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Quite frankly, Edward Snowden is the only person I can think of that is “beyond reproach”. He put his life on the line to let other people (us) know about what

Quite frankly, Edward Snowden is the only person I can think of that is “beyond reproach”. He put his life on the line to let other people (us) know about what was happening. He gave us the option to choose our fate. That’s more than anyone in the government did for us. We chose to do very little, but that’s in us.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cm2187 7y ago
I am a big Snowden supporter but I wouldn’t go as far as “beyond reproach”. A whistle blower is seeing wrongdoing, and reporting it. What he did instead is grab all the files he could get hold of, send them to journalists and tell them “I know there is wrongdoing there, find it among all this legitimately secret stuff that should have never left the NSA”. You can see why the NSA would find the approach more than cavalier. I think given how it affected the public debate, he should certainly be given leniency if not pardon. But that is not to say he did nothing wrong.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  What he did instead is grab all the files he could get hold of This is addressed in the book.
- emilsedgh 7y ago
  How else would you handle it?
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Only leak the files that are relevant.
    - pepesza 7y ago
      Technically unfeasible considering how much time he had to go through those docs (likely - very little).
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        He had been collecting the documents for months even before the incident that he says prompted him to blow the whistle. He knew that detailed lists of Chinese targets were not needed to blow the whistle on phone metadata collection, but he grabbed those lists anyway and immediately showed them to the SCMP.
    - emilsedgh 7y ago
      By releasing it to journalists he: * Removed the target from his back. At this point, all his value is "to be made of an example" not "a former operative with incredibly sensitive information, potentially worth neutralizing" * Recused himself from being a political player like Assange wanted to be. Also, who says he is a good judge to make the right call for each document? Journalists can do a far far better job of responsibly handling the material, with enough time, resources and expertise to investigate the material, even get in touch with the government, etc. Doing it personally would've been incredibly irresponsible and actually a power-play for personal gain not whistle-blowing for the better.
      - cm2187 7y ago
        If he is not a good judge for what document supports wrong doing, then he is not a whistle blower in the first place. And I am not suggesting he is not. I have no doubt that he knew what a compromising document looked like.
      - GVIrish 7y ago
        Thing is, that by stealing and releasing documents he did not read (by his own admission) he could not have known what collateral damage he would've done to US and allied intelligence capabilities. One might argue that any damage to intelligence interests is superceded by the public's interests in learning about abuses, but had he made a more targeted leak collateral damage might not have been an issue. Trusting journalists to do the job is a cop out. He took the action of taking the documents, then foisted responsibility on someone else. And make no mistake, intelligence services spy on journalists and have compromised journalists. Snowden had no way of knowing whether other intelligence agencies could get to what he gave the various media outlets. Even some carelessness on their part could have revealed secrets to others.
        emilsedgh 7y ago
        I actually believe he read them all personally. It's just that he didn't make the judgement call to decide which one to release. It was Chelsea Manning who a did dump without reading them first.
    - nullc 7y ago
      I think you miss how mind-numbingly boring all this stuff is. The evil is in the overarching character of the programs and infrastructure -- not the minutia. But without seeing the minutia you cannot see the program. Imagine that the year is 1942 and someone leaks you a stack of bookkeeping records from some german labor camp in poland. In it, the records account for gassing prisoners by the truckload, but to your eyes it's all just just the cryptic numbers and administrative filler of any complex bureaucracy. To make any sense of it, you need many layers back of the surrounding documentation-- not just to establish what you're looking at, but to establish what you're not looking at. Communication that shows that the data is real, not an exercise, that the prisoners are being killed rather than that the accounting is just covering deaths from natural causes, that it's really a big intentional program sponsored from on-high and not just a fluke where a local administrator or two went nuts. Without a wealth of supporting material it would be easy to dismiss Snowden's reports as "sure well, there was some overreach here and there. It wasn't officially sanctioned and the relevant parties have been sacked, James Clapper had no idea and did not perjure himself and we haven't been systematically lying to the public for a decade." In a world where the NSA was accountable to the public, Snowden would only have to reveal enough to force them to account and disclose and continued inquiry would unearth the rest. But we do not live in that world: The NSA's actions are not open to public inquiry. One shot is all we got for any real transparency into the mass surveillance apparatus. Consider the byzantine dismissals that Jewel v. NSA experienced. ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-nsa-mass-spying-citing-secrecy-claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-... ) It seemed pretty obvious to me that Snowden purposefully obfuscated what documents he took by accessing everything-- a fact you seem to have exploited in a number of posts to exaggerate the scope of the documents he took, according to our best understanding of his actions per the journalists he worked with-- in order to create a situation where the administration's ability to tell additional lies to cover up the situation would be limited by the risk that somewhere in the stash Snowden had a document which blew the latest lie apart. For another example: There is an absurd number of patents filed on most of the technical tools being used for the mass surveillance on the internet-- and their feature sets often end up leaked in product documentation and internet standards. They're not even particularly well hidden, some with co-authors who's linked in pages brag about their TS/SCI and work in intelligence... Yet, pre-snowden, people pointing to this wealth of details even combined with first hand accounts of how it was deployed, were just treated like kooks. Without the ability to open a real inquiry it isn't enough to prove that something suspicious is up, the proof must be utterly overwhelming to have a meaningful effect.
- otalp 7y ago
  Snowden's trigger was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath about mass surveillance to Congress when specifically asked about blind data collection. When the head of the organisation commits federal crimes without reproach(he was not prosecuted after the details were revealed), who are you supposed to report to except the public?
  - GVIrish 7y ago
    And Snowden was stealing files months before that happened. Maybe Snowden was on the fence about leaking and Clapper's lie pushed him over the edge. Or maybe it was what convinced him he was right. But he had already been taking documents by the time Clapper got in front of Congress according to the unclassified house intelligence report on Snowden.
    - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
      He'd also been denied some lateral movement on teams / projects from what i've heard. I think it's easy to reframe all his actions into hero worship but we have to acknowledge that his original motivations may not have been the end results we see today.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    I am not arguing against reporting wrongdoing, I am arguing against leaking secret files that have nothing to do with these wrongdoings.
    - mmrezaie 7y ago
      The claim is so big that I think without those files he would have looked and treated as just another conspiracy theorist.
      - spindoctor 7y ago
        So laws exist, but people don't always adhere to the law for reasons like ignorance and malicious intent. There are also laws which are bad laws & regulation, easily exploitable by clever people, financially lucrative in some cases. The intelligence services have a difficult task, they need to be on top of their game so they need to know everything and try to prevent problems snowballing unless its not particularly harmful and could be quite educational for future improvement. You have a blank sheet of paper, what would you do to maintain or reduce harm to society? I say this as someone who has met Andrew Parker, Stella Rimmington and Jonathon Evans and is wise to their ways but not someone who has signed the official secrets but has arguably an "autistic" interest in secrecy and quantifying all walks of life.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I would say beyond reproach is apt since the misbehavior lies with the agencies and there was no channel to prevent the crimes in question. The punishment of Snwoden cannot be determined as long as there is no consequence and assesment for the misbehavior of agencies. You cannot determine whether it was justified to leak the info if the crimes committed were not investigated. It is a basic protection allegation to focus the discussion on the misbehavior of Snowden. This is the same in every case government abuse. Don't defend Snowden, accuse the agencies in question instead. Because that is the topic. The defense will build itself. Other approaches will fail as they did so often before. It doesn't matter if justified or not. So the question about leniency is the wrong one.
- brbrodude 7y ago
  What sucks is that the 'wrong' of small people are always so easily seem and easy to point the finger however small it is, the wrong done by actual power holders, which will impact innumerable people, which lays ground for systemic abuse, catastrophic failure(e.g.: Nassim Taleb's "ruin problems") etc are always too much to grasp and get proportionally much less attention. In Brazil what we now have I can't describe another way if not societal insanity, all the real problems are probably "too much", too complex, people have decided to stop facing them and decided regressing to fetish, cliches, downright modern superstitions instead. Some weeks ago an Avengers comic with a gay kiss panel generated more commotion than a 8 year old shot by police(which in itself would be a sign of the obvious much bigger systemic problems we're not properly dealing with. We're all fucked.
- empath75 7y ago
  Nobody is beyond reproach and anybody that is going to blow the whistle on something is almost always going to have an ulterior motive. That doesn’t mean we should ignore them, though.
mcv 7y ago
I consider Snowden the gold standard of government whistle blowers. Manning tried to do a good thing but was sloppy and trusted Assange a bit too much. I admired Assange during the early days of Wikileaks, but I really can't stand his grand standing. Before Snowden, people like Thomas Drake tried to address similar issues but got nowhere. If the people in power don't like people like Snowden shining a light on their crimes, maybe they shouldn't be committing those crimes to begin with. There needs to be proper congressional oversight of these things. When that doesn't exist, it becomes the duty of the individual people involved in the government to inform the people about what the government is doing, and that's exactly what Snowden did. Not eagerly, and he paid a heavy price for it, but he recognised it as necessary and did what needed to be done.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Whistle blowing is a social service. Assange tried to do something that stepped outside nearly every social rule we have and challenged our bedrock assumptions about journalism and free speech... He did that irresponsibly and may have harmed people, but I admire the effort. He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    > He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is. I guess we watch different Bond movies when you have guys like Kim Jong-un running some shows out there, having concentration camps and killing their brothers with nerve agents on the airports
    - mcv 7y ago
      That's more of a real villain. To be a Bond villain, you need more grand standing and scenery chewing. The biggest real villains prefer to do their damage quietly without anyone noticing, while Bond villains make for a better story.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Kim Jong is too wrapped up trying to keep power back home that he can't make a German/European crazy hair brained scheme to try and take over the world. Building an informant culture in your populace and threatening collective gulagging on the rebel's family doesn't quite have the same flair as tying the rebel to a table with a slow moving laser aimed at his junk. Do you expect me to talk? No Mr Bond! I expect you to die!
agumonkey 7y ago
Is there a path between taking the hit fully and alone and not divulging ? A way to store information outside, and maybe think about it and how to use it to have an effect on policies without causing the source to suffer. Stealth hack in a way.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  That sounds like the "improve from the inside" argument, e.g. keep your trap shut until you've managed to attain a position power to solve the problem you've got. Whether or not you feel that is feasible or appropriate is, ultimately, going to require insider knowledge and experience. While I do have some experience with BAH (painfully apathetic[0]), I've never worked for the NSA so I can't say whether that is a plausible alternative to Snowden's action. [0] - FWIW, we had a number of employees passing out promotional religious literature around the office. I'd raised some concern about it, basically should we be worried about legal trouble, and was told to keep my concerns to myself. Among the reasons I didn't last a month in that circle of hell.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I meant externally. But in a slow and strategic manner. Just so the people involved may avoid taking the hit like many whistle blower do.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 7y ago

I am a big Snowden supporter but I wouldn’t go as far as “beyond reproach”. A whistle blower is seeing wrongdoing, and reporting it. What he did instead is grab all the files he could get hold of, send them to journalists and tell them “I know there is wrongdoing there, find it among all this legitimately secret stuff that should have never left the NSA”. You can see why the NSA would find the approach more than cavalier. I think given how it affected the public debate, he should certainly be given leniency if not pardon. But that is not to say he did nothing wrong.

goatinaboat 7y ago
What he did instead is grab all the files he could get hold of This is addressed in the book.
emilsedgh 7y ago
How else would you handle it?
- cm2187 7y ago
  Only leak the files that are relevant.
  - pepesza 7y ago
    Technically unfeasible considering how much time he had to go through those docs (likely - very little).
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      He had been collecting the documents for months even before the incident that he says prompted him to blow the whistle. He knew that detailed lists of Chinese targets were not needed to blow the whistle on phone metadata collection, but he grabbed those lists anyway and immediately showed them to the SCMP.
  - emilsedgh 7y ago
    By releasing it to journalists he: * Removed the target from his back. At this point, all his value is "to be made of an example" not "a former operative with incredibly sensitive information, potentially worth neutralizing" * Recused himself from being a political player like Assange wanted to be. Also, who says he is a good judge to make the right call for each document? Journalists can do a far far better job of responsibly handling the material, with enough time, resources and expertise to investigate the material, even get in touch with the government, etc. Doing it personally would've been incredibly irresponsible and actually a power-play for personal gain not whistle-blowing for the better.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      If he is not a good judge for what document supports wrong doing, then he is not a whistle blower in the first place. And I am not suggesting he is not. I have no doubt that he knew what a compromising document looked like.
    - GVIrish 7y ago
      Thing is, that by stealing and releasing documents he did not read (by his own admission) he could not have known what collateral damage he would've done to US and allied intelligence capabilities. One might argue that any damage to intelligence interests is superceded by the public's interests in learning about abuses, but had he made a more targeted leak collateral damage might not have been an issue. Trusting journalists to do the job is a cop out. He took the action of taking the documents, then foisted responsibility on someone else. And make no mistake, intelligence services spy on journalists and have compromised journalists. Snowden had no way of knowing whether other intelligence agencies could get to what he gave the various media outlets. Even some carelessness on their part could have revealed secrets to others.
      - emilsedgh 7y ago
        I actually believe he read them all personally. It's just that he didn't make the judgement call to decide which one to release. It was Chelsea Manning who a did dump without reading them first.
  - nullc 7y ago
    I think you miss how mind-numbingly boring all this stuff is. The evil is in the overarching character of the programs and infrastructure -- not the minutia. But without seeing the minutia you cannot see the program. Imagine that the year is 1942 and someone leaks you a stack of bookkeeping records from some german labor camp in poland. In it, the records account for gassing prisoners by the truckload, but to your eyes it's all just just the cryptic numbers and administrative filler of any complex bureaucracy. To make any sense of it, you need many layers back of the surrounding documentation-- not just to establish what you're looking at, but to establish what you're not looking at. Communication that shows that the data is real, not an exercise, that the prisoners are being killed rather than that the accounting is just covering deaths from natural causes, that it's really a big intentional program sponsored from on-high and not just a fluke where a local administrator or two went nuts. Without a wealth of supporting material it would be easy to dismiss Snowden's reports as "sure well, there was some overreach here and there. It wasn't officially sanctioned and the relevant parties have been sacked, James Clapper had no idea and did not perjure himself and we haven't been systematically lying to the public for a decade." In a world where the NSA was accountable to the public, Snowden would only have to reveal enough to force them to account and disclose and continued inquiry would unearth the rest. But we do not live in that world: The NSA's actions are not open to public inquiry. One shot is all we got for any real transparency into the mass surveillance apparatus. Consider the byzantine dismissals that Jewel v. NSA experienced. ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-nsa-mass-spying-citing-secrecy-claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-... ) It seemed pretty obvious to me that Snowden purposefully obfuscated what documents he took by accessing everything-- a fact you seem to have exploited in a number of posts to exaggerate the scope of the documents he took, according to our best understanding of his actions per the journalists he worked with-- in order to create a situation where the administration's ability to tell additional lies to cover up the situation would be limited by the risk that somewhere in the stash Snowden had a document which blew the latest lie apart. For another example: There is an absurd number of patents filed on most of the technical tools being used for the mass surveillance on the internet-- and their feature sets often end up leaked in product documentation and internet standards. They're not even particularly well hidden, some with co-authors who's linked in pages brag about their TS/SCI and work in intelligence... Yet, pre-snowden, people pointing to this wealth of details even combined with first hand accounts of how it was deployed, were just treated like kooks. Without the ability to open a real inquiry it isn't enough to prove that something suspicious is up, the proof must be utterly overwhelming to have a meaningful effect.
otalp 7y ago
Snowden's trigger was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath about mass surveillance to Congress when specifically asked about blind data collection. When the head of the organisation commits federal crimes without reproach(he was not prosecuted after the details were revealed), who are you supposed to report to except the public?
- GVIrish 7y ago
  And Snowden was stealing files months before that happened. Maybe Snowden was on the fence about leaking and Clapper's lie pushed him over the edge. Or maybe it was what convinced him he was right. But he had already been taking documents by the time Clapper got in front of Congress according to the unclassified house intelligence report on Snowden.
  - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
    He'd also been denied some lateral movement on teams / projects from what i've heard. I think it's easy to reframe all his actions into hero worship but we have to acknowledge that his original motivations may not have been the end results we see today.
- cm2187 7y ago
  I am not arguing against reporting wrongdoing, I am arguing against leaking secret files that have nothing to do with these wrongdoings.
  - mmrezaie 7y ago
    The claim is so big that I think without those files he would have looked and treated as just another conspiracy theorist.
    - spindoctor 7y ago
      So laws exist, but people don't always adhere to the law for reasons like ignorance and malicious intent. There are also laws which are bad laws & regulation, easily exploitable by clever people, financially lucrative in some cases. The intelligence services have a difficult task, they need to be on top of their game so they need to know everything and try to prevent problems snowballing unless its not particularly harmful and could be quite educational for future improvement. You have a blank sheet of paper, what would you do to maintain or reduce harm to society? I say this as someone who has met Andrew Parker, Stella Rimmington and Jonathon Evans and is wise to their ways but not someone who has signed the official secrets but has arguably an "autistic" interest in secrecy and quantifying all walks of life.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I would say beyond reproach is apt since the misbehavior lies with the agencies and there was no channel to prevent the crimes in question. The punishment of Snwoden cannot be determined as long as there is no consequence and assesment for the misbehavior of agencies. You cannot determine whether it was justified to leak the info if the crimes committed were not investigated. It is a basic protection allegation to focus the discussion on the misbehavior of Snowden. This is the same in every case government abuse. Don't defend Snowden, accuse the agencies in question instead. Because that is the topic. The defense will build itself. Other approaches will fail as they did so often before. It doesn't matter if justified or not. So the question about leniency is the wrong one.
brbrodude 7y ago
What sucks is that the 'wrong' of small people are always so easily seem and easy to point the finger however small it is, the wrong done by actual power holders, which will impact innumerable people, which lays ground for systemic abuse, catastrophic failure(e.g.: Nassim Taleb's "ruin problems") etc are always too much to grasp and get proportionally much less attention. In Brazil what we now have I can't describe another way if not societal insanity, all the real problems are probably "too much", too complex, people have decided to stop facing them and decided regressing to fetish, cliches, downright modern superstitions instead. Some weeks ago an Avengers comic with a gay kiss panel generated more commotion than a 8 year old shot by police(which in itself would be a sign of the obvious much bigger systemic problems we're not properly dealing with. We're all fucked.
empath75 7y ago
Nobody is beyond reproach and anybody that is going to blow the whistle on something is almost always going to have an ulterior motive. That doesn’t mean we should ignore them, though.

mcv 7y ago

I consider Snowden the gold standard of government whistle blowers. Manning tried to do a good thing but was sloppy and trusted Assange a bit too much. I admired Assange during the early days of Wikileaks, but I really can't stand his grand standing. Before Snowden, people like Thomas Drake tried to address similar issues but got nowhere. If the people in power don't like people like Snowden shining a light on their crimes, maybe they shouldn't be committing those crimes to begin with. There needs to be proper congressional oversight of these things. When that doesn't exist, it becomes the duty of the individual people involved in the government to inform the people about what the government is doing, and that's exactly what Snowden did. Not eagerly, and he paid a heavy price for it, but he recognised it as necessary and did what needed to be done.

friendlybus 7y ago
Whistle blowing is a social service. Assange tried to do something that stepped outside nearly every social rule we have and challenged our bedrock assumptions about journalism and free speech... He did that irresponsibly and may have harmed people, but I admire the effort. He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  > He's the closest thing to a real life Bond villain there is. I guess we watch different Bond movies when you have guys like Kim Jong-un running some shows out there, having concentration camps and killing their brothers with nerve agents on the airports
  - mcv 7y ago
    That's more of a real villain. To be a Bond villain, you need more grand standing and scenery chewing. The biggest real villains prefer to do their damage quietly without anyone noticing, while Bond villains make for a better story.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Kim Jong is too wrapped up trying to keep power back home that he can't make a German/European crazy hair brained scheme to try and take over the world. Building an informant culture in your populace and threatening collective gulagging on the rebel's family doesn't quite have the same flair as tying the rebel to a table with a slow moving laser aimed at his junk. Do you expect me to talk? No Mr Bond! I expect you to die!

agumonkey 7y ago

Is there a path between taking the hit fully and alone and not divulging ? A way to store information outside, and maybe think about it and how to use it to have an effect on policies without causing the source to suffer. Stealth hack in a way.

mieseratte 7y ago
That sounds like the "improve from the inside" argument, e.g. keep your trap shut until you've managed to attain a position power to solve the problem you've got. Whether or not you feel that is feasible or appropriate is, ultimately, going to require insider knowledge and experience. While I do have some experience with BAH (painfully apathetic[0]), I've never worked for the NSA so I can't say whether that is a plausible alternative to Snowden's action. [0] - FWIW, we had a number of employees passing out promotional religious literature around the office. I'd raised some concern about it, basically should we be worried about legal trouble, and was told to keep my concerns to myself. Among the reasons I didn't last a month in that circle of hell.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I meant externally. But in a slow and strategic manner. Just so the people involved may avoid taking the hit like many whistle blower do.