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Snowden eviscerates OpenAI's decision to put a former NSA director on its board

26 points by miles 2y ago

JojoFatsani 2y ago
Evidcerate is a cringey headline word
- jki275 2y ago
  [flagged]
- zeroimpl 2y ago
  Especially since the board is clearly unfazed by this. Words like this really need to be reserved for situations where something actually got destroyed/damaged.
- more_corn 2y ago
  Perhaps a better word would have been “excoriate”
millerm 2y ago
I still back Snowden for his original motives in 2013. I will not bother listening to anything he has to say these days though, because I have no idea who is pulling the strings. I have no idea who he's working for, or what his motives are. It's a problem for me that he's holing up in Russia, and has probably already given up enough info to them in exchange for his asylum. I simply can't trust the man at this time. Am I being unreasonable?
- racional 2y ago
  He definitely has no choice about "holing up" in Russia. His native country revoked his passport, after all. As to whether he has given up information -- we just don't know. I don't know about you, but in situations where I have no concrete indications from which to know (rather than merely speculate) that someone has done something Bad, and even when they did, it probably just doesn't matter very much -- I tend not to worry about it. And not only that, I usually just give them the benefit of the doubt. Life is too short for holding judgements in our head about what people might have done in situations we just don't have any visibility into.
  - mdhb 2y ago
    To pretend that he had some option to just say no thanks on giving up information is so incredibly naive. He did have a choice in the sense of go to jail or give up everything he knew for protection. We can all very publicly see the decision he made but whatever his motives may have been for his initial leak (though I would argue it too was in no way a net positive) that clearly doesn’t extend to what happened beyond that when he applied for asylum. I think the truth of the matter is that he didn’t have a clear step 2 in his plan, realised he was in way over his head, panicked and did something very stupid afterwards.
    - mdhb 2y ago
      Just going to add a small bit of extra context to this from the eyes of the intelligence community because that doesn’t seem to ever get a look at on Hacker News where for many years there has been a more or less unquestionable assumption that he is some kind of hero. But from their point of view, it’s really in no way obvious that this wasn’t an operation from the very start. The FBIs chief spy catcher was actually working as a liaison officer in Moscow when this happened and he talks about it in some detail here in this interview (will update with timestamps later if I can find it) https://www.youtube.com/live/0NSGOJs150w https://www.youtube.com/live/0NSGOJs150w but in his experience this is actually EXACTLY what he would expect an operation like that to look like and there has never been any clear evidence in the years since that would put a meaningful dent in that theory. The other point I wanted to make was that because people tend to have no real idea beyond movies as to how intelligence agencies actually function in real life they have no context for where he fit into the bigger picture. But Snowden was never some super spy or anything like that, he has zero operational experience or context he was just a Microsoft SharePoint administrator who had a security clearance. He demonstrated numerous times since then that he actually had no meaningful context as to what he was actually leaking for into the wider operational picture or what kinds of controls were in place around its usage. He made a unilateral decision to take as much classified information as he could possibly get his hands on and then leak it with no regards to the consequences that came with it. There are legitimate reasons to be upset with certain actions of the US intel community I am not here to do some wholesale defence on their behalf but this image he has built for himself as some heroic whistleblower is built on incredibly flimsy evidence. There is a reason why he has essentially zero defenders inside the intelligence community and I would put it to you that it’s not simply because “they are all evil”.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I feel very similarly and came here to make almost the same comment. I am glad that Snowden exposed what he did, but I can’t think of a single headline with his name in it over the last decade that I haven’t rolled my eyes at. Often the thought going through my mind is “why do we care what he says?” or maybe “does he have any relevant expertise on this?”. He often seems to weigh in on things only tenuously related to the leaks or not related at all.

26 points by miles 2y ago

JojoFatsani 2y ago

Evidcerate is a cringey headline word

jki275 2y ago
[flagged]
zeroimpl 2y ago
Especially since the board is clearly unfazed by this. Words like this really need to be reserved for situations where something actually got destroyed/damaged.
more_corn 2y ago
Perhaps a better word would have been “excoriate”

millerm 2y ago

I still back Snowden for his original motives in 2013. I will not bother listening to anything he has to say these days though, because I have no idea who is pulling the strings. I have no idea who he's working for, or what his motives are. It's a problem for me that he's holing up in Russia, and has probably already given up enough info to them in exchange for his asylum. I simply can't trust the man at this time. Am I being unreasonable?

racional 2y ago
He definitely has no choice about "holing up" in Russia. His native country revoked his passport, after all. As to whether he has given up information -- we just don't know. I don't know about you, but in situations where I have no concrete indications from which to know (rather than merely speculate) that someone has done something Bad, and even when they did, it probably just doesn't matter very much -- I tend not to worry about it. And not only that, I usually just give them the benefit of the doubt. Life is too short for holding judgements in our head about what people might have done in situations we just don't have any visibility into.
- mdhb 2y ago
  To pretend that he had some option to just say no thanks on giving up information is so incredibly naive. He did have a choice in the sense of go to jail or give up everything he knew for protection. We can all very publicly see the decision he made but whatever his motives may have been for his initial leak (though I would argue it too was in no way a net positive) that clearly doesn’t extend to what happened beyond that when he applied for asylum. I think the truth of the matter is that he didn’t have a clear step 2 in his plan, realised he was in way over his head, panicked and did something very stupid afterwards.
  - mdhb 2y ago
    Just going to add a small bit of extra context to this from the eyes of the intelligence community because that doesn’t seem to ever get a look at on Hacker News where for many years there has been a more or less unquestionable assumption that he is some kind of hero. But from their point of view, it’s really in no way obvious that this wasn’t an operation from the very start. The FBIs chief spy catcher was actually working as a liaison officer in Moscow when this happened and he talks about it in some detail here in this interview (will update with timestamps later if I can find it) https://www.youtube.com/live/0NSGOJs150w https://www.youtube.com/live/0NSGOJs150w but in his experience this is actually EXACTLY what he would expect an operation like that to look like and there has never been any clear evidence in the years since that would put a meaningful dent in that theory. The other point I wanted to make was that because people tend to have no real idea beyond movies as to how intelligence agencies actually function in real life they have no context for where he fit into the bigger picture. But Snowden was never some super spy or anything like that, he has zero operational experience or context he was just a Microsoft SharePoint administrator who had a security clearance. He demonstrated numerous times since then that he actually had no meaningful context as to what he was actually leaking for into the wider operational picture or what kinds of controls were in place around its usage. He made a unilateral decision to take as much classified information as he could possibly get his hands on and then leak it with no regards to the consequences that came with it. There are legitimate reasons to be upset with certain actions of the US intel community I am not here to do some wholesale defence on their behalf but this image he has built for himself as some heroic whistleblower is built on incredibly flimsy evidence. There is a reason why he has essentially zero defenders inside the intelligence community and I would put it to you that it’s not simply because “they are all evil”.
joshstrange 2y ago
I feel very similarly and came here to make almost the same comment. I am glad that Snowden exposed what he did, but I can’t think of a single headline with his name in it over the last decade that I haven’t rolled my eyes at. Often the thought going through my mind is “why do we care what he says?” or maybe “does he have any relevant expertise on this?”. He often seems to weigh in on things only tenuously related to the leaks or not related at all.