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Snowden a 'traitor': Andreessen

209 points by kjhughes 12y ago

cryoshon 12y ago
"The Snowden reveals keep coming out. The [Obama] administration is letting the NSA out to dry. They're letting the American tech industry out to dry," Andreessen said. Obama could hardly be construed as letting the NSA out to dry. If anything, Obama has gone on record as having the NSA's back and making sure that they are protected from the consequences of their wrongdoing. Obama's pro-NSA actions are in stark contrast to his pre-election discourses on this topic. You'd think that he would love the opportunity to make good on one of his campaign promises rather than double down on the opposite as he's chosen to.
- chc 12y ago
  Andreessen's complaints about hurting the tech industry probably wouldn't exist if Obama had thrown the NSA under the bus. The reason American companies are getting blowback is because of how unrepentant the government appears.
billyhoffman 12y ago
I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had on "U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas," and yet he talks about Snowden. Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. They are the ones that are intercepting American technology products, like Cisco routers, and modifying them before shipping them overseas. All without (as far as we know) the knowledge or consent of the companies that make the products. All American technology products are now suspect, in ways they never have been perceived in the past. Not because of the NSA spying on foreign countries, or collecting domestic meta data. But because the NSA is now tampering with American technology products and companies. The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  This is the point. The actions of the NSA have irreparably damaged the reputation of American technology companies, and all Andreessen does is shoot the messenger.
- Borogravia 12y ago
  I agree with your point, but do you really find it that surprising?
  - yojimbo311 12y ago
    Which part? Andreessen taking his anger out on Snowden or the NSA's tampering? To the latter, yes, yes I do. If for no other reason than the consequences of such tampering are obvious if ever discovered and nothing ever stays secret forever. They made the decision and we can only assume they did it knowing full well what would happen should it ever come to light, leak or not. Would things have been much different if this was discovered 5 years from now? How about 10? Can we assume they would stop tampering with equipment at any point without disclosure? IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  > Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. He's not angry about some moral issue, he's angry that revenue is going down.
  - billyhoffman 12y ago
    I get that. But instead of saying "I'm upset with how the NSA's actions are impacting the revenue/growth of our technology sector, which is a major source of new jobs in the US, etc etc" he is talking about he thinks Snowden is a traitor. This feels like a wasted opportunity. He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      From his point of view it's not NSA's abuse that caused the problem, but the actual whistle blowing that exposed that abuse. Were it to remain secret there would have been no damage. I don't condone such an amoral approach, but at least he's honest.
- mindslight 12y ago
  > I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders. The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client. These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately). Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life. Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Well put! I'm sadly surprised that there are still so many people willing to work on these things. :(
- crusso 12y ago
  The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden. Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be. He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.
atonse 12y ago
Andreessen says he's surprised that people are surprised. That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies. Another thing is the wording - Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. That is a consequence of his disclosures. But this information was hidden from the American taxpayer (which is also easy to justify because we all don't have security clearances), but more egregiously, the information was hidden from Congressional Committees that actually have direct OVERSIGHT. And they have security clearances, so what's your excuse then? So sure, the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to. But that was their full time job to find out and they are probably hardly surprised. But thankfully, even Congress and the American public know exactly where our taxes are going. And we really aren't the enemy of the NSA. What we ask our representatives to do with this information will say it all.
- wpietri 12y ago
  > Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays. Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody. From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.
  - jellicle 12y ago
    Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government. Which Andreessen may well.
grifpete 12y ago
I'm disappointed in Andreessen. It appears that a major part of his concern is the damage done to US firms trying to do business abroad. This damage, apparently, completely outweighs and potential damage to our liberties occasioned by trampling on rights that we won by painful and bloody struggles.
- api 12y ago
  This is a really odious quote, especially if you read carefully. He says Obama is doing too little to counter the perception. In other words it's okay if you break the law, violate the constitution, and create enormous opportunities for institutional corruption as long as the perception remains intact and you don't get caught.
  - leorocky 12y ago
    Does he honestly mean he doesn't want perception to reflect reality?
    - corford 12y ago
      I doubt very much he wants perception to reflect reality. He's a VC.
- deleted 12y ago
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- revelation 12y ago
  It seems that his major concern in all of this is money. This is a guy who will happily take ethyl bromoacetate out of Zyklon B if theres a buck to be made.
cbtacy 12y ago
The good news is that there are tons of VCs out there who are really good and are well aligned with our opinions and interests. There is absolutely no need to talk to these guys much less take money from them.
- ardit33 12y ago
  Yep. A shark will always remain a shark.
warrenmiller 12y ago
It's not Snowden who's harmed US business by exposing the spying, it's the NSA who did the spying.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Absolutely this. Right now I'm reading a brilliant book on domestic abuse [1], and it talks about how abusers create double binds. E.g., family is supposed to go to a birthday party, but at the last minute the abusive dad blows up at something the mom says and refuses to let anybody go until she apologizes. The kids pressure mom to give a false apology so they can go. If she doesn't, she's the one who ruined the outing, not dad. If she does, she confirms that she's the problem, and later the kids are upset when she doesn't stick up for them. Meanwhile, the dad's tantrum is entirely out of scope of discussion, as is the repeated pattern of behavior. The governmental theory that they could try to hoover up every detail of every digital interaction and never get found out was always insane. It wasn't a question of if that would come out, it was when. I find it hard to believe nobody internally asked that, but either way they are the ones to blame for the consequences, not Snowden. [1] Lundy Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That?", http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656 http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519.... It's the single most astute thing I've read. It's one of those books where it's nominally about a relatively narrow topic, but I keep saying, "Well, this explains X! And that explains Y!" If anybody would like a copy, email me; it's good enough I want everybody to have read it.
notastartup 12y ago
this really hurts the respect I had for Andreessen. Really wish he didn't make that statement. Snowden is NOT a traitor, he is a bringer of truth, truth which will ultimately set us free, how can that be a bad thing?
- smacktoward 12y ago
  In a national security state, truth is bad for business.
- adewinter 12y ago
  Whether or not he made that statement doesn't matter. What should matter to you more is that he believes it in the first place.
  - tkinom 12y ago
    He is believer of $$$. Someone (or some org such as NSA ) is stopping the China and others from buying the product/using the service his VC firm is investing it. That's what really upset him the most.
izzydata 12y ago
Under what circumstances is hiding the truth beneficial? If the truth is in someway upsetting then something should be done to fix it instead of wishing they were still ignorant of it.
runjake 12y ago
I disagree with Marc, but he brings up a number of good points, so the video is worth watching. And yeah, many people have known/could surmise that NSA was watching all. At least those people who paid attention to ECHELON, Cryptome, and James Bamford. But Snowden's point was to get NSA's activities known to the general population, not the cypherpunks and tinfoilers. I'm unsure Marc sees or cares about this point.
mindcrime 12y ago
I think Andreesen's anger is misplaced. He should be railing against the NSA for what they were doing, not against Snowden for simply revealing it, vis-a-vis the harm being done to US companies. I also think Andreesen is dead-wrong to call Snowden a traitor. One of the most essential principles of having a free and open society is having a government which is transparent, and which is accountable to We The People. Many of the things our government has done, and is doing, belong in the playbooks of 3rd world dictatorial regimes, or totalitarian governments like WWII era Germany, or Soviet era Russia, etc. Secret laws? Secret courts? Secret legal interpretations? National Security Letters (something that acts like a warrant but isn't a warrant)?? Government agencies that spy on pretty much everybody in the world? Agency officials who are apparently allowed to lie to Congress with impunity??? And he thinks Snowden is the problem? Get real...
deleted 12y ago
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cottonseed 12y ago
I'm not sure why we care what Andreessen thinks. I wish I had a downvote. Second, he seems to be saying Snowden is a traitor because his revelations are hurting the US tech industry. I can see why that would make Andreessen feel betrayed, but that is hardly the definition of traitor. Third, as others have said, nobody was surprised the NSA is spying. We're surprised it is conducting pervasive electronic surveillance in the US. (Personally, I'm horrified although not surprised by the scope of the spying outside the US. I would strongly support extending privacy protections to everyone, as unrealistic as that idea is.) Finally, if we're going to get definitional, Snowden is certainly a traitor. He clearly broke the law, betrayed the trust placed in him and it seems very likely he would be convicted of treason. However, I also think he did the right thing for the right reasons.
- warmfuzzykitten 12y ago
  If we're going to get "definitional," Snowden is not a traitor. "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Setting aside for the moment the definition of "Enemies" - a notion that is usually reserved for wartime - it is difficult to see how Snowden's revelations gave comfort to anyone, and aid only in the sense of "Oh, and by the way, we're reading your emails and listening to your phone calls," which any sane "enemy" already suspected. Witness the precautions the Osama bin Laden camp took to never let any electronic communication originate from their hiding place in Pakistan. Snowden violated his contract with the NSA and broke the law, but neither of these amounts to treason.
logfromblammo 12y ago
People like to punish the messenger bearing bad news, for some bizarre reason. American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected." And the patient blames him for the injury. All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now. This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future. I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time. In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.
projectramo 12y ago
In case you want to look up how others feel about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Public_opinion_polls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Public_opinion_p...
joeevans1000 12y ago
Andreessen is a classic money grubber. His bottom line is his bottom line... not society, public wellbeing, or what's right.
drcongo 12y ago
Says man who wears Google Glass.
vidarh 12y ago
And there went any shred of respect I might have had for Andreessen. Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.
- tzaman 12y ago
  I could not agree more, I actually went and checked the story because I didn't believe it was _the_ Andreessen. I guess fundraising with him is off :)
- ProAm 12y ago
  Exactly, Andreessen is upset that the government is doing things that affects his investments, end of story.
  - isomorphic 12y ago
    No, he's upset that Snowden revealed that the government is doing things that affect his investments. His comments make it sound like the government is neutral or somehow the victim in this.
    - nobbyclark 12y ago
      Sounds like a similar POV as those that believe security by obscurity is adequate.
      - chris_mahan 12y ago
        The first rule of security is you do not talk about security.
    - spinlock 12y ago
      Listen to his statement again. He believes that foreign governments -- who already knew about US spy operations -- are using Snowden's leaks as political cover to enact protectionist policies. After all, every other wold power engages in exactly the same type of behavior. But, without a Snowden of their own, they don't have the PR problem that the US does.
tptacek 12y ago
I would not under almost any circumstances, including the revelation that he was working directly with the FSB† when he decided what to leak, use the word "traitor" to describe a national security leaker. In addition to being inaccurate, the word sucks all the oxygen out of the room and makes it impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about what happened. But if you can get past Andreesen's unfortunate choice of framing††, this story is useful as an indicator of how captive we are to our filter bubbles. The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird. Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that. Finally, regardless of how I feel about Snowden, I agree (for once) with the consensus opinion of the HN thread that if there's economic blowback to the revelations, it's hard to pin that on Snowden. The only way I could see that being valid is if Snowden made up his own facts and was then taken seriously. Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility, but the most outlandish claims seem to have been widely dismissed by now. † Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins. †† You're not required to get around it; you might believe in a corollary to "bad facts make bad law" and think that continuing a discussion that has already been poisoned is a waste of time.
- nabla9 12y ago
  I'm an European and treason and espionage are political crimes (they not against universal ethics in any way). If Snowden is a traitor, then he spied on my behalf against U.S. government. For me and many other citizens of so called free word he is a hero. He should get a medal. In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies? First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.
  - opendais 12y ago
    I think the reason Americans don't see foreign spying as an issue is this: If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent. However, when you spy domestically, the US citizen can't exactly defend himself and can get railroaded under National Security...then tossed in jail. There is a very, very big difference between what domestic security forces can do to you vs. foreign ones.
jgon 12y ago
This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that. Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue." I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China. At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.
zacinbusiness 12y ago
"He made me not make as much money as I wanted to have made and thus he is a traitor."
kolev 12y ago
Never like @pmarca. This is another perspective on who this guys really is. His involvement in the Bitcoin bubble is very indicative on the human material he's made of.
throw7 12y ago
Andreessen comes across as amoral here. Actually, that's not completely correct; he believes what's right is anything that helps his bottomline, and anything that hurts his bottomline is wrong. It's a very similar argument that Lanny Breuer put forth in not going after wall street.
- tptacek 12y ago
  What is the upside to an amoral Andreesen of broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?
  - jgon 12y ago
    Good question. And yet the fact remains that he did it. It's almost like people are fallible or something.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Would it blow your mind to hear that not everyone agrees with you about Snowden?
      - jgon 12y ago
        Nope. What would blow my mind is watching you engage in a non-passive aggressive manner with people. Let's see if you can!
  - larrys 12y ago
    "broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?" What do you think the actual net effect of that will be though? That Andreesen will actually lose out on the best or many deals? Not only do people have short memories, but money and opportunity smooth over many problems in people's minds. Rationalization. [1] I remember reading how up in arms people were about MIT and Schwartz. Some alum threatened to pull support. So how many actually did? (I don't know the answer). Of course if the "brand" continues to broadcast opinions on an ongoing basis that are unpopular that's a different story. [1] Faced with economic opportunity the tobacco industry spreading around wealth and business opportunities did pretty well for many years.
sixQuarks 12y ago
Andreessen is a "grand master" when it comes to tech/startups. I really do respect his insights, he's obviously a very intelligent person. However, in this case, it seems Andreessen is not much of a student of history and government. Anyone that listens to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" and "Common Sense" podcasts will know how dangerous these government powers can be.
rosser 12y ago
How many of the people decrying Andreessen's stance on Snowden would still take A16Z money? Where are your principles now?
zackmorris 12y ago
Traitor is such a strong word… To think the NSA is worried about Snowden, really at all, is kind of comical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  I remember that some of the talk at UIUC being that the school missed an opportunity there. As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.
vdaniuk 12y ago
I really, really think we need a new breed of 'venture socialists' for the lack of better term that will optimize investment BOTH for potential returns and social good.
- massappeal 12y ago
  I think the Social+Capital Partnership is trying to do this, but I could be mistaken.
scelerat 12y ago
I am not surprised that the NSA is spying on US citizens. I am angry. The "I can't believe people are surprised..." trope is dismissive and condescending.
- Gracana 12y ago
  Mhmm. "Outrage does not equal surprise" is a phrase I remember reading in comments on a Skepchick blog post once, and I thought it was a very good way to put it. I wish it was a more widely-understood concept.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    I remember reading a lot of Reddit comments initially like "are you surprised they're doing this?", and I agree they are condescending, because people saying that usually want to: 1) show how smart they are, because they already knew that, and perhaps you didn't 2) try to imply that it's "no big deal", since it's been happening for some time, and supposedly because of that you shouldn't be angry about it now. I disagree with both views, because: 1) most people weren't in fact aware that the NSA was spying on every single person on the planet, guilty of something or not, and also most people (or rather security engineers) weren't aware that NSA is trying to actively attack US companies in order to spy on their users, and even tap the Internet cables to get all plaintext data. 2) most of this stuff has been happening under secrecy (it is a spy agency after all), so just because it's been happening under secrecy for decades, doesn't mean we shouldn't be outraged that we find out about it only now. If anything we should be more outraged, because it's been happening for so long, without the population being aware of it, and giving their consent for it (especially on the part about even innocents being spied upon to "catch the terrorists" - which is already proven to not be the only reason NSA spies on everyone)
zimbatm 12y ago
Andreessen hits a point when he says what foreign government knew full well that they where spied upon. We have to remember that those revelations are for the public. Given how easy it was for Snowden to acquire these documents it's not far fetched to think that the other groups of power already had access to them. And they are collaborating with the US anyways. Politicians cry outrage to calm down the public. As if they where the victims. Funny how they never talk about what counter-measures could be applied. Shouldn't it be our countries responsibility to ensure that the Internet is not bugged at least in the realm of the country ?
albert_holm 12y ago
"This is something people have got very upset at me for saying this. I think if you actually follow the NSA and read the books and the articles and understood the history, I think you generally assume that they were doing pretty much everything that's come out." So if we already suspected/knew what NSA was doing, then what harm did Snowden cause by basically only verifying our suspicions?
mullingitover 12y ago
It's really helpful when people stand up and identitfy themselves as being enthusiastic members of 'Team Police State' without having to drag it out of them. There are definitely traitors to the cause of freedom in this whole affair, but Snowden is far from being one.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
If you look at Andersen at the video, he is angry. He is angry because he could lose money because of Snowden. He talks about other countries in the world as envious. But a lot of the capital of the US comes from outside US. The people outside of the US get angry too if they are considered "adversaries" and start doing illegal things to favor US business. That simply backfires. Most of the people outside the US has not problems with the NSA catching terrorists, but have huge problems with the NSA robbing them (industrial spying)blind. This is like cheating on your partner and then getting angry with the person that tells your partner about it. I was already telling people not to trust the cloud or American companies before Snowden, I though that if they could abuse, they will, obvious for smart people like me, a minority of the population. The difference is that now the people I talk to actually listen to me.
wellboy 12y ago
< The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas, he added. Yes and the costs are estimated to be as high as $180B (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snow...). However, this is a very close-minded thing to say, which I would have never expected from Marc Andreesen. It's not the Snowden revelations that have caused the $180B damages, it's the government breaking the law and our big tech-companies and not having a spine to fight against these violations that caused these damages.
declan 12y ago
Marc Andreessen is a smart fellow who doesn't mind saying controversial things; I often find myself agreeing with him. But I wonder here if he saying something controversial for the sake of the controversy. I especially wonder if Marc has thought through the implications of his "textbook traitor" line. Let's say he's right that Edward Snowden violated the Espionage Act, which is what I take his comments to mean (the definition of "treason" is "levies war against them or adheres to their enemies," which is arguable at best). 18 USC 798 makes it a felony for anyone to "publish" or "make available" any "classified information" relating to: - the "nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government" OR - or "concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government" OR - "obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government" http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798) Those are Boolean OR statements above; you only need to hit one to have an all-expense paid trip to Club Fed. Snowden hit all three! But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here?
- mpyne 12y ago
  > But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here? Prosecutorial discretion is still a thing, even if "common sense" has disappeared. Nor has competing interests gone away; there is a natural tension for the American government in maintaining freedom of the press while enforcing the law which would (and should!) act to make the question of suing the NYT, WaPo, etc. not as easy as you make it sound. But for Snowden there is no such dilemma. On the contrary, he even explicitly promised he would not do what he did, something the press has never guaranteed. Either way, surely you're not trying to claim that there are not gradations in severity, or that the law (even as it stands today) should or does treat crimes apart from their severity. Even our drug laws, abusive as they are, understand the concept of possession of large amounts or small amounts of a given drug, severity categories, etc. Hell, even murder and rape carry different charges for different levels of the crime, so I'm disappointed that you'd try to undermine the logic of a law against espionage by such shoddy reasoning. If Carmen Ortiz declines to charge the HN webteam with espionage it says nothing about the logic of charging Snowden with the same.
imgabe 12y ago
Hurting interests of US owned companies = treason? I mean, yeah we're all operating on the assumption that the government is more or less run by business, but it's still gauche to just come right out and say it like that.
- josho 12y ago
  Sadly, if you study American history you will find several examples* where hurting US interests has led to CIA led government overthrows. *See the book Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer for an interesting read.
justin_vanw 12y ago
His reasons for saying Snowden is a traitor boils down to "it's harder to sell stuff overseas now" which boils down to "I'm making less money because of him, therefore I don't like what he did, therefore I choose disapproving label from choices of "Hero" and "Traitor"." He even spells out that logic in his comment. At least he's transparent about where his priorities are: Andreessen's Morality Flow Chart: 1. Does it make me more money (-> good) or less money (-> bad)?
- trhway 12y ago
  yep, absolutely not a surprising reaction if one looks at just visible connections between top VCs and other elite here in the Valley and In-Q-Tel, Palantir, etc... (and if one looks at the amount of invisible ones... Valley has always been doing a lot for Military Industrial and these days it is Intelligence Industrial Complex - don't get me wrong, i'm really grateful for the Valley existence as the greatest technological R&D center :)
  - justin_vanw 12y ago
    I actually find it very refreshing that he is so up front about it, and he's absolutely right that the programs that Snowden revealed have been more or less an open secret for many years. Probably we have to consider that he was saying this on CNBC, which is a financial news channel, and in that context he had to represent his interests, which include all the people who's money he is managing. I suspect in another context his views on this would be far more nuanced.
ninv 12y ago
Snowden is rat, he broke the code of silence. US Govt must punish him (or his parents GF etc.) severely to deter any furter incident. He should be in FBI's most wanted list and Govt should offer some prize on his head. capisce!
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
> The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas, he added. It's pretty damn weird that an avowed and successful capitalist is arguing against a buyer's right to get an honest evaluation of a product. He'd be talking out the other side of his face if the same information had leaked out of China.
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cyphunk 12y ago
where's the page to join the boycott of Andreessen companies?
RV86 12y ago
Calling Snowden a 'traitor' is a very ill omen for us as a country. There are many parallels to Ellsberg, but I feel that he had more public defenders/support than Snowden. We've moved even farther to the stance that any action taken against/criticism of the state is unpatriotic and a stone's throw away from traitorous. This was especially the mentality immediately after 9/11 and it clouded our judgment so much that having a reasonable discussion about invading other countries was impossible. 13 years later, we've traded our own privacy and the respect of most of the world for bombing the intractable enemies our war-like tendencies created in the first place. It's also an ill omen that Andreessen, one of the poster-children for a transformative, open medium would come down on the side of a secret, power-drunk apparatus vs. a civil disobedient who used said medium to try to wake up a complacent populous.
protomyth 12y ago
"For me obviously he's a traitor," Andreessen said. "If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden." For a US Citizen the actual definition of treason is: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted. It might be a tad bit hard to convict him under that definition. The fact that it has hurt overseas business is a function of the government policy and not the leaker. Snowden wasn't the first at the NSA to blow the whistle, and given what happened the first time, I'm not sure what other course of action people expected.
rdl 12y ago
I don't understand why he said this publicly, even if he believes it. It does him and a16z no favors with likely startup founders, foreign governments, foreign corporate partners, the security/privacy community, etc. a16z doesn't need any help with LPs or the US Government. (I think he might be right as a first-order effect for the majority of people, but the second order effects hurt US companies, individuals, etc.)
LordHumungous 12y ago
A traitor is someone who betrays his country to another country. Which country would that be in this case? Not Russia or China, they already knew exactly what the NSA was up to. The only people Snowden betrayed his government to was the citizens of his own country, because he felt they have the right to know what their government is doing. Whether or not you think he was right to do it, it is not treason by any definition.
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dreamweapon 12y ago
"For me obviously he's a traitor," Andreessen said. "If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden." This sad quote from Andreessen, rather than telling us anything about Snowden, merely demonstrates his own predilection for manipulative thinking styles and rhetoric. Not to mention, implicitly, his profound lack of respect for the intelligence of the listener. Which makes me all even less interested than I had been in anything else he might have to say.
suprgeek 12y ago
I am still struggling to figure out if Andreessen is serious or he is trolling with these idiotic statements. Sample: "The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years that has tens of thousands of employees and spends tens of billions of dollars a year." We fund police & firefighters for more than that (aggregated) so we shouldn't be surprised when serious police misconduct comes to light. I shouldn't be surprised if say for instance they locked up Mr. Andreesson without charges? What kind of moronic argument is that? " The secrets he's revealed have hurt Silicon Valley by association,..." So it is the revelation that the NSA is indulging in widespread Warantless spying on Americans & everyone else that hurt Silicon valley, not the Spying itself. So by that logic Nixion's Watergate break-in was not bad, its revelation was bad? What a twit I think I have lost what little respect I had for this guy. We could do with a few more Snowdens to counteract him any day.
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  I am still struggling to figure out if Andreessen is serious or he is trolling with these idiotic statements. Both, it seems. That's the sad part.
squozzer 12y ago
Who has done more to damage America's social cohesion - Snowden or the NSA? If Andreesen didn't have a billion or so dollars riding on how the world perceives SV, I might find his opinion more creditable. And while a lot of the discussion considers the NSA's intent as irrelevant, it wouldn't surprise me to find out later that the NSA was using their technology to clean out the bank accounts of so-called "traitors" or whatever moniker we use to label undesirables.
i_s 12y ago
Great comment from Jonathan Blow about this on twitter: > Yesterday I didn't have an opinion about Marc Andreessen but today I have a very strong one. > Wait ... he's a traitor because he released "national security secrets", but the disclosure didn't have value because you should have known > How are they secrets if you 'should have known' they were doing this stuff? https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/474603349367476224 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/474603349367476224
JackC 12y ago
The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years ... People on both sides who say stuff like that need to watch the United States of Secrets.[1] What's going on now is not business as usual. It's business since shortly after 9/11, when the Vice President's legal counsel wrote an order directing General Hayden, the NSA Director, to disable the agency's privacy protections and take whatever steps were necessary to find Al Qaeda, ignoring any sort of constitutional limits on domestic spying. Career NSA employees described the change as bringing the agency back to what it had been when Nixon resigned. We've been funding this agency for 62 years, but after the Church Commission found that they greatly overstepped their bounds, we -- our elected representatives in Congress -- cracked down on them in the 1970s.[2] Then in 2001, we -- a few people in the Bush administration -- threw those protections away and told them to have at it, full steam ahead. What followed were a series of resignations, internal protests, and leaks. For people who knew what was going on, it was not business as usual. The first stories about the extent of the new regime started coming out in 2005, four years after it started. If you want to say that you've had a pretty good guess what the NSA was up to since 2005, and the Snowden documents only confirmed your suspicions, that's fine. But you couldn't prove it, and the government flatly denied it. They have shown no compunction about directly lying to us about what they were doing (and, remarkably, they're still trying to). What's different now is that their lies are clear, because the truth is in their own documents. If you're surprised that people were shocked by what the NSA has done since 2001, then either you were born in 2002, or you need to learn more about how and why things changed. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
bythewayside 12y ago
Here is one of a very few people who decides which company gets funded and which doesn't. If he believes that Snowden is a traitor to American interests, then I am inclined to believe he knows what he's talking about. If he believes that what's bad for the NSA is bad for Silicon Valley, I am inclined to believe him as well. Also if Hitler back in the day called Schindler a traitor to Nazi Germany interests.. that would be true as well. We like to pretend that we don't live in a corporate fascism because we are moral individuals who want nice things for all mankind and that our government should represent us. But let's face it, neither the government nor the corporate elite, of which Andreessen is a part of, gives a shit what the cogs think. The mission of this system hasn't been to represent "the people" in a long time. So shuttup, eat your cereal, work, spend and die when you're done.
declan 12y ago
I posted a five-part response on Twitter to Marc A, which he just retweeted (it doesn't mean he agrees with me, of course, but at least is a signal that he read it): https://twitter.com/declanm/ https://twitter.com/declanm/ I think @pmarca is right in that many technologists suspected the scope of #NSA surveillance pre-Snowden (I’ve made the same point). 1/5 And @pmarca is also correct that early #PRISM reporting was spectacularly wrong (despite my efforts at the time to correct the facts) 2/5 But original documents matter, especially for legal challenges to warrantless bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone records. 3/5 @pmarca And Snowden’s acts don’t amount to treason, which is the one crime defined in Constitution. Don't fit definition. Shouldn’t. 4/5 @pmarca Snowden DID violate the #Espionage Act’s prohibition on “publish[ing]” classified SIGINT docs. But so did hundreds of reporters. 5/5 @pmarca Not only reporters. All you folks on Twitter linking to leaked NSA SIGINT docs are violating Espionage Act ("makes available..."). 18USC798

209 points by kjhughes 12y ago

"The Snowden reveals keep coming out. The [Obama] administration is letting the NSA out to dry. They're letting the American tech industry out to dry," Andreessen said. Obama could hardly be construed as letting the NSA out to dry. If anything, Obama has gone on record as having the NSA's back and making sure that they are protected from the consequences of their wrongdoing. Obama's pro-NSA actions are in stark contrast to his pre-election discourses on this topic. You'd think that he would love the opportunity to make good on one of his campaign promises rather than double down on the opposite as he's chosen to.

chc 12y ago
Andreessen's complaints about hurting the tech industry probably wouldn't exist if Obama had thrown the NSA under the bus. The reason American companies are getting blowback is because of how unrepentant the government appears.

billyhoffman 12y ago

I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had on "U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas," and yet he talks about Snowden. Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. They are the ones that are intercepting American technology products, like Cisco routers, and modifying them before shipping them overseas. All without (as far as we know) the knowledge or consent of the companies that make the products. All American technology products are now suspect, in ways they never have been perceived in the past. Not because of the NSA spying on foreign countries, or collecting domestic meta data. But because the NSA is now tampering with American technology products and companies. The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
This is the point. The actions of the NSA have irreparably damaged the reputation of American technology companies, and all Andreessen does is shoot the messenger.
Borogravia 12y ago
I agree with your point, but do you really find it that surprising?
- yojimbo311 12y ago
  Which part? Andreessen taking his anger out on Snowden or the NSA's tampering? To the latter, yes, yes I do. If for no other reason than the consequences of such tampering are obvious if ever discovered and nothing ever stays secret forever. They made the decision and we can only assume they did it knowing full well what would happen should it ever come to light, leak or not. Would things have been much different if this was discovered 5 years from now? How about 10? Can we assume they would stop tampering with equipment at any point without disclosure? IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
> Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. He's not angry about some moral issue, he's angry that revenue is going down.
- billyhoffman 12y ago
  I get that. But instead of saying "I'm upset with how the NSA's actions are impacting the revenue/growth of our technology sector, which is a major source of new jobs in the US, etc etc" he is talking about he thinks Snowden is a traitor. This feels like a wasted opportunity. He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    From his point of view it's not NSA's abuse that caused the problem, but the actual whistle blowing that exposed that abuse. Were it to remain secret there would have been no damage. I don't condone such an amoral approach, but at least he's honest.
mindslight 12y ago
> I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders. The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client. These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately). Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life. Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.
- angersock 12y ago
  Well put! I'm sadly surprised that there are still so many people willing to work on these things. :(
crusso 12y ago
The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden. Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be. He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.

atonse 12y ago

Andreessen says he's surprised that people are surprised. That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies. Another thing is the wording - Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. That is a consequence of his disclosures. But this information was hidden from the American taxpayer (which is also easy to justify because we all don't have security clearances), but more egregiously, the information was hidden from Congressional Committees that actually have direct OVERSIGHT. And they have security clearances, so what's your excuse then? So sure, the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to. But that was their full time job to find out and they are probably hardly surprised. But thankfully, even Congress and the American public know exactly where our taxes are going. And we really aren't the enemy of the NSA. What we ask our representatives to do with this information will say it all.

wpietri 12y ago
> Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays. Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody. From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.
- jellicle 12y ago
  Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government. Which Andreessen may well.

grifpete 12y ago

I'm disappointed in Andreessen. It appears that a major part of his concern is the damage done to US firms trying to do business abroad. This damage, apparently, completely outweighs and potential damage to our liberties occasioned by trampling on rights that we won by painful and bloody struggles.

api 12y ago
This is a really odious quote, especially if you read carefully. He says Obama is doing too little to counter the perception. In other words it's okay if you break the law, violate the constitution, and create enormous opportunities for institutional corruption as long as the perception remains intact and you don't get caught.
- leorocky 12y ago
  Does he honestly mean he doesn't want perception to reflect reality?
  - corford 12y ago
    I doubt very much he wants perception to reflect reality. He's a VC.
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revelation 12y ago
It seems that his major concern in all of this is money. This is a guy who will happily take ethyl bromoacetate out of Zyklon B if theres a buck to be made.

cbtacy 12y ago

The good news is that there are tons of VCs out there who are really good and are well aligned with our opinions and interests. There is absolutely no need to talk to these guys much less take money from them.

ardit33 12y ago
Yep. A shark will always remain a shark.

warrenmiller 12y ago

It's not Snowden who's harmed US business by exposing the spying, it's the NSA who did the spying.

wpietri 12y ago
Absolutely this. Right now I'm reading a brilliant book on domestic abuse [1], and it talks about how abusers create double binds. E.g., family is supposed to go to a birthday party, but at the last minute the abusive dad blows up at something the mom says and refuses to let anybody go until she apologizes. The kids pressure mom to give a false apology so they can go. If she doesn't, she's the one who ruined the outing, not dad. If she does, she confirms that she's the problem, and later the kids are upset when she doesn't stick up for them. Meanwhile, the dad's tantrum is entirely out of scope of discussion, as is the repeated pattern of behavior. The governmental theory that they could try to hoover up every detail of every digital interaction and never get found out was always insane. It wasn't a question of if that would come out, it was when. I find it hard to believe nobody internally asked that, but either way they are the ones to blame for the consequences, not Snowden. [1] Lundy Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That?", http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656 http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519.... It's the single most astute thing I've read. It's one of those books where it's nominally about a relatively narrow topic, but I keep saying, "Well, this explains X! And that explains Y!" If anybody would like a copy, email me; it's good enough I want everybody to have read it.

notastartup 12y ago

this really hurts the respect I had for Andreessen. Really wish he didn't make that statement. Snowden is NOT a traitor, he is a bringer of truth, truth which will ultimately set us free, how can that be a bad thing?

smacktoward 12y ago
In a national security state, truth is bad for business.
adewinter 12y ago
Whether or not he made that statement doesn't matter. What should matter to you more is that he believes it in the first place.
- tkinom 12y ago
  He is believer of $$$. Someone (or some org such as NSA ) is stopping the China and others from buying the product/using the service his VC firm is investing it. That's what really upset him the most.

izzydata 12y ago

Under what circumstances is hiding the truth beneficial? If the truth is in someway upsetting then something should be done to fix it instead of wishing they were still ignorant of it.

runjake 12y ago

I disagree with Marc, but he brings up a number of good points, so the video is worth watching. And yeah, many people have known/could surmise that NSA was watching all. At least those people who paid attention to ECHELON, Cryptome, and James Bamford. But Snowden's point was to get NSA's activities known to the general population, not the cypherpunks and tinfoilers. I'm unsure Marc sees or cares about this point.

mindcrime 12y ago

I think Andreesen's anger is misplaced. He should be railing against the NSA for what they were doing, not against Snowden for simply revealing it, vis-a-vis the harm being done to US companies. I also think Andreesen is dead-wrong to call Snowden a traitor. One of the most essential principles of having a free and open society is having a government which is transparent, and which is accountable to We The People. Many of the things our government has done, and is doing, belong in the playbooks of 3rd world dictatorial regimes, or totalitarian governments like WWII era Germany, or Soviet era Russia, etc. Secret laws? Secret courts? Secret legal interpretations? National Security Letters (something that acts like a warrant but isn't a warrant)?? Government agencies that spy on pretty much everybody in the world? Agency officials who are apparently allowed to lie to Congress with impunity??? And he thinks Snowden is the problem? Get real...

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cottonseed 12y ago

I'm not sure why we care what Andreessen thinks. I wish I had a downvote. Second, he seems to be saying Snowden is a traitor because his revelations are hurting the US tech industry. I can see why that would make Andreessen feel betrayed, but that is hardly the definition of traitor. Third, as others have said, nobody was surprised the NSA is spying. We're surprised it is conducting pervasive electronic surveillance in the US. (Personally, I'm horrified although not surprised by the scope of the spying outside the US. I would strongly support extending privacy protections to everyone, as unrealistic as that idea is.) Finally, if we're going to get definitional, Snowden is certainly a traitor. He clearly broke the law, betrayed the trust placed in him and it seems very likely he would be convicted of treason. However, I also think he did the right thing for the right reasons.

warmfuzzykitten 12y ago
If we're going to get "definitional," Snowden is not a traitor. "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Setting aside for the moment the definition of "Enemies" - a notion that is usually reserved for wartime - it is difficult to see how Snowden's revelations gave comfort to anyone, and aid only in the sense of "Oh, and by the way, we're reading your emails and listening to your phone calls," which any sane "enemy" already suspected. Witness the precautions the Osama bin Laden camp took to never let any electronic communication originate from their hiding place in Pakistan. Snowden violated his contract with the NSA and broke the law, but neither of these amounts to treason.

logfromblammo 12y ago

People like to punish the messenger bearing bad news, for some bizarre reason. American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected." And the patient blames him for the injury. All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now. This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future. I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time. In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.

projectramo 12y ago

In case you want to look up how others feel about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Public_opinion_polls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Public_opinion_p...

joeevans1000 12y ago

Andreessen is a classic money grubber. His bottom line is his bottom line... not society, public wellbeing, or what's right.

drcongo 12y ago

Says man who wears Google Glass.

vidarh 12y ago

And there went any shred of respect I might have had for Andreessen. Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.

tzaman 12y ago
I could not agree more, I actually went and checked the story because I didn't believe it was _the_ Andreessen. I guess fundraising with him is off :)
ProAm 12y ago
Exactly, Andreessen is upset that the government is doing things that affects his investments, end of story.
- isomorphic 12y ago
  No, he's upset that Snowden revealed that the government is doing things that affect his investments. His comments make it sound like the government is neutral or somehow the victim in this.
  - nobbyclark 12y ago
    Sounds like a similar POV as those that believe security by obscurity is adequate.
    - chris_mahan 12y ago
      The first rule of security is you do not talk about security.
  - spinlock 12y ago
    Listen to his statement again. He believes that foreign governments -- who already knew about US spy operations -- are using Snowden's leaks as political cover to enact protectionist policies. After all, every other wold power engages in exactly the same type of behavior. But, without a Snowden of their own, they don't have the PR problem that the US does.

tptacek 12y ago

I would not under almost any circumstances, including the revelation that he was working directly with the FSB† when he decided what to leak, use the word "traitor" to describe a national security leaker. In addition to being inaccurate, the word sucks all the oxygen out of the room and makes it impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about what happened. But if you can get past Andreesen's unfortunate choice of framing††, this story is useful as an indicator of how captive we are to our filter bubbles. The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird. Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that. Finally, regardless of how I feel about Snowden, I agree (for once) with the consensus opinion of the HN thread that if there's economic blowback to the revelations, it's hard to pin that on Snowden. The only way I could see that being valid is if Snowden made up his own facts and was then taken seriously. Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility, but the most outlandish claims seem to have been widely dismissed by now. † Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins. †† You're not required to get around it; you might believe in a corollary to "bad facts make bad law" and think that continuing a discussion that has already been poisoned is a waste of time.

nabla9 12y ago
I'm an European and treason and espionage are political crimes (they not against universal ethics in any way). If Snowden is a traitor, then he spied on my behalf against U.S. government. For me and many other citizens of so called free word he is a hero. He should get a medal. In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies? First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.
- opendais 12y ago
  I think the reason Americans don't see foreign spying as an issue is this: If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent. However, when you spy domestically, the US citizen can't exactly defend himself and can get railroaded under National Security...then tossed in jail. There is a very, very big difference between what domestic security forces can do to you vs. foreign ones.

jgon 12y ago

This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that. Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue." I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China. At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.

zacinbusiness 12y ago

"He made me not make as much money as I wanted to have made and thus he is a traitor."

kolev 12y ago

Never like @pmarca. This is another perspective on who this guys really is. His involvement in the Bitcoin bubble is very indicative on the human material he's made of.

throw7 12y ago

Andreessen comes across as amoral here. Actually, that's not completely correct; he believes what's right is anything that helps his bottomline, and anything that hurts his bottomline is wrong. It's a very similar argument that Lanny Breuer put forth in not going after wall street.

tptacek 12y ago
What is the upside to an amoral Andreesen of broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?
- jgon 12y ago
  Good question. And yet the fact remains that he did it. It's almost like people are fallible or something.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Would it blow your mind to hear that not everyone agrees with you about Snowden?
    - jgon 12y ago
      Nope. What would blow my mind is watching you engage in a non-passive aggressive manner with people. Let's see if you can!
- larrys 12y ago
  "broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?" What do you think the actual net effect of that will be though? That Andreesen will actually lose out on the best or many deals? Not only do people have short memories, but money and opportunity smooth over many problems in people's minds. Rationalization. [1] I remember reading how up in arms people were about MIT and Schwartz. Some alum threatened to pull support. So how many actually did? (I don't know the answer). Of course if the "brand" continues to broadcast opinions on an ongoing basis that are unpopular that's a different story. [1] Faced with economic opportunity the tobacco industry spreading around wealth and business opportunities did pretty well for many years.

sixQuarks 12y ago

Andreessen is a "grand master" when it comes to tech/startups. I really do respect his insights, he's obviously a very intelligent person. However, in this case, it seems Andreessen is not much of a student of history and government. Anyone that listens to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" and "Common Sense" podcasts will know how dangerous these government powers can be.

rosser 12y ago

How many of the people decrying Andreessen's stance on Snowden would still take A16Z money? Where are your principles now?

zackmorris 12y ago

Traitor is such a strong word… To think the NSA is worried about Snowden, really at all, is kind of comical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.

Bahamut 12y ago
I remember that some of the talk at UIUC being that the school missed an opportunity there. As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.

vdaniuk 12y ago

I really, really think we need a new breed of 'venture socialists' for the lack of better term that will optimize investment BOTH for potential returns and social good.

massappeal 12y ago
I think the Social+Capital Partnership is trying to do this, but I could be mistaken.

scelerat 12y ago

I am not surprised that the NSA is spying on US citizens. I am angry. The "I can't believe people are surprised..." trope is dismissive and condescending.

Gracana 12y ago
Mhmm. "Outrage does not equal surprise" is a phrase I remember reading in comments on a Skepchick blog post once, and I thought it was a very good way to put it. I wish it was a more widely-understood concept.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I remember reading a lot of Reddit comments initially like "are you surprised they're doing this?", and I agree they are condescending, because people saying that usually want to: 1) show how smart they are, because they already knew that, and perhaps you didn't 2) try to imply that it's "no big deal", since it's been happening for some time, and supposedly because of that you shouldn't be angry about it now. I disagree with both views, because: 1) most people weren't in fact aware that the NSA was spying on every single person on the planet, guilty of something or not, and also most people (or rather security engineers) weren't aware that NSA is trying to actively attack US companies in order to spy on their users, and even tap the Internet cables to get all plaintext data. 2) most of this stuff has been happening under secrecy (it is a spy agency after all), so just because it's been happening under secrecy for decades, doesn't mean we shouldn't be outraged that we find out about it only now. If anything we should be more outraged, because it's been happening for so long, without the population being aware of it, and giving their consent for it (especially on the part about even innocents being spied upon to "catch the terrorists" - which is already proven to not be the only reason NSA spies on everyone)

zimbatm 12y ago

Andreessen hits a point when he says what foreign government knew full well that they where spied upon. We have to remember that those revelations are for the public. Given how easy it was for Snowden to acquire these documents it's not far fetched to think that the other groups of power already had access to them. And they are collaborating with the US anyways. Politicians cry outrage to calm down the public. As if they where the victims. Funny how they never talk about what counter-measures could be applied. Shouldn't it be our countries responsibility to ensure that the Internet is not bugged at least in the realm of the country ?

albert_holm 12y ago

"This is something people have got very upset at me for saying this. I think if you actually follow the NSA and read the books and the articles and understood the history, I think you generally assume that they were doing pretty much everything that's come out." So if we already suspected/knew what NSA was doing, then what harm did Snowden cause by basically only verifying our suspicions?

mullingitover 12y ago

It's really helpful when people stand up and identitfy themselves as being enthusiastic members of 'Team Police State' without having to drag it out of them. There are definitely traitors to the cause of freedom in this whole affair, but Snowden is far from being one.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

If you look at Andersen at the video, he is angry. He is angry because he could lose money because of Snowden. He talks about other countries in the world as envious. But a lot of the capital of the US comes from outside US. The people outside of the US get angry too if they are considered "adversaries" and start doing illegal things to favor US business. That simply backfires. Most of the people outside the US has not problems with the NSA catching terrorists, but have huge problems with the NSA robbing them (industrial spying)blind. This is like cheating on your partner and then getting angry with the person that tells your partner about it. I was already telling people not to trust the cloud or American companies before Snowden, I though that if they could abuse, they will, obvious for smart people like me, a minority of the population. The difference is that now the people I talk to actually listen to me.

wellboy 12y ago

< The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas, he added. Yes and the costs are estimated to be as high as $180B (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snow...). However, this is a very close-minded thing to say, which I would have never expected from Marc Andreesen. It's not the Snowden revelations that have caused the $180B damages, it's the government breaking the law and our big tech-companies and not having a spine to fight against these violations that caused these damages.

declan 12y ago

Marc Andreessen is a smart fellow who doesn't mind saying controversial things; I often find myself agreeing with him. But I wonder here if he saying something controversial for the sake of the controversy. I especially wonder if Marc has thought through the implications of his "textbook traitor" line. Let's say he's right that Edward Snowden violated the Espionage Act, which is what I take his comments to mean (the definition of "treason" is "levies war against them or adheres to their enemies," which is arguable at best). 18 USC 798 makes it a felony for anyone to "publish" or "make available" any "classified information" relating to: - the "nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government" OR - or "concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government" OR - "obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government" http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798) Those are Boolean OR statements above; you only need to hit one to have an all-expense paid trip to Club Fed. Snowden hit all three! But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here?

mpyne 12y ago
> But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here? Prosecutorial discretion is still a thing, even if "common sense" has disappeared. Nor has competing interests gone away; there is a natural tension for the American government in maintaining freedom of the press while enforcing the law which would (and should!) act to make the question of suing the NYT, WaPo, etc. not as easy as you make it sound. But for Snowden there is no such dilemma. On the contrary, he even explicitly promised he would not do what he did, something the press has never guaranteed. Either way, surely you're not trying to claim that there are not gradations in severity, or that the law (even as it stands today) should or does treat crimes apart from their severity. Even our drug laws, abusive as they are, understand the concept of possession of large amounts or small amounts of a given drug, severity categories, etc. Hell, even murder and rape carry different charges for different levels of the crime, so I'm disappointed that you'd try to undermine the logic of a law against espionage by such shoddy reasoning. If Carmen Ortiz declines to charge the HN webteam with espionage it says nothing about the logic of charging Snowden with the same.

imgabe 12y ago

Hurting interests of US owned companies = treason? I mean, yeah we're all operating on the assumption that the government is more or less run by business, but it's still gauche to just come right out and say it like that.

josho 12y ago
Sadly, if you study American history you will find several examples* where hurting US interests has led to CIA led government overthrows. *See the book Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer for an interesting read.

justin_vanw 12y ago

His reasons for saying Snowden is a traitor boils down to "it's harder to sell stuff overseas now" which boils down to "I'm making less money because of him, therefore I don't like what he did, therefore I choose disapproving label from choices of "Hero" and "Traitor"." He even spells out that logic in his comment. At least he's transparent about where his priorities are: Andreessen's Morality Flow Chart: 1. Does it make me more money (-> good) or less money (-> bad)?

trhway 12y ago
yep, absolutely not a surprising reaction if one looks at just visible connections between top VCs and other elite here in the Valley and In-Q-Tel, Palantir, etc... (and if one looks at the amount of invisible ones... Valley has always been doing a lot for Military Industrial and these days it is Intelligence Industrial Complex - don't get me wrong, i'm really grateful for the Valley existence as the greatest technological R&D center :)
- justin_vanw 12y ago
  I actually find it very refreshing that he is so up front about it, and he's absolutely right that the programs that Snowden revealed have been more or less an open secret for many years. Probably we have to consider that he was saying this on CNBC, which is a financial news channel, and in that context he had to represent his interests, which include all the people who's money he is managing. I suspect in another context his views on this would be far more nuanced.

ninv 12y ago

Snowden is rat, he broke the code of silence. US Govt must punish him (or his parents GF etc.) severely to deter any furter incident. He should be in FBI's most wanted list and Govt should offer some prize on his head. capisce!

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

> The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas, he added. It's pretty damn weird that an avowed and successful capitalist is arguing against a buyer's right to get an honest evaluation of a product. He'd be talking out the other side of his face if the same information had leaked out of China.

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cyphunk 12y ago

where's the page to join the boycott of Andreessen companies?

RV86 12y ago

Calling Snowden a 'traitor' is a very ill omen for us as a country. There are many parallels to Ellsberg, but I feel that he had more public defenders/support than Snowden. We've moved even farther to the stance that any action taken against/criticism of the state is unpatriotic and a stone's throw away from traitorous. This was especially the mentality immediately after 9/11 and it clouded our judgment so much that having a reasonable discussion about invading other countries was impossible. 13 years later, we've traded our own privacy and the respect of most of the world for bombing the intractable enemies our war-like tendencies created in the first place. It's also an ill omen that Andreessen, one of the poster-children for a transformative, open medium would come down on the side of a secret, power-drunk apparatus vs. a civil disobedient who used said medium to try to wake up a complacent populous.

protomyth 12y ago

"For me obviously he's a traitor," Andreessen said. "If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden." For a US Citizen the actual definition of treason is: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted. It might be a tad bit hard to convict him under that definition. The fact that it has hurt overseas business is a function of the government policy and not the leaker. Snowden wasn't the first at the NSA to blow the whistle, and given what happened the first time, I'm not sure what other course of action people expected.

rdl 12y ago

I don't understand why he said this publicly, even if he believes it. It does him and a16z no favors with likely startup founders, foreign governments, foreign corporate partners, the security/privacy community, etc. a16z doesn't need any help with LPs or the US Government. (I think he might be right as a first-order effect for the majority of people, but the second order effects hurt US companies, individuals, etc.)

LordHumungous 12y ago

A traitor is someone who betrays his country to another country. Which country would that be in this case? Not Russia or China, they already knew exactly what the NSA was up to. The only people Snowden betrayed his government to was the citizens of his own country, because he felt they have the right to know what their government is doing. Whether or not you think he was right to do it, it is not treason by any definition.

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dreamweapon 12y ago

"For me obviously he's a traitor," Andreessen said. "If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden." This sad quote from Andreessen, rather than telling us anything about Snowden, merely demonstrates his own predilection for manipulative thinking styles and rhetoric. Not to mention, implicitly, his profound lack of respect for the intelligence of the listener. Which makes me all even less interested than I had been in anything else he might have to say.

suprgeek 12y ago

I am still struggling to figure out if Andreessen is serious or he is trolling with these idiotic statements. Sample: "The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years that has tens of thousands of employees and spends tens of billions of dollars a year." We fund police & firefighters for more than that (aggregated) so we shouldn't be surprised when serious police misconduct comes to light. I shouldn't be surprised if say for instance they locked up Mr. Andreesson without charges? What kind of moronic argument is that? " The secrets he's revealed have hurt Silicon Valley by association,..." So it is the revelation that the NSA is indulging in widespread Warantless spying on Americans & everyone else that hurt Silicon valley, not the Spying itself. So by that logic Nixion's Watergate break-in was not bad, its revelation was bad? What a twit I think I have lost what little respect I had for this guy. We could do with a few more Snowdens to counteract him any day.

dreamweapon 12y ago
I am still struggling to figure out if Andreessen is serious or he is trolling with these idiotic statements. Both, it seems. That's the sad part.

squozzer 12y ago

Who has done more to damage America's social cohesion - Snowden or the NSA? If Andreesen didn't have a billion or so dollars riding on how the world perceives SV, I might find his opinion more creditable. And while a lot of the discussion considers the NSA's intent as irrelevant, it wouldn't surprise me to find out later that the NSA was using their technology to clean out the bank accounts of so-called "traitors" or whatever moniker we use to label undesirables.

i_s 12y ago

Great comment from Jonathan Blow about this on twitter: > Yesterday I didn't have an opinion about Marc Andreessen but today I have a very strong one. > Wait ... he's a traitor because he released "national security secrets", but the disclosure didn't have value because you should have known > How are they secrets if you 'should have known' they were doing this stuff? https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/474603349367476224 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/474603349367476224

JackC 12y ago

The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years ... People on both sides who say stuff like that need to watch the United States of Secrets.[1] What's going on now is not business as usual. It's business since shortly after 9/11, when the Vice President's legal counsel wrote an order directing General Hayden, the NSA Director, to disable the agency's privacy protections and take whatever steps were necessary to find Al Qaeda, ignoring any sort of constitutional limits on domestic spying. Career NSA employees described the change as bringing the agency back to what it had been when Nixon resigned. We've been funding this agency for 62 years, but after the Church Commission found that they greatly overstepped their bounds, we -- our elected representatives in Congress -- cracked down on them in the 1970s.[2] Then in 2001, we -- a few people in the Bush administration -- threw those protections away and told them to have at it, full steam ahead. What followed were a series of resignations, internal protests, and leaks. For people who knew what was going on, it was not business as usual. The first stories about the extent of the new regime started coming out in 2005, four years after it started. If you want to say that you've had a pretty good guess what the NSA was up to since 2005, and the Snowden documents only confirmed your suspicions, that's fine. But you couldn't prove it, and the government flatly denied it. They have shown no compunction about directly lying to us about what they were doing (and, remarkably, they're still trying to). What's different now is that their lies are clear, because the truth is in their own documents. If you're surprised that people were shocked by what the NSA has done since 2001, then either you were born in 2002, or you need to learn more about how and why things changed. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

bythewayside 12y ago

Here is one of a very few people who decides which company gets funded and which doesn't. If he believes that Snowden is a traitor to American interests, then I am inclined to believe he knows what he's talking about. If he believes that what's bad for the NSA is bad for Silicon Valley, I am inclined to believe him as well. Also if Hitler back in the day called Schindler a traitor to Nazi Germany interests.. that would be true as well. We like to pretend that we don't live in a corporate fascism because we are moral individuals who want nice things for all mankind and that our government should represent us. But let's face it, neither the government nor the corporate elite, of which Andreessen is a part of, gives a shit what the cogs think. The mission of this system hasn't been to represent "the people" in a long time. So shuttup, eat your cereal, work, spend and die when you're done.

declan 12y ago

I posted a five-part response on Twitter to Marc A, which he just retweeted (it doesn't mean he agrees with me, of course, but at least is a signal that he read it): https://twitter.com/declanm/ https://twitter.com/declanm/ I think @pmarca is right in that many technologists suspected the scope of #NSA surveillance pre-Snowden (I’ve made the same point). 1/5 And @pmarca is also correct that early #PRISM reporting was spectacularly wrong (despite my efforts at the time to correct the facts) 2/5 But original documents matter, especially for legal challenges to warrantless bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone records. 3/5 @pmarca And Snowden’s acts don’t amount to treason, which is the one crime defined in Constitution. Don't fit definition. Shouldn’t. 4/5 @pmarca Snowden DID violate the #Espionage Act’s prohibition on “publish[ing]” classified SIGINT docs. But so did hundreds of reporters. 5/5 @pmarca Not only reporters. All you folks on Twitter linking to leaked NSA SIGINT docs are violating Espionage Act ("makes available..."). 18USC798