7 ms·

Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

559 points by ahamdy 12y ago

tobylane 12y ago
The AMA says that Citizenfour will be on HBO tonight, in the UK it'll be on Channel 4, 11:05 Wednesday and 4od after that.
- username3 12y ago
  And it's currently free. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/couuobz?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s... The movie is currently available for free as the movie is used as a public evidence in a lawsuit
rndn 12y ago
What's the reason this is being flagged?
- spcoll 12y ago
  "Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
  - nashashmi 12y ago
    Which is why they should be upvoted again and again.
  - virtuabhi 12y ago
    I thought you are being smart-ass/sarcastic with saying that "Snowden" and "NSA" attract a penalty. I wonder how much %age of users know about the penalty system. I predict that it is a very small number. Personally, I am very disappointed after knowing this information. I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.
  - AceJohnny2 12y ago
    More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
    - whyever 12y ago
      > I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it? > it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
    - john_b 12y ago
      The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
      - hueving 12y ago
        >because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Do you remember when every other article on the HN frontpage was about one of the two? Not that they are unimportant subjects, but it wasn't Hacker News anymore, it was NSA News. As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.
  - virtuabhi 12y ago
    Does this penalty acts on comments too? Or, is it limited to only submissions? Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.
  - lawnchair_larry 12y ago
    HN mods have more recently said that penalty was temporary and no longer applies. No way of knowing though.
  - dang 12y ago
    There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.
    - TillE 12y ago
      The discussions got very redundant, but I don't recall many duplicate articles. Early on, there was a ton of information being released every few days, and of course a lot of drama with Snowden himself. I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
      - dang 12y ago
        This depends on how you define "duplicate". I said "copycat", meaning the plethora of follow-up stories that invariably appear when something big happens that don't include any new information, but either report on what has already been reported or are garden-variety commentary. Obviously, HN's front page doesn't have room for all of those. If you think that there aren't many of them, we must be working with different data. It's true that during the initial period there were major revelations coming out every few days. But I was talking about later.
        Galacticus 12y ago
        You are a bunch of PC busybodies who whine incessantly. The moderation, hidden bans, all very childish. Grow up.
    - ChrisAntaki 12y ago
      > "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it. While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.
- 3327 12y ago
  Honestly penalty was required because there was a point where HN front page was only NSA and Snowden, like was DC based think tank.
rurban 12y ago
Similar to the HN penalty, reddit also seems to have some Snowden countermeasures in effect. It was a very popular IAmA, but the Android AMA app, displayed only 2 answers for it, and the 3 people who wanted to answer, Laura Poitras, Ed Snowden and Glen Greenwald, were limited to about one answer per 10 minutes, so for the whole hour they could answer about 10 questions. This limits usability and civil interactions a bit. People should really choose boards without such censorship in place.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  I love that you completely guessed the incorrect answer, and then moved right to calling it censorship and critiquing Reddit based on your assumption. Snowden's account was rate-limited because accounts with no activity are more scrutinized for spam purposes. If the other accounts were (and I see no evidence of that, since Glenn Greenwald has done his own AMA before), it's the same reason. That limit exists because new account creation is so trivial. It also exists on HN in different ways, you forget. It took me several thousand comment karma on Reddit until I stopped noticing the rate limit entirely. I can't speak to the Android issues. Either way, the moderators worked it out; there was some confusion about the accounts downthread. I don't begrudge someone speculation, but when you then immediately move to acting on your speculation and decrying a community incorrectly, you should probably check if you're correct first.
  - pests 12y ago
    Specifically Snowden was commenting on two different accounts. I assume his Android AMA app messed up due to their being so many authors to the AMA.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I would be more curious to know the number of down votes the AMA has gotten, I could have sworn the number has gone down
  - burkaman 12y ago
    That happens to every single popular post on Reddit. They have lots of weird fuzzing algorithms to counter votebots and adjust for a constantly growing userbase. It's not nefarious, and it's pretty common to see some picture at 4000 points that was at 6000 an hour ago. The score is only abstractly related to the number of votes.
grey-area 12y ago
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and cogent replies from Snowden on this thread already, I'd encourage everyone to check it out.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  I find his points about governmental accumulation of power to be close to and validating that made by Assange in his very interesting Wikileaks manifesto, "Conspiracy as Governance" [1] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/conspiracies.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/cons...
- recondite 12y ago
  I find the rest of that specific comment particularly amazing: > How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. > How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights. > You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where -- if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen -- we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new -- and permanent -- basis. > Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy. > We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral. > In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends. I like his idealism, but I just don't foresee the substantial changes that he's calling for occurring any time soon. Frankly, most people don't give a shit, and there are just too many vested interests involved to ensure that can't happen (e.g. Koch brothers donating $1billion dollars in the next election cycle, Citizens United, etc). Sure, there will be some pandering by both sides of the aisle next election about how they're the only true candidate that will protect individual rights, but once they've been sufficiently elected and absorbed by the machine, they'll continue along the trend that started 50+ years ago. Obama was a constitutional lawyer ffs. But hey, as long as gas prices are low, Netflix stays up, and I can get my $10 Domino's large pizza delivered to my front door, I'll vote for whoever sounds good and promises me the most shit. /s
DAddYE 12y ago
A good thing about America is that while the "politics" lag behind citizens and US companies try at least to solve partially the problem. I liked these bits: Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!) We often denigrate US and his biggest companies like: Apple, Google or Microsoft. So I agree since then in the politics nothing big has been changed but I'm glad to see that now we take care about things like https or generally how our data is protected.
- pizza234 12y ago
  Companies won't solve the problem, because the problem is in a different domain. "Our data" may be sort of safe, but the civil rights are being eroded, which is a much bigger issue. Having such powerful entities living in complete independence from the government, and with complete unaccountability, is a social disaster. Besides, the data owned by a user in the more "immediate" sense, may be sort of safe, but don't forget that you're not the only possessing data about you; there is a large ecosystem, and such entities will be always a step ahead in the game. In absence of accountability/civil rights, such entities are completely free to rape you, independently of your technical private defenses.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    Companies won't solve the problem, because the problem is in a different domain. I think this is an interesting question, because it intersects with the rise and fall of the nation state - at some point (perhaps that point has already been reached) corporations will have greater reach and greater power than nation states and individuals will start to feel less allegiance to the state of their birth. Will they start to look to companies to protect their rights? I disagree that laws which govern a nation state are the right level for this sort of issue or that nation states are more trustworthy - those are precisely the laws which have been subverted and used against us in order to subvert encryption of websites, sim cards or any of our other communications and allow recording of it all. Just as one example of how easily our laws are subverted the man in charge of supervising UK surveillance can be bought for a few thousand pounds for trivial matters: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-rifkind-clings-on-to-chairmanship-of-intelligence-committee http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-r... International law is even worse. Even with the relatively good accountability and civil rights in the US (for most citizens most of the time), the US government has arrogated the right to kill you without trial, detain you indefinitely without trial, or torture you without legal recourse because to give you legal recourse would endanger state secrets. Such is the state of our civil rights - they are selectively applied and withdrawn by the state as it suits them, and words like traitor or terrorist are used to put someone beyond the pale of civilisation and therefore outlaw. Here is what Snowden had to say about it on that AMA: How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights. I agree with that - what is effective is moral certitudes which individuals agree and act upon, not nation state law or international law which are so easily ignored or subverted. That means technical solutions, not legal ones, though I agree it is better to rely on neither the nation state nor the corporation in proposing solutions.
nickysielicki 12y ago
>Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it. [1] What an incredible analogy. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/coutuaq http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...
- Sven7 12y ago
  At the end of the day is anyone arguing it was a bad thing that the Americans got to the bomb (and used it) before the Germans, Japanese or Russians did? I'd hand the button over to someone like Truman over Hitler or Stalin any day of the week. Do I like the tools the NSA has in its possession? No. But I am happy they got there (and have access to them) before the Chinese, Russians or Arabs did. Are there going to be disasters like Hiroshima and Nagasaki thanks to these tools? I don't think so. Will the NSA and the government misuse the tools and make mistakes? Definitely. Their effectiveness must be constantly monitored and questioned. (Huge respect for Snowden for making that possible.) But these tools aren't going anywhere until all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here stop wasting their time pretending to be lawyers (the law and lawmakers aren't going to get us out of this hole) and design better tech to stop the next Boston bombing, Charlie Hedbo style attack or ISIS recruitment drives.
  - rmxt 12y ago
    What answer regarding nuclear weapons would you expect to get on a hypothetical news.ycombinator.jp? a .ru? I think the GP and Snowden's point is that the world would be better off without them, not looking to start a debate about which country is the better worldwide nuclear policeman. What better tech are you hypothesizing? You've seem to have already come to the conclusion that the tech we have isn't enough, while preemptively declaring that policy can't solve the West's issues. I think that technical literacy amongst legal professionals and legal literacy amongst technical professionals are steps in the right direction towards a balance of safety and liberty, and are ones that do not immediately entail increasing the scope of surveillance programs.
panarky 12y ago
We have to ensure that our rights aren't just being protected by letters on a sheet of paper somewhere, or those protections will evaporate the minute our communications get routed across a border. Reminds me of Lessig's "Code is Law". http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html
logn 12y ago
> Snowden 2016 Is there any legal reason why this couldn't happen? Edit: aside from age if we're talking presidency.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- logn 12y ago
  Following up on my own question... Section 3 prohibits the election or appointment to any federal or state office of any person who had held any of certain offices and then engaged in insurrection, rebellion or treason. Section 3 was used to prevent Socialist Party of America member Victor L. Berger, convicted of violating the Espionage Act for his anti-militarist views, from taking his seat in the House of Representatives in 1919 and 1920. - source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Participants_in_rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... And as far as pardoning oneself as president, it's possible: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/1998/12/can_president_clinton_pardon_himself.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/19...
mkramlich 12y ago
HBO here in Colorado was scheduled to show Citizenfour at 7pm local time. At approx 6pm I turned it on to get it ready. Black and silent. Continued black and silent up thru 9pm local when it was supposed to have ended. All other cable TV channels and local/public channels have worked normally during this period that I can tell. HBO worked fine yesterday and every day before for as long as I can remember. Unprecedented black out. suspicious is saying it mildly. I wanted to post this here and on Reddit for public record in case this is evidence of a censorship attempt by NSA/gov or aligned entity. I feel like a tin foil hat wearer to even post this but its frightening enough and serious enough that it should be recorded somewhere, as insurance. Colorado, a dominant provider of local cable TV service, hesitant to say which city. again, all other channels are working normally. and HBO had no similar blackout effect observed by me ever before. so the cause is both unknown and suspicious.
- numinit 12y ago
  Whoa, really? What cable provider?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mkramlich 12y ago
    its one of the two local dominant ones but I'm not sure which. I'll try to find out tomorrow. I'd say the city but this topic is already terrifying enough considering the nature of the "adversary", haha, oh man. if you email me I'll tell you city. I'm hoping to see reports from others. I find it hard to believe it would just be one person, one device. surely whoever/whatever did this would do an entire region/provider combo, at a minimum 10pm local. checked again. still black and silent. all other channels fine still, showing shows.
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
      We've just been watching it here in Sunnyvale, CA.
- 12y ago

559 points by ahamdy 12y ago

The AMA says that Citizenfour will be on HBO tonight, in the UK it'll be on Channel 4, 11:05 Wednesday and 4od after that.

username3 12y ago
And it's currently free. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/couuobz?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s... The movie is currently available for free as the movie is used as a public evidence in a lawsuit

rndn 12y ago

What's the reason this is being flagged?

spcoll 12y ago
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
- nashashmi 12y ago
  Which is why they should be upvoted again and again.
- virtuabhi 12y ago
  I thought you are being smart-ass/sarcastic with saying that "Snowden" and "NSA" attract a penalty. I wonder how much %age of users know about the penalty system. I predict that it is a very small number. Personally, I am very disappointed after knowing this information. I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
  - whyever 12y ago
    > I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it? > it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
  - john_b 12y ago
    The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
    - hueving 12y ago
      >because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Do you remember when every other article on the HN frontpage was about one of the two? Not that they are unimportant subjects, but it wasn't Hacker News anymore, it was NSA News. As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.
- virtuabhi 12y ago
  Does this penalty acts on comments too? Or, is it limited to only submissions? Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.
- lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  HN mods have more recently said that penalty was temporary and no longer applies. No way of knowing though.
- dang 12y ago
  There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.
  - TillE 12y ago
    The discussions got very redundant, but I don't recall many duplicate articles. Early on, there was a ton of information being released every few days, and of course a lot of drama with Snowden himself. I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
    - dang 12y ago
      This depends on how you define "duplicate". I said "copycat", meaning the plethora of follow-up stories that invariably appear when something big happens that don't include any new information, but either report on what has already been reported or are garden-variety commentary. Obviously, HN's front page doesn't have room for all of those. If you think that there aren't many of them, we must be working with different data. It's true that during the initial period there were major revelations coming out every few days. But I was talking about later.
      - Galacticus 12y ago
        You are a bunch of PC busybodies who whine incessantly. The moderation, hidden bans, all very childish. Grow up.
  - ChrisAntaki 12y ago
    > "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it. While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.
3327 12y ago
Honestly penalty was required because there was a point where HN front page was only NSA and Snowden, like was DC based think tank.

rurban 12y ago

Similar to the HN penalty, reddit also seems to have some Snowden countermeasures in effect. It was a very popular IAmA, but the Android AMA app, displayed only 2 answers for it, and the 3 people who wanted to answer, Laura Poitras, Ed Snowden and Glen Greenwald, were limited to about one answer per 10 minutes, so for the whole hour they could answer about 10 questions. This limits usability and civil interactions a bit. People should really choose boards without such censorship in place.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
I love that you completely guessed the incorrect answer, and then moved right to calling it censorship and critiquing Reddit based on your assumption. Snowden's account was rate-limited because accounts with no activity are more scrutinized for spam purposes. If the other accounts were (and I see no evidence of that, since Glenn Greenwald has done his own AMA before), it's the same reason. That limit exists because new account creation is so trivial. It also exists on HN in different ways, you forget. It took me several thousand comment karma on Reddit until I stopped noticing the rate limit entirely. I can't speak to the Android issues. Either way, the moderators worked it out; there was some confusion about the accounts downthread. I don't begrudge someone speculation, but when you then immediately move to acting on your speculation and decrying a community incorrectly, you should probably check if you're correct first.
- pests 12y ago
  Specifically Snowden was commenting on two different accounts. I assume his Android AMA app messed up due to their being so many authors to the AMA.
Shivetya 12y ago
I would be more curious to know the number of down votes the AMA has gotten, I could have sworn the number has gone down
- burkaman 12y ago
  That happens to every single popular post on Reddit. They have lots of weird fuzzing algorithms to counter votebots and adjust for a constantly growing userbase. It's not nefarious, and it's pretty common to see some picture at 4000 points that was at 6000 an hour ago. The score is only abstractly related to the number of votes.

grey-area 12y ago

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and cogent replies from Snowden on this thread already, I'd encourage everyone to check it out.

AceJohnny2 12y ago
I find his points about governmental accumulation of power to be close to and validating that made by Assange in his very interesting Wikileaks manifesto, "Conspiracy as Governance" [1] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/conspiracies.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/cons...
recondite 12y ago
I find the rest of that specific comment particularly amazing: > How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. > How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights. > You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where -- if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen -- we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new -- and permanent -- basis. > Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy. > We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral. > In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends. I like his idealism, but I just don't foresee the substantial changes that he's calling for occurring any time soon. Frankly, most people don't give a shit, and there are just too many vested interests involved to ensure that can't happen (e.g. Koch brothers donating $1billion dollars in the next election cycle, Citizens United, etc). Sure, there will be some pandering by both sides of the aisle next election about how they're the only true candidate that will protect individual rights, but once they've been sufficiently elected and absorbed by the machine, they'll continue along the trend that started 50+ years ago. Obama was a constitutional lawyer ffs. But hey, as long as gas prices are low, Netflix stays up, and I can get my $10 Domino's large pizza delivered to my front door, I'll vote for whoever sounds good and promises me the most shit. /s

DAddYE 12y ago

A good thing about America is that while the "politics" lag behind citizens and US companies try at least to solve partially the problem. I liked these bits: Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!) We often denigrate US and his biggest companies like: Apple, Google or Microsoft. So I agree since then in the politics nothing big has been changed but I'm glad to see that now we take care about things like https or generally how our data is protected.

pizza234 12y ago
Companies won't solve the problem, because the problem is in a different domain. "Our data" may be sort of safe, but the civil rights are being eroded, which is a much bigger issue. Having such powerful entities living in complete independence from the government, and with complete unaccountability, is a social disaster. Besides, the data owned by a user in the more "immediate" sense, may be sort of safe, but don't forget that you're not the only possessing data about you; there is a large ecosystem, and such entities will be always a step ahead in the game. In absence of accountability/civil rights, such entities are completely free to rape you, independently of your technical private defenses.
- grey-area 12y ago
  Companies won't solve the problem, because the problem is in a different domain. I think this is an interesting question, because it intersects with the rise and fall of the nation state - at some point (perhaps that point has already been reached) corporations will have greater reach and greater power than nation states and individuals will start to feel less allegiance to the state of their birth. Will they start to look to companies to protect their rights? I disagree that laws which govern a nation state are the right level for this sort of issue or that nation states are more trustworthy - those are precisely the laws which have been subverted and used against us in order to subvert encryption of websites, sim cards or any of our other communications and allow recording of it all. Just as one example of how easily our laws are subverted the man in charge of supervising UK surveillance can be bought for a few thousand pounds for trivial matters: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-rifkind-clings-on-to-chairmanship-of-intelligence-committee http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-r... International law is even worse. Even with the relatively good accountability and civil rights in the US (for most citizens most of the time), the US government has arrogated the right to kill you without trial, detain you indefinitely without trial, or torture you without legal recourse because to give you legal recourse would endanger state secrets. Such is the state of our civil rights - they are selectively applied and withdrawn by the state as it suits them, and words like traitor or terrorist are used to put someone beyond the pale of civilisation and therefore outlaw. Here is what Snowden had to say about it on that AMA: How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights. I agree with that - what is effective is moral certitudes which individuals agree and act upon, not nation state law or international law which are so easily ignored or subverted. That means technical solutions, not legal ones, though I agree it is better to rely on neither the nation state nor the corporation in proposing solutions.

nickysielicki 12y ago

>Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it. [1] What an incredible analogy. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/coutuaq http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...

Sven7 12y ago
At the end of the day is anyone arguing it was a bad thing that the Americans got to the bomb (and used it) before the Germans, Japanese or Russians did? I'd hand the button over to someone like Truman over Hitler or Stalin any day of the week. Do I like the tools the NSA has in its possession? No. But I am happy they got there (and have access to them) before the Chinese, Russians or Arabs did. Are there going to be disasters like Hiroshima and Nagasaki thanks to these tools? I don't think so. Will the NSA and the government misuse the tools and make mistakes? Definitely. Their effectiveness must be constantly monitored and questioned. (Huge respect for Snowden for making that possible.) But these tools aren't going anywhere until all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here stop wasting their time pretending to be lawyers (the law and lawmakers aren't going to get us out of this hole) and design better tech to stop the next Boston bombing, Charlie Hedbo style attack or ISIS recruitment drives.
- rmxt 12y ago
  What answer regarding nuclear weapons would you expect to get on a hypothetical news.ycombinator.jp? a .ru? I think the GP and Snowden's point is that the world would be better off without them, not looking to start a debate about which country is the better worldwide nuclear policeman. What better tech are you hypothesizing? You've seem to have already come to the conclusion that the tech we have isn't enough, while preemptively declaring that policy can't solve the West's issues. I think that technical literacy amongst legal professionals and legal literacy amongst technical professionals are steps in the right direction towards a balance of safety and liberty, and are ones that do not immediately entail increasing the scope of surveillance programs.

panarky 12y ago

We have to ensure that our rights aren't just being protected by letters on a sheet of paper somewhere, or those protections will evaporate the minute our communications get routed across a border. Reminds me of Lessig's "Code is Law". http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html

logn 12y ago

> Snowden 2016 Is there any legal reason why this couldn't happen? Edit: aside from age if we're talking presidency.

deleted 12y ago
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logn 12y ago
Following up on my own question... Section 3 prohibits the election or appointment to any federal or state office of any person who had held any of certain offices and then engaged in insurrection, rebellion or treason. Section 3 was used to prevent Socialist Party of America member Victor L. Berger, convicted of violating the Espionage Act for his anti-militarist views, from taking his seat in the House of Representatives in 1919 and 1920. - source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Participants_in_rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... And as far as pardoning oneself as president, it's possible: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/1998/12/can_president_clinton_pardon_himself.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/19...

mkramlich 12y ago

HBO here in Colorado was scheduled to show Citizenfour at 7pm local time. At approx 6pm I turned it on to get it ready. Black and silent. Continued black and silent up thru 9pm local when it was supposed to have ended. All other cable TV channels and local/public channels have worked normally during this period that I can tell. HBO worked fine yesterday and every day before for as long as I can remember. Unprecedented black out. suspicious is saying it mildly. I wanted to post this here and on Reddit for public record in case this is evidence of a censorship attempt by NSA/gov or aligned entity. I feel like a tin foil hat wearer to even post this but its frightening enough and serious enough that it should be recorded somewhere, as insurance. Colorado, a dominant provider of local cable TV service, hesitant to say which city. again, all other channels are working normally. and HBO had no similar blackout effect observed by me ever before. so the cause is both unknown and suspicious.

numinit 12y ago
Whoa, really? What cable provider?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mkramlich 12y ago
  its one of the two local dominant ones but I'm not sure which. I'll try to find out tomorrow. I'd say the city but this topic is already terrifying enough considering the nature of the "adversary", haha, oh man. if you email me I'll tell you city. I'm hoping to see reports from others. I find it hard to believe it would just be one person, one device. surely whoever/whatever did this would do an entire region/provider combo, at a minimum 10pm local. checked again. still black and silent. all other channels fine still, showing shows.
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    We've just been watching it here in Sunnyvale, CA.
12y ago