15 ms·

I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance programs in the l

I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. As an American citizen and voter, I'm still mulling over what I think should be the correct policy response to the revelations about NSA claims about NSA data-gathering programs, but I have deep ties to China as a speaker and reader of Chinese and a long-time student of the language, culture, and history of China, and I have similar connections, less thoroughly developed, to Russia. People everywhere just wanna be free. We ought to be hearing a lot more about all the various governmental data-gathering and surveillance programs, everywhere in the world, and of course we should also be learning more about the actions of private business corporations to gather data on all of us. That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks, and perhaps tells me something favorable about the United States. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution, http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. AFTER EDIT: Good catch by the readers who noticed the non-American English in the Wikileaks press release here (mentioned in other comments in this thread). The press release kindly submitted here is plainly not Edward Snowden's verbatim words, but more self-publicizing from Wikileaks.

marshray 13y ago
Wikileaks is generally reactionary, i.e., they rely upon others to bring them leaks which they publish. The organization steadfastly denies going out to acquire the information themselves.
- mtowle 13y ago
  >reactionary In certain contexts, that word means 'counter-revolutionary', so be careful when using it to describe WikiLeaks. It's good that you had the presence of mind to include that i.e.! ;)
  - marshray 13y ago
    Ooh, thanks for pointing that out.
- olefoo 13y ago
  As a copyeditor; 'reactive' might be a better word to communicate the meaning you intend.
  - marshray 13y ago
    That was indeed the word I was searching for. Thanks!
guelo 13y ago
Wikileaks has released documents from governments around the world, and at different times the leaks have caused scandals in almost every country out there. You may have heard more about leaks that affect United States because of the news you read.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  You have heard more about leaks that affect United States because of the news you read. Many (not all, but many) of my leads to breaking news on surveillance and data-collection programs come from Hacker News, which includes worldwide participation, so it is a bit surprising that there is so much news about the United States here. Other news aggregation services I rely on (including the wall posts of my literate, diverse, worldwide group of Facebook friends) indeed include more news about other countries than HN sometimes does. What are the best sources we can readily link to today about surveillance and data-collection practices in China and in Russia? AFTER EDIT TO RESPOND TO REPLY BELOW: I already know Chinese, as a review of quite recent comments of mine here on Hacker News would make abundantly clear. My Russian is rusty, as I haven't kept it up through daily use since the early 1980s, but I have read the Russian press (of the communist era) in the original Russian, and I still take care to be aware of the Russian official and Russian popular perspectives on world news.
  - TillE 13y ago
    It's amusing that you think HN isn't overwhelmingly US-focused. First, you'll want to try learning Chinese or Russian.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      I'm guessing that TokenAdult speaks both of these languages better than you do, as he's discussed language skills at some length in education-related threads. An apology seems in order.
    - learc83 13y ago
      The OP speaks Chinese.
old-gregg 13y ago
>I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, >and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated >surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward >Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. I cannot speak for China, but majority of Russians lack a natural compass/taste for civil liberties and human rights: they haven't had the time to develop one. Their version of PRISM is called SORM-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM) - it was launched with a complete lack of secrecy and, predictably, was met with public apathy. There are no news to break. :(
- narrator 13y ago
  That's the thing that's so jarring about the U.S policy. Their private ideology, or whatever guides their actions, is quite obviously contradictory to their publicly espoused beliefs. The Russian and Chinese government are at least pretty direct about their ideology and intentions.
  - aet 13y ago
    You may have to offer a bit more here... Pressure != Wheeling and dealing. I think what President Obama meant by wheeling and dealing is that the U.S. will not "give up" anything for Snowden.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Well I do hate to say it but we've always had an "us or them" mentality to the rest of the world. I mean we were so isolationist that we were willing to watch Europe burn from afar rather than do anything. There's no telling what would have happened without Pearl Harbor; the U.S. may never have joined the war against Germany at all, in fact. You'll notice that much of the furor has come from the idea that the NSA might be watching what Americans are doing. For everything else there was effectively a big giant "Of course they were bugging $FOO, that's their job". Obviously Europe doesn't feel the same way (and didn't with ECHELON)...
    - spacecity1971 13y ago
dreamfactory 13y ago
Russia tapping Runet isn't exactly going to qualify as news.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "AFTER EDIT: Good catch by the readers who noticed the non-American English in the Wikileaks press release here (mentioned in other comments in this thread). The press release kindly submitted here is plainly not Edward Snowden's verbatim words, but more self-publicizing from Wikileaks." Is it not possible he dictated it and WikiLeaks typed it and published it? Or someone at WikiLeaks checked for typos using a British-English spell checker and corrected a few US-English spellings?
- thenewkid 13y ago
  The OP is nit-picking. At the end of the day, it only matters if a person puts their name behind a statement or not.
  - reedlaw 13y ago
    That's a fair point, but how can we verify that Snowden actually endorsed this statement or not? How does Wikileaks have access to him while no other media outlets do?
    - jacquesm 13y ago
      You could try hooking up with him and asking. It's not like he's going anywhere soon by the looks of it.
      - dnautics 13y ago
        A friend of mine was stranded in the same part of the moscow airport, (en route from Armenia back to the US) but she did not see Snowden, so it may not be so easy to find him.
        XorNot 13y ago
        Perhaps more importantly, none of the many media there have been able to find him so exactly where he is is an open question. Not too many places to hide in an airport.
sneak 13y ago
Not a bad idea in general, but Wikileaks is resource constrained (remember, they are being actively investigated by the FBI/DoD and have a banking blockade going against them), and it's not unreasonable for them to focus (at least right now) on the jurisdiction primarily responsible for what happens to Gmail, Android, Cisco IOS, Apple iOS, Facebook, and AWS.
cuttooth 13y ago
I'd like to see both Snowden and Assange in prison, but we can't always have what we want, unfortunately.
- iopq 13y ago
  Why do you hate freedom?
  - cuttooth 13y ago
    I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history. None of this stuff matters at all and the fact that anyone was surprised by PRISM's existence is nothing but foolish, in my opinion. With greater technology comes inevitable supervision over such things, and it isn't in the name of reading about your browsing habits unless you enjoy children being abused or bombing buildings. The only shame is the lack of transparency about the surveillance, but again, this whole thing should have been completely obvious to just about anyone. Snowden is a traitor and a coward for leaking the obvious (while running off to hide instead of facing the demons he accuses so arrogantly) and Assange is a horrible person for a bunch of other reasons.
    - marshray 13y ago
      You seem to think your porn history is the most interesting thing anyone will ever know about you. I think that's kind of sad.
    - cuttooth 13y ago
      I'm not really understanding what you're attempting to imply.
    - lhnz 13y ago
      > I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history. 1. PRISM is an apparatus just waiting for another government to use it against the US. Who's to say that Russia, China, etc. haven't been using it to spy on Americans, too? I mean, it's clearly not that hard to get access. Yes - they might not look at your porn history, but perhaps they will use some useful political information against one of your leaders and fuck you up. 2. What would happen if the government was to have a good reason to misuse the information they were gathering. What would happen if a fascist party was to come into power? 3. Calling Assange a horrible person is small-minded. Don't make this about personalities; this is about individual freedom, the right to a transparent government, the constitution your country was founded upon, and human rights. 4. Rather a traitor to the government than a traitor to the principles that made the US what it once was. Unless you want mediocrity...
kintamanimatt 13y ago
Snowden was in Hong Kong not China. There's a distinct difference.
- pekk 13y ago
  Hong Kong is part of China.
  - b6 13y ago
    You're right, but it's not that simple. HK people don't like to speak Mandarin, and don't like the mainland. It's normal in HK for there to be public demonstrations that would be unthinkable on the mainland.
mscarborough 13y ago
I share your concerns, IMHO it would be awesome if we had ten Edward Snowdens from ten countries. But we don't so I don't think it's fair to put it against Wikileaks for not leaking something that was not given to them. Seems like they should be a receptacle not an institution that does investigative journalism. Perhaps showing support for Snowden will help other content come out, but looking at the huge effort President Obama and Vice Clownshoes Biden have put together to get this guy into the brig, not fucking likely. They have done a good job of isolating Snowden and making future whistle-blowing less likely.
contingencies 13y ago
tokenadult, that is a loaded expectation that Wikileaks is disempowered from fulfilling, since they simply publish what is received after anonymizing and verifying where possible. In fact, back in 2009, Assange told me personally he was surprised not to have received more information from China.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Have they published the leak of Ecuador's surveillance system plans yet? [1] Admittedly the documents keep getting pulled but apparently they are available on DocumentCloud still. But I just checked the Ecuador page at WikiLeaks [2] and have yet to see anything. Maybe they just need more time to authenticate the contents? Although then again, Ecuador itself seems to have authenticated it [3]. On that note, Ecuador's page at WikiLeaks seems pretty sparse after 2009 or so. I guess there have been any major secrecy scandals since then in Ecuador? [1] http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2013/06/28/scribd-removes-buzzfeed-files-on-ecuador-spying/ http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2013/06/28/scribd-removes-buz... [2] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Ecuador http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Ecuador [3] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-surveillance http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-s...
- embolism 13y ago
  Why would he be surprised? For all this talk of the jeopardy Snowden is in, we forget that in China a policeman can send you to prison without trial, and that executions are so common they send round mobile vans to perform them.
sneak 13y ago
So you offer some things Wikileaks could change, and then you offer some criticism of Snowden's statement. Why exactly are we still talking about the messenger(s)? How is this productive? The goal is to make the world better. Nitpicking about Snowden, his associates, his travel, his criminal behavior or lack thereof, Wikileaks, Assange, and all of this other stuff is completely orthogonal, soap-opera bullshit that has nothing to do with that goal. We should be focusing now on how to a) spread the word about the constitutional abuses and systemic coverup being perpetrated by NSA and b) working toward building a legal environment wherein these types of circumstances are not only legally prohibited but also cannot be re-engineered in practice either.
- e3pi 13y ago
  The missile itself is not in chapter thirteen, but the chastening aftermath of its successful delivery.
baby 13y ago
about China, I think there are more worying things than governemnt-operated surveillance programs that have to be reveled. People there know there is an extreme censorship and corruption. IMO the higher government needs to take extreme measure against corruption.
- DominikR 13y ago
  They already take extreme measure by regularly executing persons (including high ranked officials and bankers) that commited crimes such as fraud and corruption. (Note: I am against the death penalty)
reledi 13y ago
> That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks I don't find that's the case. Living in the US, it's not surprising that most of what you hear from WikiLeaks is about the US. Take a look at their homepage (http://wikileaks.org http://wikileaks.org) for example, most featured stories are not about the US.
xentronium 13y ago
> People everywhere just wanna be free. We ought to be hearing a lot more about all the various governmental data-gathering and surveillance programs, everywhere in the world, and of course we should also be learning more about the actions of private business corporations to gather data on all of us. That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks, and perhaps tells me something favorable about the United States. While I agree that surveillance happens everywhere, USA is in unique position of power to do it, considering how much of internet traffic moves through US-based companies. That said, I also agree that the very fact of existence of outrage caused by PRISM is telling about the US citizens and government, people in Russia, for example, assume that tchekists from FSB are already watching every their step or at the very least able to do so.
chaostheory 13y ago
> I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. I don't know about Russia, but in China it's pretty well known by everyone that the PRC is watching you; China doesn't claim to be a democratic republic either. It's not a secret or revelation to even people in the West. The only people who aren't really familiar with it in Western countries, are people who only stick to reading mainstream consumer news.
CoffeeDregs 13y ago
[Note: I'm an American; hi NSA!] > I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and > fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance > programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located The big deal is that the US is no longer the shining beacon of hope-/change-y-ness or freedom that it claimed to be. We, the US, need to keep that beacon BRIGHTLY LIT. Those states which don't follow the lead will be pressed by the press or dissenters to follow or will repress freedom. [Yes, I acknowledge that the beacon-lit thing is dramatic and too-large, but that's the US for you.] Lose that and we join a race to the freedom-bottom the US founders would be shocked to learn we have undertaken.
- embolism 13y ago
  Finally a meaningful statement. I couldn't agree more. However I think that one part of this involves recognizing that the Federal Government is not the US. We as people need to actually use the freedoms we have to build a society that people will want to emulate. Somewhere along the way we stopped doing that.
gasull 13y ago
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:China https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:China
chj 13y ago
Both countries especially CHINA has a bad reputation on communication regulation (network shutdown on some occasions) and censorship. There is no need for WikiLeaks to break anything new here. US government has been riding a high horse and teaching everybody about internet freedom, and now they are caught pants down. That's a lot of more worthy of news than exposing already known bad guys. I find it deeply troubling that majority voices in USA are now accusing Snowden / WikiLeaks of damaging USA reputation or things like that.
- embolism 13y ago
  For all its flaws, the US is still far ahead of China and Russia on these issues. The recent rhetoric has presents the US as the worst offender of all when in practice it's probably better than anyone else who has the power to do these things (including the UK). What if you take the US position at face value? There is oversight, and there are real and serious threats from terrorism and cyberattacks. Is it good to have a massive secret signals collection apparatus? No. Is it necessary? We don't know and nobody is even discussing that because we're all too busy bashing the US.
lmm 13y ago
As a former British possession (sort of), British English is normal in Hong Kong.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

marshray 13y ago

Wikileaks is generally reactionary, i.e., they rely upon others to bring them leaks which they publish. The organization steadfastly denies going out to acquire the information themselves.

mtowle 13y ago
>reactionary In certain contexts, that word means 'counter-revolutionary', so be careful when using it to describe WikiLeaks. It's good that you had the presence of mind to include that i.e.! ;)
- marshray 13y ago
  Ooh, thanks for pointing that out.
olefoo 13y ago
As a copyeditor; 'reactive' might be a better word to communicate the meaning you intend.
- marshray 13y ago
  That was indeed the word I was searching for. Thanks!

guelo 13y ago

Wikileaks has released documents from governments around the world, and at different times the leaks have caused scandals in almost every country out there. You may have heard more about leaks that affect United States because of the news you read.

tokenadult 13y ago
You have heard more about leaks that affect United States because of the news you read. Many (not all, but many) of my leads to breaking news on surveillance and data-collection programs come from Hacker News, which includes worldwide participation, so it is a bit surprising that there is so much news about the United States here. Other news aggregation services I rely on (including the wall posts of my literate, diverse, worldwide group of Facebook friends) indeed include more news about other countries than HN sometimes does. What are the best sources we can readily link to today about surveillance and data-collection practices in China and in Russia? AFTER EDIT TO RESPOND TO REPLY BELOW: I already know Chinese, as a review of quite recent comments of mine here on Hacker News would make abundantly clear. My Russian is rusty, as I haven't kept it up through daily use since the early 1980s, but I have read the Russian press (of the communist era) in the original Russian, and I still take care to be aware of the Russian official and Russian popular perspectives on world news.
- TillE 13y ago
  It's amusing that you think HN isn't overwhelmingly US-focused. First, you'll want to try learning Chinese or Russian.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    I'm guessing that TokenAdult speaks both of these languages better than you do, as he's discussed language skills at some length in education-related threads. An apology seems in order.
  - learc83 13y ago
    The OP speaks Chinese.

old-gregg 13y ago

>I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, >and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated >surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward >Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. I cannot speak for China, but majority of Russians lack a natural compass/taste for civil liberties and human rights: they haven't had the time to develop one. Their version of PRISM is called SORM-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM) - it was launched with a complete lack of secrecy and, predictably, was met with public apathy. There are no news to break. :(

narrator 13y ago
That's the thing that's so jarring about the U.S policy. Their private ideology, or whatever guides their actions, is quite obviously contradictory to their publicly espoused beliefs. The Russian and Chinese government are at least pretty direct about their ideology and intentions.
- aet 13y ago
  You may have to offer a bit more here... Pressure != Wheeling and dealing. I think what President Obama meant by wheeling and dealing is that the U.S. will not "give up" anything for Snowden.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well I do hate to say it but we've always had an "us or them" mentality to the rest of the world. I mean we were so isolationist that we were willing to watch Europe burn from afar rather than do anything. There's no telling what would have happened without Pearl Harbor; the U.S. may never have joined the war against Germany at all, in fact. You'll notice that much of the furor has come from the idea that the NSA might be watching what Americans are doing. For everything else there was effectively a big giant "Of course they were bugging $FOO, that's their job". Obviously Europe doesn't feel the same way (and didn't with ECHELON)...
  - spacecity1971 13y ago

dreamfactory 13y ago

Russia tapping Runet isn't exactly going to qualify as news.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

>> "AFTER EDIT: Good catch by the readers who noticed the non-American English in the Wikileaks press release here (mentioned in other comments in this thread). The press release kindly submitted here is plainly not Edward Snowden's verbatim words, but more self-publicizing from Wikileaks." Is it not possible he dictated it and WikiLeaks typed it and published it? Or someone at WikiLeaks checked for typos using a British-English spell checker and corrected a few US-English spellings?

thenewkid 13y ago
The OP is nit-picking. At the end of the day, it only matters if a person puts their name behind a statement or not.
- reedlaw 13y ago
  That's a fair point, but how can we verify that Snowden actually endorsed this statement or not? How does Wikileaks have access to him while no other media outlets do?
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    You could try hooking up with him and asking. It's not like he's going anywhere soon by the looks of it.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      A friend of mine was stranded in the same part of the moscow airport, (en route from Armenia back to the US) but she did not see Snowden, so it may not be so easy to find him.
      - XorNot 13y ago
        Perhaps more importantly, none of the many media there have been able to find him so exactly where he is is an open question. Not too many places to hide in an airport.

sneak 13y ago

Not a bad idea in general, but Wikileaks is resource constrained (remember, they are being actively investigated by the FBI/DoD and have a banking blockade going against them), and it's not unreasonable for them to focus (at least right now) on the jurisdiction primarily responsible for what happens to Gmail, Android, Cisco IOS, Apple iOS, Facebook, and AWS.

cuttooth 13y ago

I'd like to see both Snowden and Assange in prison, but we can't always have what we want, unfortunately.

iopq 13y ago
Why do you hate freedom?
- cuttooth 13y ago
  I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history. None of this stuff matters at all and the fact that anyone was surprised by PRISM's existence is nothing but foolish, in my opinion. With greater technology comes inevitable supervision over such things, and it isn't in the name of reading about your browsing habits unless you enjoy children being abused or bombing buildings. The only shame is the lack of transparency about the surveillance, but again, this whole thing should have been completely obvious to just about anyone. Snowden is a traitor and a coward for leaking the obvious (while running off to hide instead of facing the demons he accuses so arrogantly) and Assange is a horrible person for a bunch of other reasons.
  - marshray 13y ago
    You seem to think your porn history is the most interesting thing anyone will ever know about you. I think that's kind of sad.
  - cuttooth 13y ago
    I'm not really understanding what you're attempting to imply.
  - lhnz 13y ago
    > I'm of the apparent internet minority (read: most Americans still don't know or care about PRISM/who this guy is) who doesn't care if the government looks at my porn history. 1. PRISM is an apparatus just waiting for another government to use it against the US. Who's to say that Russia, China, etc. haven't been using it to spy on Americans, too? I mean, it's clearly not that hard to get access. Yes - they might not look at your porn history, but perhaps they will use some useful political information against one of your leaders and fuck you up. 2. What would happen if the government was to have a good reason to misuse the information they were gathering. What would happen if a fascist party was to come into power? 3. Calling Assange a horrible person is small-minded. Don't make this about personalities; this is about individual freedom, the right to a transparent government, the constitution your country was founded upon, and human rights. 4. Rather a traitor to the government than a traitor to the principles that made the US what it once was. Unless you want mediocrity...

kintamanimatt 13y ago

Snowden was in Hong Kong not China. There's a distinct difference.

pekk 13y ago
Hong Kong is part of China.
- b6 13y ago
  You're right, but it's not that simple. HK people don't like to speak Mandarin, and don't like the mainland. It's normal in HK for there to be public demonstrations that would be unthinkable on the mainland.

mscarborough 13y ago

I share your concerns, IMHO it would be awesome if we had ten Edward Snowdens from ten countries. But we don't so I don't think it's fair to put it against Wikileaks for not leaking something that was not given to them. Seems like they should be a receptacle not an institution that does investigative journalism. Perhaps showing support for Snowden will help other content come out, but looking at the huge effort President Obama and Vice Clownshoes Biden have put together to get this guy into the brig, not fucking likely. They have done a good job of isolating Snowden and making future whistle-blowing less likely.

contingencies 13y ago

tokenadult, that is a loaded expectation that Wikileaks is disempowered from fulfilling, since they simply publish what is received after anonymizing and verifying where possible. In fact, back in 2009, Assange told me personally he was surprised not to have received more information from China.

mpyne 13y ago
Have they published the leak of Ecuador's surveillance system plans yet? [1] Admittedly the documents keep getting pulled but apparently they are available on DocumentCloud still. But I just checked the Ecuador page at WikiLeaks [2] and have yet to see anything. Maybe they just need more time to authenticate the contents? Although then again, Ecuador itself seems to have authenticated it [3]. On that note, Ecuador's page at WikiLeaks seems pretty sparse after 2009 or so. I guess there have been any major secrecy scandals since then in Ecuador? [1] http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2013/06/28/scribd-removes-buzzfeed-files-on-ecuador-spying/ http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2013/06/28/scribd-removes-buz... [2] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Ecuador http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Ecuador [3] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-surveillance http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-s...
embolism 13y ago
Why would he be surprised? For all this talk of the jeopardy Snowden is in, we forget that in China a policeman can send you to prison without trial, and that executions are so common they send round mobile vans to perform them.

sneak 13y ago

So you offer some things Wikileaks could change, and then you offer some criticism of Snowden's statement. Why exactly are we still talking about the messenger(s)? How is this productive? The goal is to make the world better. Nitpicking about Snowden, his associates, his travel, his criminal behavior or lack thereof, Wikileaks, Assange, and all of this other stuff is completely orthogonal, soap-opera bullshit that has nothing to do with that goal. We should be focusing now on how to a) spread the word about the constitutional abuses and systemic coverup being perpetrated by NSA and b) working toward building a legal environment wherein these types of circumstances are not only legally prohibited but also cannot be re-engineered in practice either.

e3pi 13y ago
The missile itself is not in chapter thirteen, but the chastening aftermath of its successful delivery.

baby 13y ago

about China, I think there are more worying things than governemnt-operated surveillance programs that have to be reveled. People there know there is an extreme censorship and corruption. IMO the higher government needs to take extreme measure against corruption.

DominikR 13y ago
They already take extreme measure by regularly executing persons (including high ranked officials and bankers) that commited crimes such as fraud and corruption. (Note: I am against the death penalty)

reledi 13y ago

> That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks I don't find that's the case. Living in the US, it's not surprising that most of what you hear from WikiLeaks is about the US. Take a look at their homepage (http://wikileaks.org http://wikileaks.org) for example, most featured stories are not about the US.

xentronium 13y ago

> People everywhere just wanna be free. We ought to be hearing a lot more about all the various governmental data-gathering and surveillance programs, everywhere in the world, and of course we should also be learning more about the actions of private business corporations to gather data on all of us. That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks, and perhaps tells me something favorable about the United States. While I agree that surveillance happens everywhere, USA is in unique position of power to do it, considering how much of internet traffic moves through US-based companies. That said, I also agree that the very fact of existence of outrage caused by PRISM is telling about the US citizens and government, people in Russia, for example, assume that tchekists from FSB are already watching every their step or at the very least able to do so.

chaostheory 13y ago

> I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. I don't know about Russia, but in China it's pretty well known by everyone that the PRC is watching you; China doesn't claim to be a democratic republic either. It's not a secret or revelation to even people in the West. The only people who aren't really familiar with it in Western countries, are people who only stick to reading mainstream consumer news.

CoffeeDregs 13y ago

[Note: I'm an American; hi NSA!] > I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and > fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance > programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located The big deal is that the US is no longer the shining beacon of hope-/change-y-ness or freedom that it claimed to be. We, the US, need to keep that beacon BRIGHTLY LIT. Those states which don't follow the lead will be pressed by the press or dissenters to follow or will repress freedom. [Yes, I acknowledge that the beacon-lit thing is dramatic and too-large, but that's the US for you.] Lose that and we join a race to the freedom-bottom the US founders would be shocked to learn we have undertaken.

embolism 13y ago
Finally a meaningful statement. I couldn't agree more. However I think that one part of this involves recognizing that the Federal Government is not the US. We as people need to actually use the freedoms we have to build a society that people will want to emulate. Somewhere along the way we stopped doing that.

gasull 13y ago

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:China https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:China

chj 13y ago

Both countries especially CHINA has a bad reputation on communication regulation (network shutdown on some occasions) and censorship. There is no need for WikiLeaks to break anything new here. US government has been riding a high horse and teaching everybody about internet freedom, and now they are caught pants down. That's a lot of more worthy of news than exposing already known bad guys. I find it deeply troubling that majority voices in USA are now accusing Snowden / WikiLeaks of damaging USA reputation or things like that.

embolism 13y ago
For all its flaws, the US is still far ahead of China and Russia on these issues. The recent rhetoric has presents the US as the worst offender of all when in practice it's probably better than anyone else who has the power to do these things (including the UK). What if you take the US position at face value? There is oversight, and there are real and serious threats from terrorism and cyberattacks. Is it good to have a massive secret signals collection apparatus? No. Is it necessary? We don't know and nobody is even discussing that because we're all too busy bashing the US.

lmm 13y ago

As a former British possession (sort of), British English is normal in Hong Kong.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]