5 ms·

There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech indus

by hooande 13y ago

There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Government surveillance has become a political wedge issue, similar to abortion. No one likes it or encourages it but people have strong emotions on both sides. Snowden is deserving of credit, he may have helped to spark another enduring and polarizing american social debate. It's unfortunate that he won't be around for the resulting legal process. It's worth noting that the modern surveillance state didn't begin when Edward Snowden stepped in front of a camera for the first time. Where were these responsible tech giants five or ten years ago? When everyone in the country was flipping the heck out over 9/11, some of these companies went along with the crowd and gave the government access to everything. Their points are very valid, more government transparency and accountability is always good. But courage is about doing the thing when it's hard, not when it's easy. It's good to see movement in the right direction but it would have been nice if things had gotten to this point sooner. Then maybe Snowden would still be sleeping in his own bed.

asuffield 13y ago
Two of them didn't exist ten years ago, and half of them would have been entirely unaware of the surveillance problem because they were too small to be targets. It's looking increasingly like Google didn't know until Snowden told them - they were just straight-up compromised by a hostile attacker breaking into their networks. So I can't blame most of them for not doing anything sooner.
justin66 13y ago
> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Let's break this down. You'd have to: not know the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union not know that Russia wasn't where Snowden was trying to end up not understand the difference between a political defector (defecting to a political system that doesn't exist anymore!) and a guy trying to evade prosecution I don't say this very often but I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are. People who think Snowden is a traitor would feel the same if he were in Iceland or something right now.
- unionpivo 13y ago
  Considering that the group of people we are talking about probably overlaps with people who still think Obama is a muslim [1], I think you are giving common sense too much credit [1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/obama-muslim_n_1706522.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/obama-muslim_n_1706...
  - melling 13y ago
    Trash talking on HN. So, sad. Got any data to support your claim? Let's see how you can make 17% = 49%. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4175089/ http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4175089/ By adding noise to the argument, you are hurting Snowden's case. People are simply going to conclude that Snowden must be wrong people because people who believe in him are wrong. The fact is that most people live busy lives and actually don't spend much time thinking about Snowden. I think his 15 minutes of fame are up. I don't see him mentioned in the news, except HN, where the story will never die.
- melling 13y ago
  I'm sorry but this is just wrong. If Snowden was is Iceland, Switzerland, Germany or France he would certainly be viewed differently. Russia still has a way to go politically. Putin has been running the country for how long? Journalist tend to get killed: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in... And Russia is also a dangerous place to be gay. Snowden in Russia looks like politics on the part of Russia. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't find out some time in the future that Russia has their own surveillance program that was similar to ours.
  - ENGNR 13y ago
    He wouldn't have made it to Iceland. The USA grounded a government owned plane travelling within Europe to Austria when they thought he was on it. Realistically, China and Russia are the only nations powerful enough to stand up to the USA.
veidr 13y ago
> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards. I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle. Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful. Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39). America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it. It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children. The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast. Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning. Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that. And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.
- couchand 13y ago
  It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children. exactly.
- teamgb 13y ago
  > And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed. Imagine this was 1980 and the issue at hand was apartheid. Jelly-fish CEOs print an open letter in newspapers, asking governments to improve race relations because unhappy black folk don't want to buy their products. Not once is Nelson Mandela mentioned in the letter, so out of the public eye, his years in prison continue. Are we supposed to be impressed with this?
temujin 13y ago
I was born during the Cold War, but I'm capable of understanding that (i) when the government failed to give Bradley Manning due process, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for fleeing. Daniel Ellsberg is in a better position to comment on this than just about anyone else; here's what he said (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427629_1_daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-snowden-s http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427... ): "Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind. There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to 'incapacitate me totally'). I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado. He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as 'cruel, inhuman and degrading.' (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.) Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts." (ii) when they forced down the Bolivian presidential plane, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for staying in Russia.
coffeemug 13y ago
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. I am a Russian American and I see this the other way around. The fact that Snowden had to escape to Russia (of all places!) to maintain his freedom is an indictment of the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. Traditionally the U.S. has been a beacon of hope for political prisoners and has a proud history of shielding dissidents. Just think of it -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner, Joseph Brodsky, I mean, the list is endless! To me (and a lot of other people whose cultural identity is tied to that era) the idea that we're now moving into a world where things are flipped upside down is incredibly weird. I really can't think of other events that cause greater cognitive dissonance. Just think of it -- political dissidents seek asylum in Russia now?! Does that not seem odd?
- teamgb 13y ago
  It seems odd because Russia always gets demonized in the media. It's always the same: mafia, corruption, hackers... I can't remember the last time a positive story was published in the English speaking press. The Thai government have just dissolved parliament and called new elections due to protests. Can you imagine that happening in many so-called "democratic" Western states? You can't even get a crack-smoking mayor to resign these days!
  - AYBABTME 13y ago
    Crack smoking mayor has popular support...!
rayiner 13y ago
> No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Your post is absolutely right, and the people responding to you really fail to capture the dynamic existing in American society. The nature of the American public is that it is willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, but will view with intense skepticism those associated with Russia or China. That's the legacy of the Cold War. This is, incidentally, why you see so much support for surveillance in the first place. People aren't intentionally trying to bring about some sort of futuristic dystopia. But the surveillance apparatus has been in place for most of the post century, and has saw America through the Cold War. Politicians of a certain age and temperament see the latest programs as simply adapting the apparatus to changing technology, not fundamentally increasing its scope or invasiveness.
- couchand 13y ago
  This is not the same "surveillance apparatus [that] saw America through the Cold War." It's simply not comparable to even just fifteen years ago. The changes in technology and the self-satisfied attitude of the spooks have changed the game entirely. Half of the people in this country are deluding themselves just like you.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    It is ahistorical and (perversely) wishful to suggest that communications surveillance in the 1950s was less onerous to the civilian population than it is today. During the heyday of the Cold War, no police force needed a court order to wiretap a phone; the notion of wiretap authorization dates back to, what, 1968? Today, we have rumors and gossip about NSA analysts "training" on Obama's comms in the early '00s. During the Cold War, the FBI brazenly monitored and transcribed all calls to various public figures and then blackmailed them: see Martin Luther King.
    - hobs 13y ago
      I know you have a background in this, and I understand the intelligence agencies COULD have monitored anyone they wanted to in the past, but they couldn't automate it to create the scope of surveillance now in place. A phone tap in the 1950s would require recording and someone listening to it, would it not? How many people could the NSA employ to listen to conversations? Millions? Either way, just because they have been doing disgusting things for so long does not make it something we should stop getting upset about.
nl 13y ago
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. I was born during the cold war. I remember the outrage when it was found that the East German secret police (the Stasi) had files on 1/3 of the population of East Germany. I remember the commentators telling us how no one in the Western, Free world would ever stand for it, and how it could never happen.
Fjolsvith 13y ago
We got laws protecting whistleblowers of big corporations. Why not protection for someone who reveals CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS!?! Why not ADMIRATION and GRADITUDE?

by hooande 13y ago

asuffield 13y ago

Two of them didn't exist ten years ago, and half of them would have been entirely unaware of the surveillance problem because they were too small to be targets. It's looking increasingly like Google didn't know until Snowden told them - they were just straight-up compromised by a hostile attacker breaking into their networks. So I can't blame most of them for not doing anything sooner.

justin66 13y ago

> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Let's break this down. You'd have to: not know the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union not know that Russia wasn't where Snowden was trying to end up not understand the difference between a political defector (defecting to a political system that doesn't exist anymore!) and a guy trying to evade prosecution I don't say this very often but I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are. People who think Snowden is a traitor would feel the same if he were in Iceland or something right now.

unionpivo 13y ago
Considering that the group of people we are talking about probably overlaps with people who still think Obama is a muslim [1], I think you are giving common sense too much credit [1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/obama-muslim_n_1706522.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/obama-muslim_n_1706...
- melling 13y ago
  Trash talking on HN. So, sad. Got any data to support your claim? Let's see how you can make 17% = 49%. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4175089/ http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4175089/ By adding noise to the argument, you are hurting Snowden's case. People are simply going to conclude that Snowden must be wrong people because people who believe in him are wrong. The fact is that most people live busy lives and actually don't spend much time thinking about Snowden. I think his 15 minutes of fame are up. I don't see him mentioned in the news, except HN, where the story will never die.
melling 13y ago
I'm sorry but this is just wrong. If Snowden was is Iceland, Switzerland, Germany or France he would certainly be viewed differently. Russia still has a way to go politically. Putin has been running the country for how long? Journalist tend to get killed: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in... And Russia is also a dangerous place to be gay. Snowden in Russia looks like politics on the part of Russia. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't find out some time in the future that Russia has their own surveillance program that was similar to ours.
- ENGNR 13y ago
  He wouldn't have made it to Iceland. The USA grounded a government owned plane travelling within Europe to Austria when they thought he was on it. Realistically, China and Russia are the only nations powerful enough to stand up to the USA.

veidr 13y ago

> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards. I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle. Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful. Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39). America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it. It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children. The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast. Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning. Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that. And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.

couchand 13y ago
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children. exactly.
teamgb 13y ago
> And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed. Imagine this was 1980 and the issue at hand was apartheid. Jelly-fish CEOs print an open letter in newspapers, asking governments to improve race relations because unhappy black folk don't want to buy their products. Not once is Nelson Mandela mentioned in the letter, so out of the public eye, his years in prison continue. Are we supposed to be impressed with this?

temujin 13y ago

I was born during the Cold War, but I'm capable of understanding that (i) when the government failed to give Bradley Manning due process, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for fleeing. Daniel Ellsberg is in a better position to comment on this than just about anyone else; here's what he said (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427629_1_daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-snowden-s http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427... ): "Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind. There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to 'incapacitate me totally'). I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado. He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as 'cruel, inhuman and degrading.' (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.) Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts." (ii) when they forced down the Bolivian presidential plane, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for staying in Russia.

coffeemug 13y ago

There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. I am a Russian American and I see this the other way around. The fact that Snowden had to escape to Russia (of all places!) to maintain his freedom is an indictment of the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. Traditionally the U.S. has been a beacon of hope for political prisoners and has a proud history of shielding dissidents. Just think of it -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner, Joseph Brodsky, I mean, the list is endless! To me (and a lot of other people whose cultural identity is tied to that era) the idea that we're now moving into a world where things are flipped upside down is incredibly weird. I really can't think of other events that cause greater cognitive dissonance. Just think of it -- political dissidents seek asylum in Russia now?! Does that not seem odd?

teamgb 13y ago
It seems odd because Russia always gets demonized in the media. It's always the same: mafia, corruption, hackers... I can't remember the last time a positive story was published in the English speaking press. The Thai government have just dissolved parliament and called new elections due to protests. Can you imagine that happening in many so-called "democratic" Western states? You can't even get a crack-smoking mayor to resign these days!
- AYBABTME 13y ago
  Crack smoking mayor has popular support...!

rayiner 13y ago

> No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Your post is absolutely right, and the people responding to you really fail to capture the dynamic existing in American society. The nature of the American public is that it is willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, but will view with intense skepticism those associated with Russia or China. That's the legacy of the Cold War. This is, incidentally, why you see so much support for surveillance in the first place. People aren't intentionally trying to bring about some sort of futuristic dystopia. But the surveillance apparatus has been in place for most of the post century, and has saw America through the Cold War. Politicians of a certain age and temperament see the latest programs as simply adapting the apparatus to changing technology, not fundamentally increasing its scope or invasiveness.

couchand 13y ago
This is not the same "surveillance apparatus [that] saw America through the Cold War." It's simply not comparable to even just fifteen years ago. The changes in technology and the self-satisfied attitude of the spooks have changed the game entirely. Half of the people in this country are deluding themselves just like you.
- tptacek 13y ago
  It is ahistorical and (perversely) wishful to suggest that communications surveillance in the 1950s was less onerous to the civilian population than it is today. During the heyday of the Cold War, no police force needed a court order to wiretap a phone; the notion of wiretap authorization dates back to, what, 1968? Today, we have rumors and gossip about NSA analysts "training" on Obama's comms in the early '00s. During the Cold War, the FBI brazenly monitored and transcribed all calls to various public figures and then blackmailed them: see Martin Luther King.
  - hobs 13y ago
    I know you have a background in this, and I understand the intelligence agencies COULD have monitored anyone they wanted to in the past, but they couldn't automate it to create the scope of surveillance now in place. A phone tap in the 1950s would require recording and someone listening to it, would it not? How many people could the NSA employ to listen to conversations? Millions? Either way, just because they have been doing disgusting things for so long does not make it something we should stop getting upset about.

nl 13y ago

Fjolsvith 13y ago

We got laws protecting whistleblowers of big corporations. Why not protection for someone who reveals CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS!?! Why not ADMIRATION and GRADITUDE?