5 ms·

The lie about Edward Snowden that just won't die

47 points by shill 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago
They have no idea what he took and how much, because their internal logging systems are non-existent (on purpose) - but you shouldn't worry about any NSA abuses or other loss of data, because they have "strict oversight".
peterkelly 12y ago
s/stole/exposed to the public what they have a right to know in a democratic society/g
brianbreslin 12y ago
slightly off-topic. how do you think snowden will be remembered in 10 years?
- Theodores 12y ago
  Yes, however, I sadly suspect he will be remembered as being a bit like this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust Rather than being up there with this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
  - RodericDay 12y ago
    I think he'll be remembered like this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg And also I'd be wary of setting MLK as a golden standard- I'd say his image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have opposed (ie: all the kids who are obliquely taught that he "fixed" racism)
    - Theodores 12y ago
      Ellsberg is far from a household name, particularly outside the USA. 'That guy who did the Pentagon Papers' carries no resonance at all, people don't even know what the Pentagon Papers were (outside the USA). Most British whistleblowers wrong-footed themselves with 9/11 or decided they were Jesus, they didn't need the media to make fools of them. I don't think that what's his name again? will make this mistake. However, there is a 'now what?' aspect to the story, there is no uprising from the masses, marches on Washington or anything troubling for the authorities. In some ways Snowden has helped formalise the spying arrangements, it is now just a fact of life like having CCTV everywhere. The social contract has just been clarified. Also, Snowden did one act, albeit a lot of planning and hard work went into it. He is not recognised as a writer or a public speaker (yet). His babysitting arrangements mean he cannot flourish that way to easily.
      - DonHopkins 12y ago
        Jesus's image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have opposed, too.
        hegotapoint 12y ago
        Ooo, I'm interested. Please elaborate?
        DonHopkins 12y ago
        He wasn't white. And he wasn't the son of God. And he didn't hate all the people who modern mainstream Christians hate.
  - rdl 12y ago
    I'd be happy to take the other side of that bet. At the very least, he's going to be at least as well regarded as some combination of Deep Throat and Daniel Ellsberg. He might actually end up as the Rachel Carson of the issue. There's an outside chance he could be the John Brown. There are a few axes of comparison: effectiveness of his action, and "goodness" of his motivation. They're not completely orthogonal, but if he turns out to have been an (unwitting?) SVR asset, or if a big terrorist incident happens which includes comsec/opsec derived from the Snowden leaks, he's probably doomed on both. But I don't think that's likely.
    - dfc 12y ago
      I think you forgot to include one axis that Snowden fails to compete with the Rev. Dr. MLK; length of sustained actions in the face of extreme risk to life and liberty. Rev. Dr. King's legacy is also buttressed by his writings in addition to his actions, Snowden has yet to pen something as eloquent as "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."[^1] Addendum: I just saw the mention of John Brown. I tried to tip toe around the issue originally but with Brown's name being mentioned it is the elephant in the room. Hopefully Snowden will not join John Brown or Rev. Dr. King among the list of those that died in the service of social action. [^1]: If he does pen something like Letter from a Birmingham jail I hope he leaves instructions with his lawyer/estate to not be fascists about enforcing copyright protections on the work.
      - rdl 12y ago
        Being non-anonymous is a point in favor of Snowden being remembered (DT did a lot more than Ellsberg but...), although being in limbo in Russia really isn't helping. Another interesting question is timing. If Snowden had happened in December 2002 (so, no elections, and the programs well underway), he probably wouldn't have the level of support we have today. Before the Iraq War, there was certainly a lot more support of the GWoT among even "reasonable" people. I remember launching an anonymous remailer late on 9/11 or 9/12 and it really seemed like the end for people caring about privacy. If MLK had happened much earlier, it probably would have been a lot more difficult for him, too. With Snowden, I think we're a bit late (in time for the elections of 2008 or 2012 would have been great; the financial collapse might have been a necessary precondition for distrust of institutions though) -- a decade more on the same trajectory would have been a lot worse, and IMO probably irreversible.
  - RRRA 12y ago
    I hope he stops at landing in Moscow and not Rust's later life... ;)
staunch 12y ago
You can't infer anything about his motives from the number of files he took. It's just good sysadmin instinct to backup everything, encrypt it, and then sort it out later. Disk space is cheap and it's better to have too much than be missing something important. It also often takes less effort to take more data simply because it requires no additional thinking or typing to exclude things.
whoopdedo 12y ago
The two questions that must be asked about this are: Are all documents created equal? Is one document a multi-page report containing detailed information, or is it a brief memorandum about something trivial? How much of these documents is boilerplate such as daily summaries that will repeat the same information as long as it's relevant? If I grab someone's mbox is that one document, or a collection of emails that each count as one document? Of course none of that matters if there the number is entirely fictional. But there is still the second question, does it matter how many documents were leaked? Would your opinion of Snowden change if the number were different? If you defend him, is there an upper limit after which revealing the information is no longer justified? If you think he's a traitor, is there a small enough number that you would not object to? I don't think it matters. The writers probably don't think so either and are thus using it not to add information to their articles but because sounds better. A person learning about this for the first time will see "1.7 million" and think either "Wow, that's a lot!" or "This reporter did a good job." A person writing "Snowden is reported to have stolen an unknown number of documents," will raise the question of who it is unknown to. The reader may think the reporter didn't do enough research. Or doubt the NSA's account of what happened. Adding an irrelevant statistic makes the article more believable. And the more specific the statistic the better. Would the effect be the same if it were "2 million", or the more cautious "over 1 million"? I bet media analysts have studied click rates and know just what kind of meaningless statistics can be added to an article to increase readership. This is what happens when success in journalism is measured by page views.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  %! % Top Secret Stolen NSA Documents 1800000 { 100 500 moveto (TOP SECRET) show showpage } repeat
dan_bk 12y ago
I don't think this issue really is a big one. I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". It seems like Snowden's work has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance. I really hope I'm wrong.
- krapp 12y ago
  Bear in mind that "the new normal" as a qualifier for the current state of affairs, at least in the US, goes back to Dick Cheney and 9/11. I don't know that Snowden changed that many minds, outside of this particular bubble. Mostly, people are more upset with the minor annoyances of the TSA that discovering the government can read their emails.
- vwoolf 12y ago
  I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". A lot of this is also a political / legal question; has the public ever been deeply interested in privacy questions? My (naive?) guess is no, but the judicial branch has historically done an okay job of representing the public interest, and giant scandals (like Nixon) have moved legislators.
  - qnaal 12y ago
    Pretty soon some part of the system is going to catch on that everyone else is as subtly creeped out by all this shit as they are, and the military industrial complex will have to surrender some of its tentacles.
- onnoonno 12y ago
  I wonder whether this could be a manufactured opinion to an extent? I mean, we now know that online forums are subverted and socially engineered to keep 'bad opinions' down. Add to that the still persisting mass media with known effects - and I slowly start to think of the internet as being very much part of the 'mass media', too. For example, I noticed a lot of articles in newspapers being written by journalists that have agendas that diverge completely from the opinions of the people commenting on an article. The next step, I'd guess, is to 'properly' police these comments....
mudil 12y ago
The piece in WSJ titled "Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?" is worth reading (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230483130...). Even though I am sympathetic to Showden for his disclosures of gov't surveillance of American citizens and others, the scope, complexity, and execution of operation leaves many questions unanswered. National security officials (both Republicans and Dems) are quoted in the piece that they believe that Showden operation was an espionage heist. From the article: "On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation." So on one hand we have people like the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Obama officials who are neck deep in intelligence work, and on the other we have feel-gooders like BoingBoing, who really don't know what's going on, and who might never ever find out what really happened, because it could be classified for ages.
- mudil 12y ago
  Anyone can explain why above is being down voted?
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    For taking Dianne Feinstein seriously on matters of national security.
    - mudil 12y ago
      She is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. This is no small matter. She was chosen there by her colleagues, other senators, and it is a very serious position. This is probably the most serious committee in all of Senate.
      - 12y ago
pbreit 12y ago
With that headline I was expecting the author to put forth a number or at least assert that it couldn't be 1.7 million.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  The whole point of the article is that there's no credible number because the government has no way to know what was stolen.
  - lazylizard 12y ago
    a little bit curious. i'd think that is a correct assumption to be working with -> he accessed N documents, assume they're all compromised.
csandreasen 12y ago
I don't think this would have been nearly as much of an issue if the reporters had been up front about how much had been given to them. Pick a metric - documents/files/pages/slides/whatever, and stick to it. As it played out, it went from Snowden saying "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed" in his interview last June, to Greenwald saying the total count was 9-10k in July, then 15-20k in August, then the NY Times saying that the Guardian gave them 50k Snowden docs in September [1]. I'm curious why they won't give a definitive number - I'm assuming that they're trying to avoid accusations that he just scraped as much as he could and took it out of the country without properly evaluating the documents. [1] http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-incredibly-mutating-document-trove/ http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-inc...

47 points by shill 12y ago

They have no idea what he took and how much, because their internal logging systems are non-existent (on purpose) - but you shouldn't worry about any NSA abuses or other loss of data, because they have "strict oversight".

peterkelly 12y ago

s/stole/exposed to the public what they have a right to know in a democratic society/g

brianbreslin 12y ago

slightly off-topic. how do you think snowden will be remembered in 10 years?

Theodores 12y ago
Yes, however, I sadly suspect he will be remembered as being a bit like this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust Rather than being up there with this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
- RodericDay 12y ago
  I think he'll be remembered like this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg And also I'd be wary of setting MLK as a golden standard- I'd say his image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have opposed (ie: all the kids who are obliquely taught that he "fixed" racism)
  - Theodores 12y ago
    Ellsberg is far from a household name, particularly outside the USA. 'That guy who did the Pentagon Papers' carries no resonance at all, people don't even know what the Pentagon Papers were (outside the USA). Most British whistleblowers wrong-footed themselves with 9/11 or decided they were Jesus, they didn't need the media to make fools of them. I don't think that what's his name again? will make this mistake. However, there is a 'now what?' aspect to the story, there is no uprising from the masses, marches on Washington or anything troubling for the authorities. In some ways Snowden has helped formalise the spying arrangements, it is now just a fact of life like having CCTV everywhere. The social contract has just been clarified. Also, Snowden did one act, albeit a lot of planning and hard work went into it. He is not recognised as a writer or a public speaker (yet). His babysitting arrangements mean he cannot flourish that way to easily.
    - DonHopkins 12y ago
      Jesus's image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have opposed, too.
      - hegotapoint 12y ago
        Ooo, I'm interested. Please elaborate?
        DonHopkins 12y ago
        He wasn't white. And he wasn't the son of God. And he didn't hate all the people who modern mainstream Christians hate.
- rdl 12y ago
  I'd be happy to take the other side of that bet. At the very least, he's going to be at least as well regarded as some combination of Deep Throat and Daniel Ellsberg. He might actually end up as the Rachel Carson of the issue. There's an outside chance he could be the John Brown. There are a few axes of comparison: effectiveness of his action, and "goodness" of his motivation. They're not completely orthogonal, but if he turns out to have been an (unwitting?) SVR asset, or if a big terrorist incident happens which includes comsec/opsec derived from the Snowden leaks, he's probably doomed on both. But I don't think that's likely.
  - dfc 12y ago
    I think you forgot to include one axis that Snowden fails to compete with the Rev. Dr. MLK; length of sustained actions in the face of extreme risk to life and liberty. Rev. Dr. King's legacy is also buttressed by his writings in addition to his actions, Snowden has yet to pen something as eloquent as "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."[^1] Addendum: I just saw the mention of John Brown. I tried to tip toe around the issue originally but with Brown's name being mentioned it is the elephant in the room. Hopefully Snowden will not join John Brown or Rev. Dr. King among the list of those that died in the service of social action. [^1]: If he does pen something like Letter from a Birmingham jail I hope he leaves instructions with his lawyer/estate to not be fascists about enforcing copyright protections on the work.
    - rdl 12y ago
      Being non-anonymous is a point in favor of Snowden being remembered (DT did a lot more than Ellsberg but...), although being in limbo in Russia really isn't helping. Another interesting question is timing. If Snowden had happened in December 2002 (so, no elections, and the programs well underway), he probably wouldn't have the level of support we have today. Before the Iraq War, there was certainly a lot more support of the GWoT among even "reasonable" people. I remember launching an anonymous remailer late on 9/11 or 9/12 and it really seemed like the end for people caring about privacy. If MLK had happened much earlier, it probably would have been a lot more difficult for him, too. With Snowden, I think we're a bit late (in time for the elections of 2008 or 2012 would have been great; the financial collapse might have been a necessary precondition for distrust of institutions though) -- a decade more on the same trajectory would have been a lot worse, and IMO probably irreversible.
- RRRA 12y ago
  I hope he stops at landing in Moscow and not Rust's later life... ;)

staunch 12y ago

You can't infer anything about his motives from the number of files he took. It's just good sysadmin instinct to backup everything, encrypt it, and then sort it out later. Disk space is cheap and it's better to have too much than be missing something important. It also often takes less effort to take more data simply because it requires no additional thinking or typing to exclude things.

whoopdedo 12y ago

The two questions that must be asked about this are: Are all documents created equal? Is one document a multi-page report containing detailed information, or is it a brief memorandum about something trivial? How much of these documents is boilerplate such as daily summaries that will repeat the same information as long as it's relevant? If I grab someone's mbox is that one document, or a collection of emails that each count as one document? Of course none of that matters if there the number is entirely fictional. But there is still the second question, does it matter how many documents were leaked? Would your opinion of Snowden change if the number were different? If you defend him, is there an upper limit after which revealing the information is no longer justified? If you think he's a traitor, is there a small enough number that you would not object to? I don't think it matters. The writers probably don't think so either and are thus using it not to add information to their articles but because sounds better. A person learning about this for the first time will see "1.7 million" and think either "Wow, that's a lot!" or "This reporter did a good job." A person writing "Snowden is reported to have stolen an unknown number of documents," will raise the question of who it is unknown to. The reader may think the reporter didn't do enough research. Or doubt the NSA's account of what happened. Adding an irrelevant statistic makes the article more believable. And the more specific the statistic the better. Would the effect be the same if it were "2 million", or the more cautious "over 1 million"? I bet media analysts have studied click rates and know just what kind of meaningless statistics can be added to an article to increase readership. This is what happens when success in journalism is measured by page views.

DonHopkins 12y ago
%! % Top Secret Stolen NSA Documents 1800000 { 100 500 moveto (TOP SECRET) show showpage } repeat

dan_bk 12y ago

I don't think this issue really is a big one. I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". It seems like Snowden's work has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance. I really hope I'm wrong.

krapp 12y ago
Bear in mind that "the new normal" as a qualifier for the current state of affairs, at least in the US, goes back to Dick Cheney and 9/11. I don't know that Snowden changed that many minds, outside of this particular bubble. Mostly, people are more upset with the minor annoyances of the TSA that discovering the government can read their emails.
vwoolf 12y ago
I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". A lot of this is also a political / legal question; has the public ever been deeply interested in privacy questions? My (naive?) guess is no, but the judicial branch has historically done an okay job of representing the public interest, and giant scandals (like Nixon) have moved legislators.
- qnaal 12y ago
  Pretty soon some part of the system is going to catch on that everyone else is as subtly creeped out by all this shit as they are, and the military industrial complex will have to surrender some of its tentacles.
onnoonno 12y ago
I wonder whether this could be a manufactured opinion to an extent? I mean, we now know that online forums are subverted and socially engineered to keep 'bad opinions' down. Add to that the still persisting mass media with known effects - and I slowly start to think of the internet as being very much part of the 'mass media', too. For example, I noticed a lot of articles in newspapers being written by journalists that have agendas that diverge completely from the opinions of the people commenting on an article. The next step, I'd guess, is to 'properly' police these comments....

mudil 12y ago

The piece in WSJ titled "Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?" is worth reading (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230483130...). Even though I am sympathetic to Showden for his disclosures of gov't surveillance of American citizens and others, the scope, complexity, and execution of operation leaves many questions unanswered. National security officials (both Republicans and Dems) are quoted in the piece that they believe that Showden operation was an espionage heist. From the article: "On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation." So on one hand we have people like the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Obama officials who are neck deep in intelligence work, and on the other we have feel-gooders like BoingBoing, who really don't know what's going on, and who might never ever find out what really happened, because it could be classified for ages.

mudil 12y ago
Anyone can explain why above is being down voted?
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  For taking Dianne Feinstein seriously on matters of national security.
  - mudil 12y ago
    She is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. This is no small matter. She was chosen there by her colleagues, other senators, and it is a very serious position. This is probably the most serious committee in all of Senate.
    - 12y ago

pbreit 12y ago

With that headline I was expecting the author to put forth a number or at least assert that it couldn't be 1.7 million.

kevingadd 12y ago
The whole point of the article is that there's no credible number because the government has no way to know what was stolen.
- lazylizard 12y ago
  a little bit curious. i'd think that is a correct assumption to be working with -> he accessed N documents, assume they're all compromised.

csandreasen 12y ago

I don't think this would have been nearly as much of an issue if the reporters had been up front about how much had been given to them. Pick a metric - documents/files/pages/slides/whatever, and stick to it. As it played out, it went from Snowden saying "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed" in his interview last June, to Greenwald saying the total count was 9-10k in July, then 15-20k in August, then the NY Times saying that the Guardian gave them 50k Snowden docs in September [1]. I'm curious why they won't give a definitive number - I'm assuming that they're trying to avoid accusations that he just scraped as much as he could and took it out of the country without properly evaluating the documents. [1] http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-incredibly-mutating-document-trove/ http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-inc...