12 ms·

Interview with Laura Poitras

238 points by hotgoldminer 12y ago

oconnor0 12y ago
"That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence." - I hope that one day we realize this is true.
- jobu 12y ago
  That whole paragraph is amazing: "Two of the 9/11 hijackers were on the CIA list and had trained with bin Laden in Afghanistan. They came into the country and [the CIA] failed to notify the FBI. We’re here 13 years later with 13 years of war, $4 trillion of money spent, occupied countries, and it was an intelligence failure that could have been corrected in a different way where we should have said, “Why did this happen? Some people should get fired, and let’s be smarter about this.” They had a handful of people that hated us, but now they’ve created entire generations. That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence."
  - arca_vorago 12y ago
    "That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence." Perhaps that's the goal. I've spent a long time trying to understand the grand chessboard of geopolitics and military strategy, and my general conclusion about the WOT is that it was designed as a destabilization program in the first place. Destabilization helps by allowing the jackals to manipulate the power structure to allow whatever the real objective(s) are. In the case of Iraq, for example, it was largely about two things: control of oil (not about getting oil for ourselves, but about controlling who did get it), because the real intellectual hawks (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger, etc kind of people who persist in the beltway over decades) feel that Russia and China are the real threat as we move towards resource wars, and by extension Iran is a threat because it doesn't comply with our power structure. We isolated Iran with both Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to allow both neo-cons and the hawkish left to isolate them even more. I don't think they understand the gravity of such actions though. I gave Wartard some pointers on this article that is worth a read if you are interested in this sort of subject matter. http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/01/phase-ii-why-us-wants-to-attack-iran.html http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/01/phase-ii-why-us-wants-to... Anyway, I digress, the point is that we need to acknowledge and accept that actual national security from terrorism has never been the primary goal, and instead is the cover for the perceived national security situation that is soon to be here, namely, a neo-cold war era of global resource and economic wars. Until this fact is acknowledged, I will continue to be disappointed in journalists who simply stop at "but we are creating more terrorists!" and don't move on the the bigger picture of why this is the current state of the union.
    - g0v 12y ago
      From the Wartard post: "but the Chinese did manage to sneak a diesel powered sub into the middle of a carrier group during USN exercises off Taiwan in 2006." I was stationed in Japan when I was in the Navy and just missed this little event. Supposedly the sub surfaced directly in front of the Kittyhawk. Shortly thereafter, the Kittyhawk went into General Quarters.
    - junto 12y ago
      Just wow. Great post and the linked blog post was also fascinating. I find it almost incredulous that there are people in the throws of power who play this as a game with the lives of billions hanging by a thread in their hands.
    - pyre 12y ago
      > We isolated Iran with both Afghanistan and Iraq How did Iraq isolated Iran? Iran and Iraq, while both bucking the 'US power structure', were enemies of each other.
    - mpweiher 12y ago
      Obligatory reference to "The Power of Nightmares (The Rise of the Politics of Fear)" by Adam Curtis. If you haven't watched it, it's a must see. well worth the 3 hours for the whole series. I re-watch it every couple of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares http://vimeo.com/84414208 http://vimeo.com/84414208 http://vimeo.com/84389928 http://vimeo.com/84389928 http://vimeo.com/84421510 http://vimeo.com/84421510
    - MCRed 12y ago
      There's a general bigger picture perspective that goes something like this: "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure." EG: Government creates problems in order to justify more power by claiming it needs the power (or money) to solve the problem. It's not just the War on Terror. The war on drugs has had a similar effect -- drug enforcement focusing on importation, incentivizes more concentrated drugs allowing for profit per pound in smuggling operations. These drugs happen to also be more addictive. Cocoa Leaves -> Cocaine -> Crack In fact, I submit you can probably find a similar effect in every "grand effort" at the federal level that gets called a "war".
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    it was never a handful of people, the US is a convenient bogey man regardless of its actions. Combined with the revulsion that Islam in that area has for Western culture and its not likely anything we do one or another has much effect. Blaming the Iraq war for their dislike of us is about as silly as it gets, they didn't like us before. The key differences now is that technology allows such groups to better organize than ever before.
    - pyre 12y ago
      There is a difference between a general dislike and an active dislike. There are plenty of people there who will blame the US for specific deaths of people close to them. This motivates people a lot more than some general "I don't like those people much" idea.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - guelo 12y ago
      Your suggestion that invading armies have no effect on "dislike" (also known as resistance) doesn't seem plausible. Many Arabs went from "that crazy bin Laden is a conspiracy theorist" to "bi Laden is right, America is our enemy".
    - MCRed 12y ago
      > "Blaming the Iraq war for their dislike of us is about as silly as it gets, they didn't like us before." Actually, I'd love to hear a better explanation for the Iraq war. Because I've not heard one that wasn't silly. Iraqi's didn't like us and didn't like us before? Have you met many Iraqis? Remember this was a relatively modern, westernish country. The average Iraqi liked america, our freedom, and wish they could be liberated from Saddam. (this is not a justification for the war with Iraq, in my mind, but neither is the 9/11 event which involved Saudis and had no apparent connection to Iraq.) How about Iranians. Do you think Iranians hate westerners? Reports from people visiting Iran, and the Iranians I have known disagree with that position. Again, also a relatively modern society, though with an even more religious government than Iraq. I think you might be making the mistake that many make of conflating the views of "leaders" (often self described) or "government" with "the people". On the other hand, take an individual Iraqi or Afghani father, who lost his wife and kids to a drone attack that only killed civilians. Do you think he might hate america? Quite possibly. But that was not "before", that is only "since" the drone attacks started. I imagine there are many kids who were teenagers who lost their fathers and or mothers to drone attacks in the last 10 years who will grow up to hate americans, and some of them may turn out to be terrorists. The "War on terrorism" is using tactics that create terrorists.
- sigzero 12y ago
  Radical Islam will always hate and try and kill. That is not going to stop even if everyone realizes that statement is true.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Religion is indeed a powerful motivator, and interpreted certain ways is very dangerous. However, we don't do ourselves any favors by pushing sympathetic moderates towards extremism by waging wars that only serve to open a power vacuum. The world would be safer without religions that deny the rights of others to exist, and would also be safer if violence hadn't been used to encourage more membership in those religions that promote violence.
    - bostik 12y ago
      > However, we don't do ourselves any favors by pushing sympathetic moderates towards extremism by waging wars that only serve to open a power vacuum. The law of unintended consequences is a tricky beast. I have pasted this link before, but it bears repeating. It's thorny by design, and happens to snide at US - but they are certainly not the only ones who have succesfully created their own enemies. Usually by supporting and funding earlier allies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo IIRC Iran was a massive source of counterfeit US dollars in the 1980's and early 1990's. The reason? The last Shah of Persia was supported by the US and was even provided with a mint-quality printing press. [0][1] When he fled the country after the 1979 uprising, the printing press was left behind. 0: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17960/did-usa-send-federal-reserve-system-officers-to-iran-to-print-cash-for-iranian-o http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17960/did-usa-se... 1: http://articles.latimes.com/1992-07-02/news/mn-1906_1_counterfeit-bills http://articles.latimes.com/1992-07-02/news/mn-1906_1_counte... EDIT: made quote appear in italics
    - totalforge 12y ago
      The power and authority religion grants the adherent is the key motivator. Power over women, power to kill 'enemies' in the name the faith, and so on.
  - 12y ago
jordigh 12y ago
Can we fix the URL without the Google redirect? It should go to: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/01/laura-poitras-on-finding-edward-snowden-obama-s-tainted-legacy-and-oliver-stone-s-snowden-film.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/01/laura-poitr...
- pfortuny 12y ago
  Yes, I thought it was some kind of google research.
  - hotgoldminer 12y ago
    My b. Won't let me edit the link. Suppose I could delete and repost, but might compromise the comments section. Unless there's a riot, I say keep it as is?
    - jordigh 12y ago
      It's really a request for the mods. I believe they can amend urls.
    - pfortuny 12y ago
      It is a request for the mods, as jordigh has said. Not to worry, one gets the URLs one gets and google is certainly awful at giving them.
konradb 12y ago
I found it odd when she said > I was destroying the physical media, because you can’t encrypt SD cards. Does she mean they don't come with built-in encryption? I'm curious as to why you couldn't just save an encrypted file or encrypted container to an SD card. edit: aaah, camera. I got the wrong end of the stick. Thanks!
- vidarh 12y ago
  She is talking about the SD cards in her camera, presumably. I don't know if you can get cameras that supports encrypting the images as they're written, but it's not unreasonable that she wouldn't have one, and not unreasonable that she'd be reluctant to trust whether or not formatting/overwriting the SD card would be sufficient to prevent recovery.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    I guess some overwrites should be enough for i in $(seq 1 1000); do if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=$((1024 * 1024)) count=(SD size in MB); done
    - josephlord 12y ago
      Actually what if one of the blocks used for the critical data was deemed degraded and removed from the pool and replaced with a reserve before it was overwritten. No way to delete then although expensive to retrieve it might be possible. Depends on the capability of your opponent and the consequences if your guess is wrong.
      - raverbashing 12y ago
        Yeah, also block size, I'm not sure how big they usually are. 512 bytes should be ok (for a picture), if it's bigger I'd be more worried Might be easier to microwave the SD card
        nitrogen 12y ago
cryoshon 12y ago
Mediocre interview, I think. Nothing really groundbreaking asked or answered with depth. That said, I agree with her when she says that these two decades of war and terror we've inflicted on the world will be seen as dark times. I say two decades because we've already been through 13 years, and only now are starting to show the faintest hints of slowing down the rampage abroad and the totalitarianism at home.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  The fascist West is no better than Russia or China. All Europeans, Americans, Canadians etc should be ashamed.
  - cryoshon 12y ago
    I wouldn't go nearly that far. Russia doesn't even maintain the slightest veneer of democracy or civic empowerment, and China doesn't really have the capacity to enforce complete compliance from its massive population yet.
    - DasIch 12y ago
      That actually makes the position of the US far worse. The US claims to be good in some way, to care about freedom and human rights while at the same time they couldn't care less. China, Russia, Iran and other such countries - no matter what you may think about their policies - can at least be said to be honest. That doesn't make them good but it does show that the US isn't better, in fact they are quite a bit worse.
      - happyscrappy 12y ago
        The entire West is working together on intel. You can argure that Europe, Canada etc. are incompetent and weak but you can't argue that they are innocent. They are deeply complicit. But that narrative doesn't work very well.
  - dang 12y ago
abandonliberty 12y ago
Does Snowden's legal fund actually have under 9000$? https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6mzUd https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6mzUd Seems legitimate, but that's crazy to me. Maybe they don't count everything?
- csandreasen 12y ago
  Why does he need a legal fund if he has no intention of returning to the US and facing trial? What does that money actually go to?
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    > Why does he need a legal fund if he has no intention of returning to the US and facing trial? Because stuff like dealing with Russian immigration law and maybe also negotiating with the USA does require a lawyer? And for the question why it's only $9k, the Wau Holland Foundation also accepts bank transfers which won't show up there.
    - csandreasen 12y ago
      If he's using it for Russian immigration, it shouldn't be advertised as a legal defense fund.
slg 12y ago
Poitras says "the reporting we’ve done has all been filtering what’s in the public interest versus what’s operational" yet in the same interview reveals "the communication flow for the drone system all goes through Rammstein, so it’s part of the nerve center. The controls are elsewhere, but it all runs through fiber optic cables that go in and out of Rammstein" How is it in the public interest to know that all drone communication flows through a specific base especially considering how valuable that fact might be to someone who would want to ground our drone fleet? That is my only problem with Snowden and how these things are being reported. It started out with valid whistle blowing but there are plenty of real operational national secrets that are being revealed in the process. If Snowden simply stuck to the NSA's overreach in domestic spying, it would be much harder for politicians and the like to call him a traitor and marginalize these issues.
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  "If Snowden simply stuck to the NSA's overreach in domestic spying" On behalf of the other 6.7 billion people on this spinning green ball, thankfully he didn't. We have rights too.
  - slg 12y ago
    >We have rights too. Not under the US Constitution which is what governs the NSA. That has been one of the main features of government throughout history. They put their own people's rights above the rights of foreigners. EDIT: And doing the opposite will generally be viewed as treason. I am honestly not aware of anything that was revealed that would violate any international treaty the US agreed to, but will definitely listen if you have examples. I also have a hard time believing that any other country with the capability to do the type of international spying the US does wouldn't do the exact same thing (or isn't already).
    - pfortuny 12y ago
      We may not have US constitutional rights but that is not the same as not having any rights at all. The USC establishes the USA not humanity.
nihaody 12y ago
"You can't encrypt SD cards." Right there she throws any accountability that she has any idea what she's talking about regarding encryption out the window.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  I suppose she meant that cameras don't provide encryption and she was worried about audio/video data being extracted from the SD cards if they were suddenly confiscated, since most cameras don't do a low-level format. But it struck me as an odd remark as well.
- baddox 12y ago
  I assumed that she just meant that consumer cameras cannot write encrypted data directly onto SD cards. It's not precise technical phrasing, to be sure, but I wouldn't conclude anything so broad from just that sentence.
- omegaworks 12y ago
  This was addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704874
ikm3451 12y ago
Most of the geopolitical analysis usually ignores the imminent public global preeminence of the astonishing economical power achieved by the Saudi guys + close allies in the close future. Not to mention how that economical power could look like in 100 years from now. It is almost certain that this power it is currently already shaping many geopolitical events from the backstage. Many think these new awesome amounts of money will just vanish after all the oil is gone, but that's not true. The money, most of it, it's already invested in many economical infrastructures around the world, the Saudí sphere of influence has probably similar chances to vanish in the next couple of hundred years as any of the current superpowers (US, Russia, China, etc.). So many current superpower certainly need to comply with requests from those "new" kids on the block. Like it or not. And many should look there for reasons to send troops where nobody wants to send them, or for to start wars without any public reasonable cause.

238 points by hotgoldminer 12y ago

"That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence." - I hope that one day we realize this is true.

jobu 12y ago
That whole paragraph is amazing: "Two of the 9/11 hijackers were on the CIA list and had trained with bin Laden in Afghanistan. They came into the country and [the CIA] failed to notify the FBI. We’re here 13 years later with 13 years of war, $4 trillion of money spent, occupied countries, and it was an intelligence failure that could have been corrected in a different way where we should have said, “Why did this happen? Some people should get fired, and let’s be smarter about this.” They had a handful of people that hated us, but now they’ve created entire generations. That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence."
- arca_vorago 12y ago
  "That’s the stuff that drives me crazy—this response of more violence and more war to make us all safer actually creates more violence." Perhaps that's the goal. I've spent a long time trying to understand the grand chessboard of geopolitics and military strategy, and my general conclusion about the WOT is that it was designed as a destabilization program in the first place. Destabilization helps by allowing the jackals to manipulate the power structure to allow whatever the real objective(s) are. In the case of Iraq, for example, it was largely about two things: control of oil (not about getting oil for ourselves, but about controlling who did get it), because the real intellectual hawks (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger, etc kind of people who persist in the beltway over decades) feel that Russia and China are the real threat as we move towards resource wars, and by extension Iran is a threat because it doesn't comply with our power structure. We isolated Iran with both Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to allow both neo-cons and the hawkish left to isolate them even more. I don't think they understand the gravity of such actions though. I gave Wartard some pointers on this article that is worth a read if you are interested in this sort of subject matter. http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/01/phase-ii-why-us-wants-to-attack-iran.html http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/01/phase-ii-why-us-wants-to... Anyway, I digress, the point is that we need to acknowledge and accept that actual national security from terrorism has never been the primary goal, and instead is the cover for the perceived national security situation that is soon to be here, namely, a neo-cold war era of global resource and economic wars. Until this fact is acknowledged, I will continue to be disappointed in journalists who simply stop at "but we are creating more terrorists!" and don't move on the the bigger picture of why this is the current state of the union.
  - g0v 12y ago
    From the Wartard post: "but the Chinese did manage to sneak a diesel powered sub into the middle of a carrier group during USN exercises off Taiwan in 2006." I was stationed in Japan when I was in the Navy and just missed this little event. Supposedly the sub surfaced directly in front of the Kittyhawk. Shortly thereafter, the Kittyhawk went into General Quarters.
  - junto 12y ago
    Just wow. Great post and the linked blog post was also fascinating. I find it almost incredulous that there are people in the throws of power who play this as a game with the lives of billions hanging by a thread in their hands.
  - pyre 12y ago
    > We isolated Iran with both Afghanistan and Iraq How did Iraq isolated Iran? Iran and Iraq, while both bucking the 'US power structure', were enemies of each other.
  - mpweiher 12y ago
    Obligatory reference to "The Power of Nightmares (The Rise of the Politics of Fear)" by Adam Curtis. If you haven't watched it, it's a must see. well worth the 3 hours for the whole series. I re-watch it every couple of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares http://vimeo.com/84414208 http://vimeo.com/84414208 http://vimeo.com/84389928 http://vimeo.com/84389928 http://vimeo.com/84421510 http://vimeo.com/84421510
  - MCRed 12y ago
    There's a general bigger picture perspective that goes something like this: "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure." EG: Government creates problems in order to justify more power by claiming it needs the power (or money) to solve the problem. It's not just the War on Terror. The war on drugs has had a similar effect -- drug enforcement focusing on importation, incentivizes more concentrated drugs allowing for profit per pound in smuggling operations. These drugs happen to also be more addictive. Cocoa Leaves -> Cocaine -> Crack In fact, I submit you can probably find a similar effect in every "grand effort" at the federal level that gets called a "war".
- Shivetya 12y ago
  it was never a handful of people, the US is a convenient bogey man regardless of its actions. Combined with the revulsion that Islam in that area has for Western culture and its not likely anything we do one or another has much effect. Blaming the Iraq war for their dislike of us is about as silly as it gets, they didn't like us before. The key differences now is that technology allows such groups to better organize than ever before.
  - pyre 12y ago
    There is a difference between a general dislike and an active dislike. There are plenty of people there who will blame the US for specific deaths of people close to them. This motivates people a lot more than some general "I don't like those people much" idea.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - guelo 12y ago
    Your suggestion that invading armies have no effect on "dislike" (also known as resistance) doesn't seem plausible. Many Arabs went from "that crazy bin Laden is a conspiracy theorist" to "bi Laden is right, America is our enemy".
  - MCRed 12y ago
    > "Blaming the Iraq war for their dislike of us is about as silly as it gets, they didn't like us before." Actually, I'd love to hear a better explanation for the Iraq war. Because I've not heard one that wasn't silly. Iraqi's didn't like us and didn't like us before? Have you met many Iraqis? Remember this was a relatively modern, westernish country. The average Iraqi liked america, our freedom, and wish they could be liberated from Saddam. (this is not a justification for the war with Iraq, in my mind, but neither is the 9/11 event which involved Saudis and had no apparent connection to Iraq.) How about Iranians. Do you think Iranians hate westerners? Reports from people visiting Iran, and the Iranians I have known disagree with that position. Again, also a relatively modern society, though with an even more religious government than Iraq. I think you might be making the mistake that many make of conflating the views of "leaders" (often self described) or "government" with "the people". On the other hand, take an individual Iraqi or Afghani father, who lost his wife and kids to a drone attack that only killed civilians. Do you think he might hate america? Quite possibly. But that was not "before", that is only "since" the drone attacks started. I imagine there are many kids who were teenagers who lost their fathers and or mothers to drone attacks in the last 10 years who will grow up to hate americans, and some of them may turn out to be terrorists. The "War on terrorism" is using tactics that create terrorists.
sigzero 12y ago
Radical Islam will always hate and try and kill. That is not going to stop even if everyone realizes that statement is true.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Religion is indeed a powerful motivator, and interpreted certain ways is very dangerous. However, we don't do ourselves any favors by pushing sympathetic moderates towards extremism by waging wars that only serve to open a power vacuum. The world would be safer without religions that deny the rights of others to exist, and would also be safer if violence hadn't been used to encourage more membership in those religions that promote violence.
  - bostik 12y ago
    > However, we don't do ourselves any favors by pushing sympathetic moderates towards extremism by waging wars that only serve to open a power vacuum. The law of unintended consequences is a tricky beast. I have pasted this link before, but it bears repeating. It's thorny by design, and happens to snide at US - but they are certainly not the only ones who have succesfully created their own enemies. Usually by supporting and funding earlier allies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo IIRC Iran was a massive source of counterfeit US dollars in the 1980's and early 1990's. The reason? The last Shah of Persia was supported by the US and was even provided with a mint-quality printing press. [0][1] When he fled the country after the 1979 uprising, the printing press was left behind. 0: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17960/did-usa-send-federal-reserve-system-officers-to-iran-to-print-cash-for-iranian-o http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17960/did-usa-se... 1: http://articles.latimes.com/1992-07-02/news/mn-1906_1_counterfeit-bills http://articles.latimes.com/1992-07-02/news/mn-1906_1_counte... EDIT: made quote appear in italics
  - totalforge 12y ago
    The power and authority religion grants the adherent is the key motivator. Power over women, power to kill 'enemies' in the name the faith, and so on.
- 12y ago

jordigh 12y ago

Can we fix the URL without the Google redirect? It should go to: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/01/laura-poitras-on-finding-edward-snowden-obama-s-tainted-legacy-and-oliver-stone-s-snowden-film.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/01/laura-poitr...

pfortuny 12y ago
Yes, I thought it was some kind of google research.
- hotgoldminer 12y ago
  My b. Won't let me edit the link. Suppose I could delete and repost, but might compromise the comments section. Unless there's a riot, I say keep it as is?
  - jordigh 12y ago
    It's really a request for the mods. I believe they can amend urls.
  - pfortuny 12y ago
    It is a request for the mods, as jordigh has said. Not to worry, one gets the URLs one gets and google is certainly awful at giving them.

konradb 12y ago

I found it odd when she said > I was destroying the physical media, because you can’t encrypt SD cards. Does she mean they don't come with built-in encryption? I'm curious as to why you couldn't just save an encrypted file or encrypted container to an SD card. edit: aaah, camera. I got the wrong end of the stick. Thanks!

vidarh 12y ago
She is talking about the SD cards in her camera, presumably. I don't know if you can get cameras that supports encrypting the images as they're written, but it's not unreasonable that she wouldn't have one, and not unreasonable that she'd be reluctant to trust whether or not formatting/overwriting the SD card would be sufficient to prevent recovery.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  I guess some overwrites should be enough for i in $(seq 1 1000); do if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=$((1024 * 1024)) count=(SD size in MB); done
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Actually what if one of the blocks used for the critical data was deemed degraded and removed from the pool and replaced with a reserve before it was overwritten. No way to delete then although expensive to retrieve it might be possible. Depends on the capability of your opponent and the consequences if your guess is wrong.
    - raverbashing 12y ago
      Yeah, also block size, I'm not sure how big they usually are. 512 bytes should be ok (for a picture), if it's bigger I'd be more worried Might be easier to microwave the SD card
      - nitrogen 12y ago

cryoshon 12y ago

Mediocre interview, I think. Nothing really groundbreaking asked or answered with depth. That said, I agree with her when she says that these two decades of war and terror we've inflicted on the world will be seen as dark times. I say two decades because we've already been through 13 years, and only now are starting to show the faintest hints of slowing down the rampage abroad and the totalitarianism at home.

happyscrappy 12y ago
The fascist West is no better than Russia or China. All Europeans, Americans, Canadians etc should be ashamed.
- cryoshon 12y ago
  I wouldn't go nearly that far. Russia doesn't even maintain the slightest veneer of democracy or civic empowerment, and China doesn't really have the capacity to enforce complete compliance from its massive population yet.
  - DasIch 12y ago
    That actually makes the position of the US far worse. The US claims to be good in some way, to care about freedom and human rights while at the same time they couldn't care less. China, Russia, Iran and other such countries - no matter what you may think about their policies - can at least be said to be honest. That doesn't make them good but it does show that the US isn't better, in fact they are quite a bit worse.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      The entire West is working together on intel. You can argure that Europe, Canada etc. are incompetent and weak but you can't argue that they are innocent. They are deeply complicit. But that narrative doesn't work very well.
- dang 12y ago

abandonliberty 12y ago

Does Snowden's legal fund actually have under 9000$? https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6mzUd https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6mzUd Seems legitimate, but that's crazy to me. Maybe they don't count everything?

csandreasen 12y ago
Why does he need a legal fund if he has no intention of returning to the US and facing trial? What does that money actually go to?
- mschuster91 12y ago
  > Why does he need a legal fund if he has no intention of returning to the US and facing trial? Because stuff like dealing with Russian immigration law and maybe also negotiating with the USA does require a lawyer? And for the question why it's only $9k, the Wau Holland Foundation also accepts bank transfers which won't show up there.
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    If he's using it for Russian immigration, it shouldn't be advertised as a legal defense fund.

slg 12y ago

Poitras says "the reporting we’ve done has all been filtering what’s in the public interest versus what’s operational" yet in the same interview reveals "the communication flow for the drone system all goes through Rammstein, so it’s part of the nerve center. The controls are elsewhere, but it all runs through fiber optic cables that go in and out of Rammstein" How is it in the public interest to know that all drone communication flows through a specific base especially considering how valuable that fact might be to someone who would want to ground our drone fleet? That is my only problem with Snowden and how these things are being reported. It started out with valid whistle blowing but there are plenty of real operational national secrets that are being revealed in the process. If Snowden simply stuck to the NSA's overreach in domestic spying, it would be much harder for politicians and the like to call him a traitor and marginalize these issues.

secfirstmd 12y ago
"If Snowden simply stuck to the NSA's overreach in domestic spying" On behalf of the other 6.7 billion people on this spinning green ball, thankfully he didn't. We have rights too.
- slg 12y ago
  >We have rights too. Not under the US Constitution which is what governs the NSA. That has been one of the main features of government throughout history. They put their own people's rights above the rights of foreigners. EDIT: And doing the opposite will generally be viewed as treason. I am honestly not aware of anything that was revealed that would violate any international treaty the US agreed to, but will definitely listen if you have examples. I also have a hard time believing that any other country with the capability to do the type of international spying the US does wouldn't do the exact same thing (or isn't already).
  - pfortuny 12y ago
    We may not have US constitutional rights but that is not the same as not having any rights at all. The USC establishes the USA not humanity.

nihaody 12y ago

"You can't encrypt SD cards." Right there she throws any accountability that she has any idea what she's talking about regarding encryption out the window.

anigbrowl 12y ago
I suppose she meant that cameras don't provide encryption and she was worried about audio/video data being extracted from the SD cards if they were suddenly confiscated, since most cameras don't do a low-level format. But it struck me as an odd remark as well.
baddox 12y ago
I assumed that she just meant that consumer cameras cannot write encrypted data directly onto SD cards. It's not precise technical phrasing, to be sure, but I wouldn't conclude anything so broad from just that sentence.
omegaworks 12y ago
This was addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704874

ikm3451 12y ago

Most of the geopolitical analysis usually ignores the imminent public global preeminence of the astonishing economical power achieved by the Saudi guys + close allies in the close future. Not to mention how that economical power could look like in 100 years from now. It is almost certain that this power it is currently already shaping many geopolitical events from the backstage. Many think these new awesome amounts of money will just vanish after all the oil is gone, but that's not true. The money, most of it, it's already invested in many economical infrastructures around the world, the Saudí sphere of influence has probably similar chances to vanish in the next couple of hundred years as any of the current superpowers (US, Russia, China, etc.). So many current superpower certainly need to comply with requests from those "new" kids on the block. Like it or not. And many should look there for reasons to send troops where nobody wants to send them, or for to start wars without any public reasonable cause.