5 ms·

According to Greenwald there were millions of pages, largely because everything from parking spaces to nuclear weapons were frivolously marked "top secret" in o

by nmqsxc 3y ago

According to Greenwald there were millions of pages, largely because everything from parking spaces to nuclear weapons were frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats. Snowden gave the pile to the Guardian (Greenwald and another journalist), who decided what to publish, which was a major task because of all the unimportant stuff. How could Snowden have gone through that pile in a couple of days while on the run and possibly afraid for his life?

jstarfish 3y ago
[flagged]
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  That's one way to look at it. Another interpretation would be that he knew about specific things, assumed there were other bad things he hadn't learned about yet, and couldn't filter through it himself.
- namdnay 3y ago
  He sent the documents to be filtered by trusted journalists working for one of the worlds number one investigative newspapers. It’s not like he sold them to the Daily Mail There’s a slight irony in your comment about his performance reviews - how did that get out? Apparently leaking isn’t always a problem :)
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Not all of us can grep as well as we'd like. Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.
- xtian 3y ago
  The government is not a person so your rhetorical device is as nonsensical and irrelevant as your unsubstantiated character assassination. Moreover, a criminal organization can make no claims to ‘fairness’. Criminal governments are no different.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    At face value, no-- my source is government personnel. But it's possible there's more to the story than we've heard from the "victim." For the same reason, I don't believe Assange was a rapist.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  Why do the agencies not bother to filter out unrelated material? According to you, the responsible course of action would have to be to record only what is related to illegal activity in the first place. Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.
- msm_ 3y ago
  >I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism. Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).
- dmbche 3y ago
  Just to be clear - if you are trying to amass enough proof to bring to the media, but expect to be fired any day now, the logical thing to do is to exfiltrate as much of what could be relevant and sort out the rest after. Say you exfiltrate not enough and are fired. You're shit out of luck, and there is no way to infiltrate someone else to your position to get the rest out. I doubt you can honestly see his actions as reckless or revengeful.
jhauris 3y ago
> frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats. This is a real problem, but I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's no score card on number of classified documents one has access to. Rather, it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level. No one is going to get in trouble for mistakenly over classifying something, but theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document, not to mention the real harm that could arise from such an error.
- breck 3y ago
  > it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level This! I once had the opportunity to work on a project with DoD folks to help them write software to speed up the declassification process. I was astonished by the current manual process. Imagine a decision tree 50 pages long that you have to apply by hand to each sentence of a document to determine what can be unclassified or not. These were such nice people and overwhelmed by the work and genuinely trying to make it better so more information could be declassified, faster. I realized it was a hopeless task. The only real solution is to move toward a world where next to nothing needs to be classified. To do more in the open. That needs to be the vision. Laws need to be adjusted so that these crazy complicated rubrics don't need to be created at all. [The end of the story is I opted not to join that project. LLMs provide at least some hope that they can make it somewhat better, lacking the changes at the legal and organizational level that I mentioned]
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's pretty naive. > theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document The whole system is designed to make declassification risky and expensive. And you think that has nothing to do with power? Is it just a coincidence that criminal gangs have a similar code of life-long silence?
ted_bunny 3y ago
To play devil's advocate: things that sound minor like parking spaces are regularly the grist of intelligence operations. And the targets are rarely heads of state or other bigwigs — less-prominent people are easier to recruit, kill, harass, etc.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Yeah, even if just to know which car to break into.
- m463 3y ago
  weren't there some intelligence operations during the vietnam war where "benign" peanut butter orders predicted troop movements?
  - ted_bunny 3y ago
    Hilarious and cromulent enough for me.

by nmqsxc 3y ago

jstarfish 3y ago

[flagged]

evantbyrne 3y ago
That's one way to look at it. Another interpretation would be that he knew about specific things, assumed there were other bad things he hadn't learned about yet, and couldn't filter through it himself.
namdnay 3y ago
He sent the documents to be filtered by trusted journalists working for one of the worlds number one investigative newspapers. It’s not like he sold them to the Daily Mail There’s a slight irony in your comment about his performance reviews - how did that get out? Apparently leaking isn’t always a problem :)
HeckFeck 3y ago
Not all of us can grep as well as we'd like. Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.
xtian 3y ago
The government is not a person so your rhetorical device is as nonsensical and irrelevant as your unsubstantiated character assassination. Moreover, a criminal organization can make no claims to ‘fairness’. Criminal governments are no different.
fallingknife 3y ago
And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  At face value, no-- my source is government personnel. But it's possible there's more to the story than we've heard from the "victim." For the same reason, I don't believe Assange was a rapist.
Loquebantur 3y ago
Why do the agencies not bother to filter out unrelated material? According to you, the responsible course of action would have to be to record only what is related to illegal activity in the first place. Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.
msm_ 3y ago
>I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism. Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).
dmbche 3y ago
Just to be clear - if you are trying to amass enough proof to bring to the media, but expect to be fired any day now, the logical thing to do is to exfiltrate as much of what could be relevant and sort out the rest after. Say you exfiltrate not enough and are fired. You're shit out of luck, and there is no way to infiltrate someone else to your position to get the rest out. I doubt you can honestly see his actions as reckless or revengeful.

jhauris 3y ago

> frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats. This is a real problem, but I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's no score card on number of classified documents one has access to. Rather, it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level. No one is going to get in trouble for mistakenly over classifying something, but theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document, not to mention the real harm that could arise from such an error.

breck 3y ago
> it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level This! I once had the opportunity to work on a project with DoD folks to help them write software to speed up the declassification process. I was astonished by the current manual process. Imagine a decision tree 50 pages long that you have to apply by hand to each sentence of a document to determine what can be unclassified or not. These were such nice people and overwhelmed by the work and genuinely trying to make it better so more information could be declassified, faster. I realized it was a hopeless task. The only real solution is to move toward a world where next to nothing needs to be classified. To do more in the open. That needs to be the vision. Laws need to be adjusted so that these crazy complicated rubrics don't need to be created at all. [The end of the story is I opted not to join that project. LLMs provide at least some hope that they can make it somewhat better, lacking the changes at the legal and organizational level that I mentioned]
goodpoint 3y ago
> I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's pretty naive. > theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document The whole system is designed to make declassification risky and expensive. And you think that has nothing to do with power? Is it just a coincidence that criminal gangs have a similar code of life-long silence?

ted_bunny 3y ago

To play devil's advocate: things that sound minor like parking spaces are regularly the grist of intelligence operations. And the targets are rarely heads of state or other bigwigs — less-prominent people are easier to recruit, kill, harass, etc.

MattGaiser 3y ago
Yeah, even if just to know which car to break into.
m463 3y ago
weren't there some intelligence operations during the vietnam war where "benign" peanut butter orders predicted troop movements?
- ted_bunny 3y ago
  Hilarious and cromulent enough for me.