7 ms·
David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden
- msabalau 13y ago"The press is not among the elements of civil society that Brooks lists; and yet it is the one to which Snowden turned." Real journalists should be ashamed of "pundits" such as Brooks
- ttrreeww 13y agoThe mind of a Savior of Humanity.
- e3pi 13y agoHN Poll: Are you `properly embedded in gently `gradated' authoritative structures'? Who'd be a better friend. Choose one: Edward Snowdan: unmediated, indeferent, catalyst `Savior of Humanity'? or David Brooks: `mediated', `deferent', genuflecting despicable toady?
- WestCoastJustin 13y agoIt irks me a little how everyone keeps dropping the "high-school dropout" bit. If you watch the video of him speaking [1], it is readily apparent he is no flunky. At any rate, he was taken under the wing of CIA/NSA/Booz Allen, who must have seen something in him, and given a highly specialized and job specific education. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM
- threeseed 13y agoWell he did flee to Hong Kong of all places. So clearly he isn't the most learned person around.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- qzxt 13y agoApparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.
- owyn 13y agoExactly. I also read that the gov't there is currently revamping their asylum rules and that for now anybody who applies for asylum can stay until the rules are sorted out, which may take quite a long time... I don't think he's done so, but it may be a more savvy location than you'd think.
- threeseed 13y agoI've lived in Hong Kong for over a decade so know it's culture. It's not that dissimilar from Singapore in its western leanings. Hong Kong's history is irrelevant as they have an extradition treaty with the USA. Any normal person would not seek asylum in a country where this was the case.
- jckt 13y agoOnly on the surface is it close to Singapore. When you are a part of what political pundits have always hyped up as "the biggest threat to the USA/the next superpower", things change -- attitudes change. "Western leanings" sure, I'll give you that. But that is not equivalent to being pro-American. In fact, if pro-west meant just abiding by the majority of Western countries' attitudes, then on this matter pro-west might as well be equivalent to anti-USA. (I've lived in HK as well). And the USA has basically an extradition treaty with every country. They are not always followed, either (granted, I am not an expert on this matter). Of course, they might extradite him, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out.
- threeseed 13y agoUSA does not have an extradition with basically every country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradition_treaties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extraditi... It has been widely reported just how bizarre it was to pick a country like Hong Kong given their recent cooperation with the USA.
- subsystem 13y agoI think it's a fairly common attitude that if you just do as you're told and don't rock the boat you'll be successful. So of course it's going to be provoking that someone who doesn't fit the mold can still make a very good living.
- ef4 13y agoIt's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves. How many people now hear of Julian Assange and think "he's kinda creepy and megalomaniacal?". They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.
- GHFigs 13y agoThey believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him. It's not hard to get a similar impression from his own writing and speaking, or from people that worked with him.
- SkyMarshal 13y agoIt's still a form of ad-hominem. Ignore the messenger, evaluate the message.
- zachrose 13y agoOr rms, perhaps?
- SkyMarshal 13y ago>It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves. Sex scandal accusation is in the works I'm sure.
- w_t_payne 13y agoGiven how much he has pissed them off, I am sure it will be a graphic one ...
- JPKab 13y agoFYI: Booz probably hired him not because they trusted him, but because he possessed a Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) Clearance, along with experience for the CIA. People think the CIA is very selective with who they hire: they aren't. As a guy whose former company used to make me go to career fairs every now and then to man the booth in the DC area, I was shocked at how many cocky, CIA employees looking for a way to cash in their TS/SCI clearance at a contractor would show up and have AWFUL education credentials (colleges with reputations as being diploma farms with dorms, weak majors, etc). The CIA is more likely to hire someone who went to a "joke" party school with an A average than someone who went to a difficult school with a C average. I can't speak for Snowden's skills, since I never knew him. I will say this: he worked IT security for a while. The Federal Government, and particularly IC and DoD IT security has no middle class. It is made up of the teeming masses of talentless certification whores with zero coding skills and a complete lack of offensive hacking skills. They rely on their Security +, CISSPA, etc certs, which are obtained with cramming courses followed by incredibly easy (for people who are smart enough to code) tests. Then there are the "red team" folks. These are the bad asses, the small minority who often have weird, unconventional backgrounds, write books on penetration testing (Violent Python for example) and laugh their asses off at the whole joke of a security apparatus that is the CISSPA paperwork paradigm.
- rW80b2 13y agoHere you're wrong. The CIA and some other members of the IC are very selective in who they hire, but not in the way most top-tier companies are. The issue is applicant clearance. So if you're a genius, native-US born linguist who has lived in several Middle Easter countries, speaks Arabic, and has a honors degree from a top school, or a brilliant mathmetician/computer scientist who studied in Eastern Europe and married an Eastern European, it's relatively hard to get the level of clearance you need for the CIA, because of the way that foreign residence and/or family and friends count on your clearance questionnaire. And if you've got this background and smoked a couple of dozen joints in college, getting a clearance becomes near impossible. On the other hand, if you're a community-college educated applicant with solid grades and military or law enforcement experience, and no foreign residencies or drug experiences and/or alcohol-related misdemeanors, you're golden. You allude to this phenomenon. But while it relatively easy for a certain kind of applicant to get into the CIA, it's far from the truth to say that they're not selective. They're incredibly selective, and they're excluding some of the most promising candidates that apply because of their particular kind of selectivity. Beside the loss of many highly-qualified applicants (what serious language expert hasn't lived overseas?), this is also said to create a certain culture that bears more resemblance to boot camp than to the highly-professional organization the CIA has been traditionally. Snowden alluded to this in his interview. This is not a secret problem. In fact, there were quite a few public Senate hearings on the issue after 911. But nothing much is reported to have changed.
- marshray 13y agoSurprised no one has pointed out the worst of Brooks' warped logic: > If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably > revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods. and > He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak > like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. > They limit debate a little more. This is exactly like something a friend from the former Soviet Union told me a few years ago. People in the community would self-censor, and moreso censor each other by saying explicitly: "If we don't censor amongst ourselves, the central authorities will be forced to step in and impose even tighter and more strict measures than we are under now." This goes beyond a simple fear of consequences. It's a pervasive acceptance of the aggressor's malevolence in which the victim ritualistically cowtows in order to appease it. This is ICD-9 code 995.81 "Battered person syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome : * The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault. * The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere. * The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient. EDIT: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors or abusers, sometimes to the point of defending them. [...] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat."
- youngerdryas 13y agoI am upvoting this for spite, and if David Brooks was battered he probably deserved it.
- marshray 13y agoI'm disappointed you upvoted my comment for spite. I'd much rather have a thoughtful reply (pro or con). For the record, I respect David Brooks as a person, have found his writing to be insightful in the past, and of course do not believe he or anyone deserves to be battered.
- wavefunction 13y agoDavid Brooks is a glorified typist. What the hell does he know about anything, let alone the human mind.
- koops 13y agoWith his column David Brooks loses his title of "The Liberals' Favorite Conservative." New title: "Betrayer of a Genuine American Hero." And I can think of worse.
- jayro 13y agoBrooks is the ultimate apologist for this kind of corrupt military, industrial, surveillance state crap. What a tool. This article about Brooks (written by Greenwald and dating back to 2009) is pretty illuminating. * David Brooks: our nation’s premier expert warrior http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/brooks_6/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/brooks_6/
- spodek 13y agoAnyone can write what David Brooks wrote, dodging anything of importance about the situation. Here, I'll do with David Brooks what he did with Snowden -- avoiding looking at the situation, slighting someone's character without knowing anything important. I'll just work with his Wikipedia page. Here goes... David Brooks sounds like an intelligent guy, but if you look at his background you see his true colors. Raised in suburban Philadelphia's ultra-wealthy Main Line, he started and has never wavered from an ultra-elite, insider status, leading to today living literally inside the Beltway, the quintessential system man, his status-quo "opinions" on every issue a foregone conclusion. His intelligence sadly belies his consistent conclusion-first-supporting-argument-second reflexive responses. What else would you expect from someone so ingrained in the establishment -- Yale, Duke, University of Chicago, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. This man may have never said a single word to someone who didn't know where their next meal might come from, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil with a creme fraiche brulee. This nation could use discussion of important issues, debate, thoughtful exchange. He delivers rubber stamp answers. We as a nation lose out. While he can't single-handedly deserve credit for our slide into partisan bickering and bureaucracy, he proudly contributes more than his share. And why not, with lucrative speaking fees and book options paving his way. If you want a pundit to unthinkingly deliver a preconceived notion supporting keeping things the way they are, David Brooks is your man. Sadly, if you want thoughtful consideration of complex issues, he'll stand in the way of whoever would deliver. --------------- There, how was that? Can I have a job as the knee-jerk conservative guy at the New York Times now?
- nnethercote 13y agoI think you've actually described David Brooks pretty accurately.
- randlet 13y agoThe Rockwell painting mentioned in the article for anyone who is interested: http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_Western-Art/27_Popular_Modern-Realism/Rockwell/Rockwell_1943_'Four-Freedoms'_Speech.jpg http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_Western-Art/27_Popula...
- gridmaths 13y agoTotally unimpressed with Brooks' character assassination piece. This college dropout did what those at the NSA with PhDs failed to do in their responsibility to ensure that their organisation stayed within the spirit and laws of their mandate. He did what Brooks failed to do as a journalist, ie. to draw attention to a worrying centralization of absolute power, and abuse of law. Lets describe Benjamin Franklin, John Rockefeller, Walt Disney as high school dropouts, rather than look at what they achieved.
- CleanedStar 13y ago"betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed." Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says - "The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia" If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions? The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined. I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.
- pradocchia 13y agoHa, that's nothing. Just wait till Friedman weighs in.
- wam 13y agoBrooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate that even sound rebuttals like this one feed into the cycle that makes him a successful columnist.
- crazygringo 13y agoBrooks deserved a response like this. Just looking at the very top comments voted up on the NYT: > This column reads like ... Nixon's Enemies List. > This is something right out of Nixon's secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow. > Mr. Brooks, this is one of your more bizarre commentaries. > Brook's article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination > What a bizarre column. > Brooks column is the most awful piece of smear journalism I have ever read. To be honest, I'm almost surprised the NYT ran it. I've read a lot of his columns, never thought much of them, they just seemed fairly "normal". But this one is truly just bizarre, just bizarre. I really want to know what on earth he was thinking?
- grandalf 13y agoHe's doing his part to help diffuse the situation. It's his show of loyalty to the powers that be. He's thought of as influential and this kind of thing is expected of him. He won't be held accountable for this piece. He's done his duty and would never submit to any kind of rational questioning of his motives or his beliefs. I guess what it boils down to is that he's an actor.
- grandalf 13y agoWhat I can't understand is how anyone can respect the NY Times with stuff like this being published. This guy is one of the paper's star writers and he writes this kind of thing. It's one thing to be conservative and wish to defend atrocities committed by governments, but it's completely another to do so using the kinds of techniques Brooks employs. I'd go so far as to say that the NY Times is complicit in the moral wrongs that it spreads propaganda to help cover up.
- specialist 13y agoThank you for including the name of the pundit (David Brooks) in the link. Saves me the effort of opening link.
- saosebastiao 13y agoWhat I can't figure out is how it always takes 1000 words for David Brooks to explain a concept simple enough to convey in 10. I'm not that big of a fan of the TL;DR...but with David Brooks, you don't actually gain anything by reading the whole thing.
- crusso 13y agoIs the information so grave that it’s worth betraying an oath, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally exposing secrets that can never be reclassified? Isn't the fact that this story has had such strong "legs" a great indication that this act of whistle blowing was justified?
- michaelochurch 13y agoI tend to think of this immediate reversion to ad hominem attacks as an extension of the bike-shedding impulse. Is PRISM a good idea? Did Edward Snowden do the right thing? Where is the line between unacceptable disclosures (that should be punished severely) and, e.g., the Pentagon Papers. These are complex issues and few people are courageous enough to take a stand on them, especially under their real names. There's just too much uncertainty. I sure as hell don't know what the right answer is, on many of these questions. But everyone feels entitled to an opinion of whether Julian Assange is "creepy", "arrogant", et cetera. As a lesser degree of whistleblower, I went through something similar. People make all kinds of speculations about why you did what you did, and they're usually far off the mark. Granted, in my case I made some mistakes along the way. For one example, I probably should not have implored Google to "choke on a taint" at one point (if only because it distracted attention away from the valid message there) even if, on that particular issue, my indignation was justified. People get into bike-shedding discussions about personalities and possible motivations because it's a lot easier than discussing the underlying and often more complicated issues.
- ck2 13y agoDavid Brooks is a well-known institutionalist. This is why you cannot listen to him about when the government behaves badly.
- grappler 13y agoOne story here is about what a “hacker” is. What the word represents, what people who identify with it value, and what role those people play in private industry, in government, and in the military/security/intelligence world. Here on Hacker News, where most of the top stories, threads and comments are favorable to Edward Snowden, you might have the impression that there's some unspoken “hacker code” just below the surface, encompasing ideals like sharing source, promoting freedom of expression and privacy, understood by anyone whose work closely concerns the internet. When it comes to the intelligence community, this impression would be sorely mistaken. If you are a regular on hacker news, NSA types already have a stereotype for people like you: “Remember, folks, IT weenies are the code-clerks of the 21st century” https://twitter.com/20committee/statuses/343812020992372736 https://twitter.com/20committee/statuses/343812020992372736 After this incident, they'll probably step up efforts to keep people who sympathize with these sorts of values away from classified information. They'll find plenty of other able candidates who don't share these values. http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesses-and-the-nsa-your-it-people-are-your-biggest-risk/ http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesse...