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That was such a refreshing article. I've been saying it for a while now, I'm hopeful that we're going to see some very positive reforms in 2014 or 2015, as well

by pvnick 13y ago

That was such a refreshing article. I've been saying it for a while now, I'm hopeful that we're going to see some very positive reforms in 2014 or 2015, as well as an eventual hero's welcome for Snowden. It takes a while for such a massive shift in public opinion, but it's inevitable. The reason it's taking so long is just a knowledge gab with the people that aren't as well-informed and don't know the magnitude of the abuses. As people learn the full scope of what's been revealed they tend to be (for the most part) outraged. I look forward to a couple decades from now, when I can tell my kids about how us folks who were paying attention were all vindicated when the NSA reforms were enacted and Snowden was given a full pardon.

hooande 13y ago
It's unfair to characterize people who disagree with you as being uninformed. A lot of people who don't like Snowden's actions know as much about the situation as you do. They've just drawn different conclusions. The gap here is one of personal philosophy and opinion, not one of knowledge. I''m not entirely sure why Snowden is getting so much personal credit. I remember watching an episode of Frontline on PBS that discussed “Room 641A” [1]. A few quotes from the cited wikipedia page, emphasis added: ”[the room] is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore 'the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic.” ”[the program] was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS Nova episode 'The Spy Factory'.” I admittedly watch more PBS than the average person. I was talking about Room 641A and concept of the NSA directly siphoning every call, email, text and url sent from the AT&T Pacific data center several years ago. Snowden’s revelations were news and he provided theretofore unnknown details. But they weren't completely out of the blue. People knew that the NSA was collecting data on an unprecedented scale before Edward Snowden. These programs aren’t new, they didn’t start last year. Snowden unquestioningly gets credit for coming forward, he deserves praise for taking such a risk. It’s clear that he provided us with a paper trail and evidence that no one had in May of 2007. But our knowledge of the NSA’s activities is not “entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden” as the NYT OpEd alleges. People had the knowledge years ago. The outrage is recent. We'll see if the future holds substantive policy reforms or presidential pardons. Cautious optimism never hurts. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- jonathanwallace 13y ago
  You're absolutely correct, Snowden receives personal credit because he's taken on great personal risk to share the information he's shared. Let's not underestimate the value of a singular face to focus sentiment vs. a room.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    Mark Klein was the ATT tech who exposed room 614A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
- gdrulia 13y ago
  In the same way, one day, when someone will discover life on other planets or something similar, there will be people telling us, that people knew that life exists outside of the Earth. Evidence is one crucial point that is necessary to be able to distinguish tattle from facts. Knowledge without evidence is just a possibility. An in my very amateur opinion, Mr. Snowden receives the personal credit simply because he has provided the world with evidence of that previously "known" activity.
- jcc80 13y ago
  "It's unfair to characterize people who disagree with you as being uninformed. A lot of people who don't like Snowden's actions know as much about the situation as you do." True, but the point the parent comment is making is that as people learn more, more people will support what Snowden did / want NSA reforms. I think it's clear that will happen but we'll see what public opinion does over time. Anecdotal I can say that members of my family (the type that barely use a computer) had only a vague notion of the NSA's domestic spying until the Snowden stories broke through the everyday media noise.
- bguthrie 13y ago
  You're underestimating the importance of that paper trail. Knowing that they could have such a capability is not the same thing as knowing that they are actively exercising it, laid out in helpfully blunt Powerpoint. Yes, if you were paying attention, the signs were there. But even well-informed tech people have been taken aback by the breadth and sheer gall of the NSA's snooping. Snowden isn't the only NSA whistleblower, but he is the most important. He deserves the personal credit he's received. As for the article, I'm thankful. If my relatives won't listen to me, maybe they'll listen to the New York Times editorial board.
tokenadult 13y ago
You've made friendly comments about my comments here on HN before, so I'll make a friendly comment here about yours. I have noticed that you consistently view Snowden as a hero, but I respectfully disagree. It would take more electrons than the margins of one HN comment could contain (and more time than I have with my work responsibilities today) to explain how I think Edward Snowden could have revealed the same key facts more responsibly, but even though I largely agree that it's good for the public to know more about what NSA was doing and how NSA was characterizing what it was doing to Congress, I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure ("whistle-blowing"). I think Snowden over the last year has been just as sincerely but ultimately mistakenly misguided as Kim Philby[1] was in the 1960s. Snowden appears to think that he has made the world and his native country a better place on a net basis, and he may even be right about what will happen to his native country as a result of his disclosures, but I think he is mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole. That's all I have time to say about this at the moment, but I want to put that out there as an American who has lived under real tyranny[2] before and has observed how tyranny is overcome by people power. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720
- arca_vorago 13y ago
  I just have to say that I very strongly dislike this type of comment. First, you disagree with the poster, and proceed to make a few claims "I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure", [Snowden was] "ultimately mistakenly misguided", and "mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole." After those claims though, you bow out with "That's all I have time to say about this at the moment" (and of course you lead the comment with a similar "It would take ...more time than I have with my work responsibilities today" You took enough time to write a 1335 character comment, but not a single bit of it was about backing up or explaining the logic behind a single one of your claims. If you don't have time to get into a discussion, don't, and don't expect others to respect such a one-directional attempt at conversation. Now, I will make a small try at explaining why I think you are wrong. "I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure" I think Snowden did the best he could given the restrictions he was under. He took the data over a certain amount of time, and given the amount of documents it is infeasible that he could purge truly sensitive information withing a decent timeframe, therefore he did the next best thing, which was to contact respectable news outlets and give them the documents on the condition that they use their resources to do what he could not. He gave all documents up (minus a supposed insurance file) and sought political asylum, a respected political tradition since the days of Hammurabi. I really can't fathom any better course of action for the situation, but if you would like to suggest one please go ahead. ""mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole." I'm not sure, but to me this seems like it might allude to a claim that the revelations have made the US/World weaker. That simply isn't true. The weaknesses are already there, we the public are simply just learning about them. Could that create a political weakness? Yes indeed, but that is irrelevant because it was the NSA and other powers that be that actually performed the acts that created that weakness, not Snowden and not the public. On your link about Kim, I also have a strong suspicion, hopefully an unfounded one, that you may have fallen into the trap that "journalists" like Joushua Foust have fallen into, in which they all but outright claim "ze Russians" have some nefarious hand in Snowdens cookie jar. Before doing this, please remember that it was never Snowden's intention to seek Asylum in Russia and was headed for Latin America when matters out of his control put him in a spot with limited options.
vorg 13y ago
Didn't read the article (blocked by the Great Firewall), but here's a year-ender from Gwynne Dyer. He says... "[Instead of] a list of events, a year-end piece should be a first draft of history that tries to identify where the flow of events is really taking us. By that standard, Snowden comes first." http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=5&i=10887 http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=5&i=10887

by pvnick 13y ago

hooande 13y ago

It's unfair to characterize people who disagree with you as being uninformed. A lot of people who don't like Snowden's actions know as much about the situation as you do. They've just drawn different conclusions. The gap here is one of personal philosophy and opinion, not one of knowledge. I''m not entirely sure why Snowden is getting so much personal credit. I remember watching an episode of Frontline on PBS that discussed “Room 641A” [1]. A few quotes from the cited wikipedia page, emphasis added: ”[the room] is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore 'the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic.” ”[the program] was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS Nova episode 'The Spy Factory'.” I admittedly watch more PBS than the average person. I was talking about Room 641A and concept of the NSA directly siphoning every call, email, text and url sent from the AT&T Pacific data center several years ago. Snowden’s revelations were news and he provided theretofore unnknown details. But they weren't completely out of the blue. People knew that the NSA was collecting data on an unprecedented scale before Edward Snowden. These programs aren’t new, they didn’t start last year. Snowden unquestioningly gets credit for coming forward, he deserves praise for taking such a risk. It’s clear that he provided us with a paper trail and evidence that no one had in May of 2007. But our knowledge of the NSA’s activities is not “entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden” as the NYT OpEd alleges. People had the knowledge years ago. The outrage is recent. We'll see if the future holds substantive policy reforms or presidential pardons. Cautious optimism never hurts. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

jonathanwallace 13y ago
You're absolutely correct, Snowden receives personal credit because he's taken on great personal risk to share the information he's shared. Let's not underestimate the value of a singular face to focus sentiment vs. a room.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  Mark Klein was the ATT tech who exposed room 614A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
gdrulia 13y ago
In the same way, one day, when someone will discover life on other planets or something similar, there will be people telling us, that people knew that life exists outside of the Earth. Evidence is one crucial point that is necessary to be able to distinguish tattle from facts. Knowledge without evidence is just a possibility. An in my very amateur opinion, Mr. Snowden receives the personal credit simply because he has provided the world with evidence of that previously "known" activity.
jcc80 13y ago
"It's unfair to characterize people who disagree with you as being uninformed. A lot of people who don't like Snowden's actions know as much about the situation as you do." True, but the point the parent comment is making is that as people learn more, more people will support what Snowden did / want NSA reforms. I think it's clear that will happen but we'll see what public opinion does over time. Anecdotal I can say that members of my family (the type that barely use a computer) had only a vague notion of the NSA's domestic spying until the Snowden stories broke through the everyday media noise.
bguthrie 13y ago
You're underestimating the importance of that paper trail. Knowing that they could have such a capability is not the same thing as knowing that they are actively exercising it, laid out in helpfully blunt Powerpoint. Yes, if you were paying attention, the signs were there. But even well-informed tech people have been taken aback by the breadth and sheer gall of the NSA's snooping. Snowden isn't the only NSA whistleblower, but he is the most important. He deserves the personal credit he's received. As for the article, I'm thankful. If my relatives won't listen to me, maybe they'll listen to the New York Times editorial board.

tokenadult 13y ago

You've made friendly comments about my comments here on HN before, so I'll make a friendly comment here about yours. I have noticed that you consistently view Snowden as a hero, but I respectfully disagree. It would take more electrons than the margins of one HN comment could contain (and more time than I have with my work responsibilities today) to explain how I think Edward Snowden could have revealed the same key facts more responsibly, but even though I largely agree that it's good for the public to know more about what NSA was doing and how NSA was characterizing what it was doing to Congress, I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure ("whistle-blowing"). I think Snowden over the last year has been just as sincerely but ultimately mistakenly misguided as Kim Philby[1] was in the 1960s. Snowden appears to think that he has made the world and his native country a better place on a net basis, and he may even be right about what will happen to his native country as a result of his disclosures, but I think he is mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole. That's all I have time to say about this at the moment, but I want to put that out there as an American who has lived under real tyranny[2] before and has observed how tyranny is overcome by people power. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720

arca_vorago 13y ago
I just have to say that I very strongly dislike this type of comment. First, you disagree with the poster, and proceed to make a few claims "I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure", [Snowden was] "ultimately mistakenly misguided", and "mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole." After those claims though, you bow out with "That's all I have time to say about this at the moment" (and of course you lead the comment with a similar "It would take ...more time than I have with my work responsibilities today" You took enough time to write a 1335 character comment, but not a single bit of it was about backing up or explaining the logic behind a single one of your claims. If you don't have time to get into a discussion, don't, and don't expect others to respect such a one-directional attempt at conversation. Now, I will make a small try at explaining why I think you are wrong. "I don't think Snowden engaged in responsible disclosure" I think Snowden did the best he could given the restrictions he was under. He took the data over a certain amount of time, and given the amount of documents it is infeasible that he could purge truly sensitive information withing a decent timeframe, therefore he did the next best thing, which was to contact respectable news outlets and give them the documents on the condition that they use their resources to do what he could not. He gave all documents up (minus a supposed insurance file) and sought political asylum, a respected political tradition since the days of Hammurabi. I really can't fathom any better course of action for the situation, but if you would like to suggest one please go ahead. ""mistaken about what the overall course of his actions has done for the world as a whole." I'm not sure, but to me this seems like it might allude to a claim that the revelations have made the US/World weaker. That simply isn't true. The weaknesses are already there, we the public are simply just learning about them. Could that create a political weakness? Yes indeed, but that is irrelevant because it was the NSA and other powers that be that actually performed the acts that created that weakness, not Snowden and not the public. On your link about Kim, I also have a strong suspicion, hopefully an unfounded one, that you may have fallen into the trap that "journalists" like Joushua Foust have fallen into, in which they all but outright claim "ze Russians" have some nefarious hand in Snowdens cookie jar. Before doing this, please remember that it was never Snowden's intention to seek Asylum in Russia and was headed for Latin America when matters out of his control put him in a spot with limited options.

vorg 13y ago

Didn't read the article (blocked by the Great Firewall), but here's a year-ender from Gwynne Dyer. He says... "[Instead of] a list of events, a year-end piece should be a first draft of history that tries to identify where the flow of events is really taking us. By that standard, Snowden comes first." http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=5&i=10887 http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=5&i=10887