thanks, Edward Snowden. You left it all on the line to help us. The fact that we're still talking about it 6+ years later shows it's importance.

einpoklum 7y ago

A bit ironic that it's suggested to us to buy the book through Amazon, a cloud services provider for the CIA (and otherwise shady mega-corporation) See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

autoexec 7y ago
Amazon controls so much of the internet that it's increasingly hard for anyone to avoid them. The deal they struck is far more involved than your typical company using AWS, but I wouldn't look to Amazon's customers to make any assumptions about Amazon's motivations beyond their lust for more money. The reality is that this book doesn't pose any meaningful threat to the US government's mass surveillance programs and having impotent critiques of the US Government openly available as opposed to outright banned gives us a false sense of security in our freedoms.

ordinaryperson 7y ago

Unpopular opinion destined to attract downvotes but: IMHO the NSA spying program was outrageous...for the colossal waste of money and time it was. First, if you're really worried about privacy, why is it not a DEFCON 1 outrage that state DMVs are selling your info to private investigators? [1] Or if you're really worried about your personal liberty, isn't your local police force a greater threat then NSA eavesdroppers? Back in 2013 the NSA claimed it was spying on 29 petabytes of internet data (out of 1826) a day [2], or 1.6%. That's both a trivial amount of overall traffic and an insanely large dataset at the same time (since it accumulates every day). Isn't a big chunk of that traffic encrypted? Even if it's not, how do you find terrorists in that data? Do they self-identify? Even if they use a trivial substitution cipher ('cupcakes' instead of 'bombs') it would evade these billion-dollar supercomputers. To me the NSA's spying program was security theater akin to airport security: expensive machines that don't even catch terrorists. They fail their own internal tests 95% of the time! [3]. I personally would like to know what algorithms the NSA was using to successfully identify terrorist data in exobytes of (possibly encrypted) datasets. Sounds like billions spent on airport scanners to me. Finally, on a political level, Snowden seems like a massive hypocrite to me for hiding in China, which harvests the organs of political prisoners [4] and Russia, which routinely assassinates political opponents and journalists [5]. But he's mad that what, the US was reading his Gmail? I realize he's super popular among the HN crowd and the libertarians for whom all gov't surveillance is evil but I, for one, am not a Snowden admirer. Downvote away. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-private-investigators-making-millions-of-dollars https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-hunger-demands-29-petabytes-of-data-a-day/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-hunger-demands-29-petabyte... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests-organs-detainees-tribunal-concludes-n1018646 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests... [5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-shows-us-what-happens-to-enemies-of-the-people-bloodied-heads-murdered-reporters-poisoned-dissidents https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-shows-us-what-happens-t...

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the 1st humanity king, we should remember!

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