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So, to clarify, it's only called 'smearing someone' if that someone is someone we're on the same side of, right? Otherwise, its called activism or journalism o

by jmduke 13y ago

So, to clarify, it's only called 'smearing someone' if that someone is someone we're on the same side of, right? Otherwise, its called activism or journalism or some other, vaguely more pleasant verb? If you don't think that the fact that Snowden's claims are tempered slightly by the fact that he doesn't have a formal high school or computer science education; hell, why not? I'm not saying that Snowden won't be dragged through the mud, but that's irrespective of what he did, besides the fact that he did anything at all. It's 2013, and 24-hour cable news channels need content: they will say and find anything and everything if it means finding or saying something new. (Also, Brooks and Toobin are both respected journalists and academics. They've both spoken vocally against the current administration, against the PATRIOT Act, and other things.)

_delirium 13y ago
David Brooks is a "respected journalist" in the same sense that USA Today is a "respected newspaper"...
- joonix 13y ago
  He is not even a journalist. He is a pundit, no better than the talking heads on Fox News, he just knows how to dress himself up as an "intellectual" to cater to the NYT/Charlie Rose audience.
  - r00fus 13y ago
    He pretty much "is" the voice of the establishment. If he's saying it, you can bet the military industrial complex shares his opinion.
lambda 13y ago
Why should it matter whether he has a high school diploma? That type of attack is precisely the definition of an ad-hominem. The truth of his claims does not depend on whether he has obtained a high school diploma. It depends on whether or not his claims are true. Someone with no high school diploma can tell the truth just as well as someone with a PhD. And it's not like his claims require an advanced education to understand. If he was claiming to have built a cold fusion reactor, that would be one thing; it would be pretty hard to believe that someone without formal education and with no prior results in the area had made such an advance. But all he's claiming is that the systems he administered had the ability to wiretap any given American at his whim. That just takes some basic technical knowledge and being in the right place at the right time.
- jmduke 13y ago
  To quote jessedhillon from another comment on this article: Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. Elsewhere he talks about every machine being bugged and things like that. And the tapping he claims to have intimate knowledge of -- that kind of stuff would be happening inside of some kind of data store, maybe like Apache Accumulo which the NSA also developed. Let alone the implications of what he's saying on the security of all crypto systems everywhere -- how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at, and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works. And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. My verdict is that all he had was some slideshow that he turned over to the Guardian, the rest is a bullshit story. Personally, I don't think what he's saying is 'a bullshit story', I just know the only definitive facts we have right now are the PRISM slides.
  - gohrt 13y ago
    Amount of formal CS/technical/college education that is relevant to accessing data in a database system in which you have priveleges == 0. "High school dropout" doesn't mean "dumb", it means "not socially compatible with school". This is not anti-correlated to comfort using computer systems. I once worked with a sysadmin with all the stereotypical features: weak credentials, puffed-up self-important attitude of "God of knowledge", constatn bragging of his hacking skillz, poor root-cause analysis of complex software failure modes. But did hew know how to install a database and read its contents? Of course.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]

by jmduke 13y ago

_delirium 13y ago

David Brooks is a "respected journalist" in the same sense that USA Today is a "respected newspaper"...

joonix 13y ago
He is not even a journalist. He is a pundit, no better than the talking heads on Fox News, he just knows how to dress himself up as an "intellectual" to cater to the NYT/Charlie Rose audience.
- r00fus 13y ago
  He pretty much "is" the voice of the establishment. If he's saying it, you can bet the military industrial complex shares his opinion.

lambda 13y ago

Why should it matter whether he has a high school diploma? That type of attack is precisely the definition of an ad-hominem. The truth of his claims does not depend on whether he has obtained a high school diploma. It depends on whether or not his claims are true. Someone with no high school diploma can tell the truth just as well as someone with a PhD. And it's not like his claims require an advanced education to understand. If he was claiming to have built a cold fusion reactor, that would be one thing; it would be pretty hard to believe that someone without formal education and with no prior results in the area had made such an advance. But all he's claiming is that the systems he administered had the ability to wiretap any given American at his whim. That just takes some basic technical knowledge and being in the right place at the right time.

jmduke 13y ago
To quote jessedhillon from another comment on this article: Snowden did have a difficult time in HS and he does not possess a formal CS/technical education. He was a sys admin, not an engineer. His claims, in that light, do seem bizarre and uninformed. I mean, ffs he seemed to insinuate in the Guardian interview that the NSA keeps a list of undercover assets and he had access to it!? These are the people who created selinux -- if I extend him some credibility, I doubt greatly that he had any real idea what it is he was looking at. Elsewhere he talks about every machine being bugged and things like that. And the tapping he claims to have intimate knowledge of -- that kind of stuff would be happening inside of some kind of data store, maybe like Apache Accumulo which the NSA also developed. Let alone the implications of what he's saying on the security of all crypto systems everywhere -- how many uneducated sys admins do you know who can inspect a data store and actually understand what they're looking at, and also understand deeply how consumer encryption works. And this all presumes that the NSA's systems are so poorly configured that a contractor in HI could access all this. My verdict is that all he had was some slideshow that he turned over to the Guardian, the rest is a bullshit story. Personally, I don't think what he's saying is 'a bullshit story', I just know the only definitive facts we have right now are the PRISM slides.
- gohrt 13y ago
  Amount of formal CS/technical/college education that is relevant to accessing data in a database system in which you have priveleges == 0. "High school dropout" doesn't mean "dumb", it means "not socially compatible with school". This is not anti-correlated to comfort using computer systems. I once worked with a sysadmin with all the stereotypical features: weak credentials, puffed-up self-important attitude of "God of knowledge", constatn bragging of his hacking skillz, poor root-cause analysis of complex software failure modes. But did hew know how to install a database and read its contents? Of course.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]