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it is worrying what is happening in Russia but much less so than what is going in the USA. Google, Facbook etc tightly integrated with the nations intelligence

it is worrying what is happening in Russia but much less so than what is going in the USA. Google, Facbook etc tightly integrated with the nations intelligence agencies, mining the data found there to make secret lists that could result in assassinations, indefinite detention and torture. Russias actions are for the most part overt, and rightly criticized, what the US does, it does so covertly. If anyone speaks about the actions that the Us takes in secret they are hunted to the end of the world, and must seek refuge in Russia. We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much more so than any of the Putin dissidents. (With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated) Remember that the air plane carrying the President of Bolivia was forced to land and be searched by American allies under the suspicion that Snowden might be on-board. Can you imagine AirForce One being forced to land, and be searched by Russia or China? Becaus they suspected it might be carrying a dissident? I dont think so.

schrodinger 12y ago
Sorry, but I really don't buy the argument that USA is worse than Russia in this respect. Snowden, while I totally applaud what he did and would love to see him pardoned, or protected under whistleblower laws, leaked a ton of highly classified information. Again, I think he did the right thing, but him being prosecuted is not the same as "if anyone speaks about the actions the U.S. takes in secret they are hunted to the end of the world." Plenty of people have overtly criticized the U.S. government without any fear of retribution.
- Perdition 12y ago
  Yeah, if Snowden had of betrayed the ~~KGB~~ FSS/FIS he would have fallen down some stairs onto some bullets a long time ago.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    if he was lucky where lucky one agent for the CIA ended up getting tortured and allegedly burned alive in the basement of the KGB and I suspect the poor sods that Kim Philby burned all got a quick clean death
- nemanja 12y ago
  If Snowden blew the whistle (to the minimum extent possible to inform the public about what was happening) and stayed in the U.S. to face the music, I could buy the argument that he was a hero and deserves a pardon. What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe and revealed publicly a lot of tactical information that only serves to hurt U.S. intelligence operations abroad. Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome. Now he's a part of a propaganda machine of a tyrannical regime. Sorry, but that makes him a Russian agent, traitor and a dirtbag.
  - jarek 12y ago
    Really curious how you feel about Litvinenko's work with MI6. Western agent and traitor to Russia should be non-controversial and not bad from Western point of view, but how about the dirtbag?
    - nemanja 12y ago
      I suppose I don't place data surveillance and stuff like journalist executions, apartment bombings, staging theater/school hostage situations in the same weight class of morally wrong.
      - jarek 12y ago
        Did you have "data surveillance" in mind when you wrote "Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome"?
  - dreamweapon 12y ago
    What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe .. No, what happened was that he attempted to fly to a relatively neutral country in South America, and the U.S. government (rather stupidly) revoked his visa while in transit.
- dchichkov 12y ago
  Well, he is somewhat right. Snooping tech that three-letter-agencies have here is likely to be well beyond anything Russia can possibly have. I've seen some of it in Russia about 15 years back (to my shame, as a student, participated in the development) and even though my code was kinda ok-ish, this was literally child's play ;) You could monitor small percentage of phone calls, but it is a far cry from bulk wiretapping, voice recognition and search/analytics/social-network-analysis that is probably in place here.
happyscrappy 12y ago
It is easy to criticize the US but the entire West is working together. Is Assange or Snowden safe in Germany or Norway? The longer Europeans pretend that the problem is only the US the easier it is to have business as usual.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
Yeah they would never do that in Russia or China.
DangerousPie 12y ago
> With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated That's pretty much the point though, isn't it? Of course the US is going to prosecute someone who reveals their state secrets on such a massive scale. Every country would. However, what they don't do is routinely assassinate and imprison political opponents. In the same way, I agree with you that the cooperation between internet companies and the NSA/CIA is very concerning. However, I believe this still pales in comparison to the amount of oppression and state-control over the media that you see in Russia. What the US is doing is definitely not right. But I don't believe we should let our disappointment about that trivialize the totalitarian state that is Putin's Russia.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
muglug 12y ago
Espionage (what the US programs were for) is very different than the widespread victimisation of those who are seen as undesirable. The Russian government is actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands of people. Whether it's because they were unfortunate enough to have been born gay, or because they want to talk about Russia's annexation of eastern Ukraine, or whether they just don't think Putin should be in power forever. Call me crazy, but I think that's worse than passive collection of reams of data.
- debacle 12y ago
  The US government is also actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and they have been doing so since before Martin Luther King's days. They're just far more subversive about it because they're sitting on reams of money.
  - melling 12y ago
    Could you be more explicit and provide some examples.
    - debacle 12y ago
      "Freedom zones," trying to get MLK to commit suicide, the Red Scare, subversion of activist groups during the Nixon years, Kent State, manipulation of social networks and Wikipedia, controlling the media to the point that it might as well be called the state media unless you're watching BBC or Comedy Central. I could go on and on. The Russians are not worse than the US, they're just not as good at hiding it.
      - muglug 12y ago
        The US government does not "control" the media, and allows private news organisations (Fox News, The Wall St Journal) that effectively act as a mouthpiece for the opposition party to flourish. Not so in Russia, where independent news organisations are under constant attack. You're absolutely right that the US has done some deplorable things in its past (including, as we now know, the recent state-sanctioned torture of probably innocent foreigners). That doesn't make what Russia's doing today, in fairly plain sight, any less repugnant.
icelancer 12y ago
Pretty clear fallacy of tu quoque: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque Based on your spacing and carriage returns, it's pretty obvious you aren't American and have an anti-American bias. Not saying the US is a shining example of civil rights - they certainly are not - but your comment adds nothing to the discussion.
- osipov 12y ago
  That's plain wrong. The OP is arguing that US violations of civil rights are far more significant and consequential than the ones in Russia. OP is right because US claims the mantle of world leadership, has the world's largest military force, and a dominant economy. US should be held to a higher standard.
nemanja 12y ago
I suppose what you are saying is that prosecuting someone for a trial by a jury of their peers (with access to the best defense you can imagine) is much worse than poisoning people with radioactive materials?? At the end of the day, Snowden was a member of the U.S. Intelligence community and entrusted with classified information and, for better or worse, he willfully broke the law. What do you expect, that he would not be prosecuted? Do you think if that happened in Russia, Putin would have any reservation from assassinating him before he managed to flee to his biggest foe and reveal who-knows-what to earn his welcome?
minimax 12y ago
We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much more so than any of the Putin dissidents. (With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated) Assange has a TV show on Russian state television, and Snowden is a guy who fled to Russia with literally thousands of stolen NSA documents and now does TV propaganda with Vladimir Putin. Those are not dissidents. Those are Russian agents, whether they realize it or not.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  They are western dissidents, whether or not they are also Russian agents. Its not uncommon for dissidents forced to resort to exile to be leveraged for propaganda purposes by regimes opposed to the ones with regard to which they are dissidents, but that doesn't make them any less dissidents. Why do people want to make things exclusive that are not?
- ThinkBeat 12y ago
  Does that mean that North Korean dissidents who speak about against the regime when they escape are CIA agents?
  - minimax 12y ago
    If a North Korean signals intelligence officer managed to smuggle thousands of strategic DPRK intelligence documents and himself out of North Korea, I would assume it was with the help of a foreign government.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jazzyk 12y ago
  You are using the exact "reasoning"/propaganda that communist regimes used in Eastern Europe in the past. EVERY dissident who fled to a Western country was automatically labeled a spy.
zarriak 12y ago
The biggest thing about the difference between Russia and the United States is the end goal of their actions. Putin is ensuring his power base, while the US is trying to stop terrorism. I don't like what they are doing but this is what the NSA thinks what works to stop terrorism. If you look at both President Obama and President Bush they did close to the same things regarding national security. It may be a faulty assumption, but this leads me to believe that there are things that these programs protect the western world from. The people who work for the CIA and NSA aren't idiots and they definitely have committed some horrible actions, but they wouldn't being continuing these missions if they were futile. I would like to live in a world without religious extremism, but it has and will always exist. They utilize the poverty and illiteracy of certain places in the middle east to make teenagers believe suicide bombing is the way to get to heaven. Humanity is facing many existential crises and this is the way we are currently handling one. It is definitely not an optimal solution, but it doesn't matter if we can't solve our ever increasing CO2 emissions and the many other problems resulting from greenhouse gases.
- ThinkBeat 12y ago
  You have drunk the cool aid. Everything the US does is to maintain their global position of power. The end goal is obedience to the US and control over as many natural resource and territories as possible. Either directly through military force, or preferably through subversion, coercion and integration. This is not unique to the US, it is what empires do, and the US is now the biggest empire ever created. We have and continue to cooperate with, fund, and protect some of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen. Ours is not a noble mission with just wars to free the slaves of the world and introduce democracy. The only way democracy is acceptable is if the American candidate is electable. If the natives happen to make the wrong choice, coups happen, sanctions happen, directly military action happens. These are not conspiracies, extreme leftist propaganda or the ramblings of Americas enemies, they are historic facts. Are there other bad regimes in the world? Of course. Have their been regimes worse than the US? That depends. If you only want to talk about life in main land US, of course much much worse than that. If you include what regimes supported by the US has done it is hard to say yes or no.
curiously 12y ago
How many Americans would move to Russia vs Russians moving to America? Apples and oranges my friend. Using the same academic tone, one could make even North Korea sound like a great civilized place to be, but then when you get there it isn't anything.

schrodinger 12y ago

Sorry, but I really don't buy the argument that USA is worse than Russia in this respect. Snowden, while I totally applaud what he did and would love to see him pardoned, or protected under whistleblower laws, leaked a ton of highly classified information. Again, I think he did the right thing, but him being prosecuted is not the same as "if anyone speaks about the actions the U.S. takes in secret they are hunted to the end of the world." Plenty of people have overtly criticized the U.S. government without any fear of retribution.

Perdition 12y ago
Yeah, if Snowden had of betrayed the ~~KGB~~ FSS/FIS he would have fallen down some stairs onto some bullets a long time ago.
- walshemj 12y ago
  if he was lucky where lucky one agent for the CIA ended up getting tortured and allegedly burned alive in the basement of the KGB and I suspect the poor sods that Kim Philby burned all got a quick clean death
nemanja 12y ago
If Snowden blew the whistle (to the minimum extent possible to inform the public about what was happening) and stayed in the U.S. to face the music, I could buy the argument that he was a hero and deserves a pardon. What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe and revealed publicly a lot of tactical information that only serves to hurt U.S. intelligence operations abroad. Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome. Now he's a part of a propaganda machine of a tyrannical regime. Sorry, but that makes him a Russian agent, traitor and a dirtbag.
- jarek 12y ago
  Really curious how you feel about Litvinenko's work with MI6. Western agent and traitor to Russia should be non-controversial and not bad from Western point of view, but how about the dirtbag?
  - nemanja 12y ago
    I suppose I don't place data surveillance and stuff like journalist executions, apartment bombings, staging theater/school hostage situations in the same weight class of morally wrong.
    - jarek 12y ago
      Did you have "data surveillance" in mind when you wrote "Further, we will never know what he sold to Russia to earn his welcome"?
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  What he did instead is that he fled to our biggest foe .. No, what happened was that he attempted to fly to a relatively neutral country in South America, and the U.S. government (rather stupidly) revoked his visa while in transit.
dchichkov 12y ago
Well, he is somewhat right. Snooping tech that three-letter-agencies have here is likely to be well beyond anything Russia can possibly have. I've seen some of it in Russia about 15 years back (to my shame, as a student, participated in the development) and even though my code was kinda ok-ish, this was literally child's play ;) You could monitor small percentage of phone calls, but it is a far cry from bulk wiretapping, voice recognition and search/analytics/social-network-analysis that is probably in place here.

happyscrappy 12y ago

It is easy to criticize the US but the entire West is working together. Is Assange or Snowden safe in Germany or Norway? The longer Europeans pretend that the problem is only the US the easier it is to have business as usual.

icantthinkofone 12y ago

Yeah they would never do that in Russia or China.

DangerousPie 12y ago

> With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated That's pretty much the point though, isn't it? Of course the US is going to prosecute someone who reveals their state secrets on such a massive scale. Every country would. However, what they don't do is routinely assassinate and imprison political opponents. In the same way, I agree with you that the cooperation between internet companies and the NSA/CIA is very concerning. However, I believe this still pales in comparison to the amount of oppression and state-control over the media that you see in Russia. What the US is doing is definitely not right. But I don't believe we should let our disappointment about that trivialize the totalitarian state that is Putin's Russia.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

muglug 12y ago

Espionage (what the US programs were for) is very different than the widespread victimisation of those who are seen as undesirable. The Russian government is actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands of people. Whether it's because they were unfortunate enough to have been born gay, or because they want to talk about Russia's annexation of eastern Ukraine, or whether they just don't think Putin should be in power forever. Call me crazy, but I think that's worse than passive collection of reams of data.

debacle 12y ago
The US government is also actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and they have been doing so since before Martin Luther King's days. They're just far more subversive about it because they're sitting on reams of money.
- melling 12y ago
  Could you be more explicit and provide some examples.
  - debacle 12y ago
    "Freedom zones," trying to get MLK to commit suicide, the Red Scare, subversion of activist groups during the Nixon years, Kent State, manipulation of social networks and Wikipedia, controlling the media to the point that it might as well be called the state media unless you're watching BBC or Comedy Central. I could go on and on. The Russians are not worse than the US, they're just not as good at hiding it.
    - muglug 12y ago
      The US government does not "control" the media, and allows private news organisations (Fox News, The Wall St Journal) that effectively act as a mouthpiece for the opposition party to flourish. Not so in Russia, where independent news organisations are under constant attack. You're absolutely right that the US has done some deplorable things in its past (including, as we now know, the recent state-sanctioned torture of probably innocent foreigners). That doesn't make what Russia's doing today, in fairly plain sight, any less repugnant.

icelancer 12y ago

Pretty clear fallacy of tu quoque: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque Based on your spacing and carriage returns, it's pretty obvious you aren't American and have an anti-American bias. Not saying the US is a shining example of civil rights - they certainly are not - but your comment adds nothing to the discussion.

osipov 12y ago
That's plain wrong. The OP is arguing that US violations of civil rights are far more significant and consequential than the ones in Russia. OP is right because US claims the mantle of world leadership, has the world's largest military force, and a dominant economy. US should be held to a higher standard.

nemanja 12y ago

I suppose what you are saying is that prosecuting someone for a trial by a jury of their peers (with access to the best defense you can imagine) is much worse than poisoning people with radioactive materials?? At the end of the day, Snowden was a member of the U.S. Intelligence community and entrusted with classified information and, for better or worse, he willfully broke the law. What do you expect, that he would not be prosecuted? Do you think if that happened in Russia, Putin would have any reservation from assassinating him before he managed to flee to his biggest foe and reveal who-knows-what to earn his welcome?

minimax 12y ago

We hear a lot about Russian dissidents leaving Russia because they have their freedom limited. Snowden and Julian Assange have had their freedom limited to much more so than any of the Putin dissidents. (With the exception of the possibility that a couple of them have been assassinated) Assange has a TV show on Russian state television, and Snowden is a guy who fled to Russia with literally thousands of stolen NSA documents and now does TV propaganda with Vladimir Putin. Those are not dissidents. Those are Russian agents, whether they realize it or not.

dragonwriter 12y ago
They are western dissidents, whether or not they are also Russian agents. Its not uncommon for dissidents forced to resort to exile to be leveraged for propaganda purposes by regimes opposed to the ones with regard to which they are dissidents, but that doesn't make them any less dissidents. Why do people want to make things exclusive that are not?
ThinkBeat 12y ago
Does that mean that North Korean dissidents who speak about against the regime when they escape are CIA agents?
- minimax 12y ago
  If a North Korean signals intelligence officer managed to smuggle thousands of strategic DPRK intelligence documents and himself out of North Korea, I would assume it was with the help of a foreign government.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jazzyk 12y ago
You are using the exact "reasoning"/propaganda that communist regimes used in Eastern Europe in the past. EVERY dissident who fled to a Western country was automatically labeled a spy.

zarriak 12y ago

The biggest thing about the difference between Russia and the United States is the end goal of their actions. Putin is ensuring his power base, while the US is trying to stop terrorism. I don't like what they are doing but this is what the NSA thinks what works to stop terrorism. If you look at both President Obama and President Bush they did close to the same things regarding national security. It may be a faulty assumption, but this leads me to believe that there are things that these programs protect the western world from. The people who work for the CIA and NSA aren't idiots and they definitely have committed some horrible actions, but they wouldn't being continuing these missions if they were futile. I would like to live in a world without religious extremism, but it has and will always exist. They utilize the poverty and illiteracy of certain places in the middle east to make teenagers believe suicide bombing is the way to get to heaven. Humanity is facing many existential crises and this is the way we are currently handling one. It is definitely not an optimal solution, but it doesn't matter if we can't solve our ever increasing CO2 emissions and the many other problems resulting from greenhouse gases.

ThinkBeat 12y ago
You have drunk the cool aid. Everything the US does is to maintain their global position of power. The end goal is obedience to the US and control over as many natural resource and territories as possible. Either directly through military force, or preferably through subversion, coercion and integration. This is not unique to the US, it is what empires do, and the US is now the biggest empire ever created. We have and continue to cooperate with, fund, and protect some of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen. Ours is not a noble mission with just wars to free the slaves of the world and introduce democracy. The only way democracy is acceptable is if the American candidate is electable. If the natives happen to make the wrong choice, coups happen, sanctions happen, directly military action happens. These are not conspiracies, extreme leftist propaganda or the ramblings of Americas enemies, they are historic facts. Are there other bad regimes in the world? Of course. Have their been regimes worse than the US? That depends. If you only want to talk about life in main land US, of course much much worse than that. If you include what regimes supported by the US has done it is hard to say yes or no.

curiously 12y ago

How many Americans would move to Russia vs Russians moving to America? Apples and oranges my friend. Using the same academic tone, one could make even North Korea sound like a great civilized place to be, but then when you get there it isn't anything.