Snowdon (not Snowden) is the name of the tallest mountain in Wales and while by Swiss or Colorado standards it may not seem like much the weather on Snowdon is unpredictable and has taken many lives. I climbed Snowdon as a schoolboy with my class and that day on the mountain another school group was lost in a blizzard and some boys died. This is what first came to mind when I heard about National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking documents and fleeing to Hong Kong. Like his namesake mountain, this Snowden is trouble for those who are overconfident or unwary.
I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a search here and at PBS will yield a great deal that I’d rather not have to repeat. We’ve been here before. Maybe not so much in terms of there being a whistle-blower or a traitor (your choice of terms — I’d say whistle-blower), but these surveillance programs are either old hat or logical extensions of what came before. I’m not defending them, I’m saying we shouldn’t be surprised they exist.
Today’s news was that the U.S. and UK have been snooping on the e-mails and phone conversations of foreign politicians. What news is that? Intelligence agencies have been snooping as long as there have been intelligence agencies. That’s what these agencies were created for in the first place. Just because it’s now Putin, not Khrushchev (or Obama, not Eisenhower) doesn’t change much for agencies that are supposed to be non-political. It’s just another day at the wiretap for these guys.
But it isn’t all non-political, is it? We build these capabilities and then we abuse them, sometimes shamefully. That’s not the way it is supposed to be but it’s the way it is. A huge revelation for me in this Snowden business was in his Q&A yesterday morning with the Guardian in which he explained that the information – all the information being stored – is generally available to analysts who are trusted not to read the bits they aren’t supposed to see.
Yeah, right.
Intelligence agencies and their people will inevitably break these rules because the agents and officials are human, they often have complex personal motivations to do so, and wading through all this information it’s easy to forget the rules or not see them as applying to you. Such rules are intended, after all, to keep other people out.
It’s difficult to reconcile respect for privacy in programs that are inherently designed to violate privacy. We pretend to have it both ways but that doesn’t really work.
What concerns me too is the collateral damage, fear of which you can see in companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft trying to distance themselves from this crisis. The NSA, CIA, DIA – you name the agency – doesn’t care a damn about these companies or their customers. For the agencies, maintaining data integrity is important only for internal – never external – reasons. And for this reason alone they’ll get sloppy.
Here’s the big question I don’t hear being asked: what do these NSA revelations mean for Cloud Computing?
The essence of the cloud is that our stuff is being held for us by someone else just like the kind, friendly, and ever-so-benevolent banks hold our money then refuse to loan it back to us. The rules say they’ll hold our stuff but not read it, right? Well that one is now out the window. May as well just store everything down at the NSA.
Maybe we already do.
So the recent news is bad for the cloud but it’s also bad for the intelligence agencies, themselves, because they’ve been busted. Who benefits from that? The regular military – the ones with guns and missiles – benefits, because when intelligence fails the fallback is to come out blasting.
Some generals in the Pentagon are enjoying this comeuppance immensely.
My prediction is that nothing much will come of this. No laws will be changed and probably no jobs will even be lost. If anything intelligence budgets will go up because – again like the banks – these operations are considered too big to fail.
And so we bail them out of trouble.
Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because he’s a so-called Millennial. His ethics and allegiances are not those of his father or grandfather and certainly not those of the politicians and intelligence leaders he’d love to bring down. So the old rules, old threats, and old reward structures don’t work with this guy, making him even more dangerous.
I think that’s good. In fact I think it’s the system re-regulating itself. We created Edward Snowden by disappointing him so. Our leaders, representing the old culture even as they presented themselves as representing the new, gave him no morally acceptable way to be successful in his own culture. We made him do what he is doing now. And if you think that’s bullshit I suggest you think again because this guy has been very clear about his motivation.
A mighty storm is blowing on Snowden and I don’t think we’ve seen all of it yet.
There is a great debate about the balance between security and privacy. Snowden took it upon himself to endanger all of us, so that we can have more privacy. He wanted to start a debate and he has, but as a person that has sworn an oath to not divulge our nation’s secrets it was not his role to do so. Through proxy I trust people in his position, and so I am really pissed off by his actions. How dare he compromise my safety without my permission nor due process?
Mike Page,
Since Snowden worked for Carlyle Group (through a subsidiary), he may not have sworn any oaths.
To me, the bigger scandal is the access given to private companies, in particular this rather politically connected one, than to the NSA.
The NSA is far less likely to use the information they gain for insider trading or partisan political sabotage, than Carlyle Group, which apparently has unlimited access. That part has been very underplayed by the mass media, which has been focusing on the big bad government. In this case, we have a combination of unprincipled contractors, party officials, AND semi-trustworthy agencies.
Snowden *did* swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The Armed Forces Oath of Enlistment was written with the understanding that not all threats come from the outside, that the government is not perfect, and that a soldier’s fealty is to the Constitution above all, even when ordered to violate it.
However, Snowden hasn’t been active in the military for nearly a decade. Do former soldiers still have a duty to protect the Constitution? Does that override Snowden’s duty to adhere to his current terms of employment and security clearance?
Personally, I’m glad Snowden clued us all in. But the Constitution is like the Bible in that it is subject to interpretation. Only the Supreme Court has the authority to decide what is and is not Constitutional. Perhaps it would have been better for his sake to pose a hypothetical question about the Constitutionality of the situation; he could have been a ghost writer or consultant to an author writing a fictional story who would then talk with many other people in government, getting their take on the Constitutionality of the fictional situation. Eventually the Supreme Court or some arm of the Judicial system would conduct it’s own investigation.
The existence of this surveillance program is a threat to everybody in America. We have a right to know.
You are 100% right. Freedom cannot exist without scrutiny of government actions. Without that high level of accountability, we end up with the kind of arbitrary power that the Founding Fathers feared most. With no freedom, privacy, nor prosperity left to fight for, what is the purpose of maintaining the world’s largest national defense budgets.
He likely did swear an oath as part of his job as it likely required a security clearance, so that much is believable.
However, you also have to remember that such an oath is not simply about keeping the nation’s secrets, but (and more importantly) like the Oath of Office for governors, Congressmen (state & federal), the President, law enforcement, and the Judiary it is about keeping the laws of the land as well.
So yes, if someone suspects a program is not keeping to the laws of the land, then they are 100% within their oath to report it, even to the Press if no one will listen to them. And that is what part of the Whistle Blower Act is about as well – they’re only a whistle blower if they are actually calling out an issue where the program fails to adhere to the law of the land; if it’s within the law, then they can be brought up on non-Whistle Blower chargers.
IANAL, talk to a relevant attorney for real legal advice.
You are dead wrong. It is everyone’s moral duty to question the ethics of what we are being asked to do and to continually question all forms authority. Obeying unjust laws defiles our humanity and our basic dignity and creates a breeding ground for horrific acts of violence and persecution. Saying Snowden shouldn’t have disclosed what is really going on is exactly the same as the Nazis saying that Oskar Schindler betrayed Germany by protecting Jews. Oath breaking is not the worse offense a person can commit and it does not overrule whatever we are standing up to by breaking that oath. Besides which, Snowden has taken care not to compromise national security in what he has disclosed but instead only expose the unconstitutional practices of the government. In short, he is a hero. And your attitude that you think your security has somehow been compromised is exactly the problem.
Absolutely right! That whole program really smell bad. The total lack of transparency is alarming. I’m really uncomfortable with “Top Secret” stuff anyway. Why does anything have to be “Top Secret”? We’ve all been watching too many movies.
BTW, no amount of wholesale eavesdropping makes up for sloppy decretive work. There were clues everywhere pointing to the 911 caper, but miscommunication between the myriad of government police and spy agencies keep the dots from being connected. The real truth was we have too much information and too many agencies, not too little. What’s lacking is some kind of central assimilation of the data.
Mike Page,
Well, yes, I would agree in so far as the existing system & due process works. Unfortunately, it does not work terribly well, so I cannot go very far at all in agreeing with you.
Firstly, I am not a US national. Thus disenfranchised, I have no role in the political process that governs this spying, and there exist no checks and balances to prevent abuses directed towards me.
Secondly, even if I were a US national, I could not in all seriousness rely on the control systems that have been presented so far. The oversight and regulatory mechanisms currently in place seem to be dangerously naive.
It seems to me like Snowden is calling out a lack of systemic safety in the control mechanisms that are currently in place.
In the same way that safety-critical systems often require hardware fail-safe mechanisms in case software control systems fail, we should require that the our intelligence-gathering machinery should have technical (physical, cryptographic and software) fail-safes in place to support and enforce the policies and practices that are supposed to prevent abuses.
In the modern, highly technical world, it is critical that our leaders pay attention to technical details such as these. No amount of hand-waving solves these problems. Only hard work does.
Do we think our current crop of leaders are up for a little less posturing and a little more attention-to-detail?
Mike, you are so very very wrong and misled. Snowden did not endanger us in any meaningful way. Nothing he revealed is at all actionable by any terrorist, and most of the information is already known or suspected by those in the intelligence community and other nations such as China who are portrayed as villainous to inspire our patriotism. Furthermore, the collection of this information en masse is statistically incapable of preventing terrorism because terrorism is so rare that there is still an insurmountable needle-in-a-haystack problem. A statistician recently ran some very conservative estimates showing that even if you have a method detecting terrorism with 99% accuracy, you will still have *thousands* of false positives due to the rarity of terrorists themselves. The irony is I suspect you would strongly defend Coca Cola’s liberty to pedal sugar water that leads directly to diabetes and obesity and kills thousands of times more Americans than terrorists have ever done, but yet you don’t defend the liberty of the people to know how they are being universally surveilled.
What you fail to understand is that the threat of government tyranny is much much more of a threat to freedom than any terrorist ever will be. You need to ask yourself, what is more scary, the thought of a desperate suicidal indoctrinated fundamentalist trying to blow you up, or having an unmarked van roll up behind you, a black mask put over your head, and being shipped off to a foreign country to be tortured, or imprisoned indefinitely with neither you nor your family ever knowing what happened or where you are. What about having your life destroyed because someone in power doesn’t like your politics and they can dredge up the contents of personal phone calls when you were a teenager to perform public character assassination thereby effectively blacklisting you in future society?
The founding fathers of the US understood that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s why the constitution is set up the way it is with checks and balances to prevent exactly the kind of abuse of power that is happening now. Obama and those in power always defend the apparatus that put them there, and they say “trust us”, but keep in mind the slogans and the mechanisms are the exact same used by Soviet propagandists and the Stasi surveillance state in East Germany. You think our national pride and Hollywood culture will prevent the government from abusing their power behind closed doors? You think we should just trust them to do the right thing? If so you are a fool, and you need to be shown the light. What is going is flat out unconstitutional and un-American in the truest sense of the word. Wake up!
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” —Benjamin Franklin
Gabe da Silveira, Thank you ! You hit the nail on the head. And, if we do not
correct the problem SOON. Then, this country will not be a fit place to live
for future generations.
East Germany Stazi had over 1 million informers out of a population of 12 million.
The Stazi was shocked by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The NSA too will miss the forest for the trees.
I’m with Bruce Schneier on this.
“Whistleblowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in
power. “
Snowden didn’t endanger you or risk your safety. As I said in response to a post by Jonathan Turley when all of this news first broke…
We are being ruled by fear of other. Fear of other is the tool used by governments time immemorial to get their people to comply. “Keep us safe” is the cry, and basic freedom and liberty the victim.
Ultimately it is not the protesters, the fringe groups or the terrorists that are the greatest threat to democracy and the liberty it is charged to protect. As history has shown us repeatedly, the greatest threat is the unchecked power of the state over the people, unleashed in the name of security and preservation of the state.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” – George Washington.
The IRS is being used to target and harass conservatives opposing Obama. Need I say more?
For the slow in the crowd: These tools are excused as tools against foreign enemies. The reality is the Robert Mugabe of America that is Obama licks his chops at this stuff. All he has to do is point reporters in the right direction in regards his opponents closet skeletons. He did it 2 times before he was even elected senator by getting legally sealed divorce records unsealed. He KNEW what was in those records BEFORE he spent and time or money pushing.
Get a clue people……we’re better off with no intelligence than this. It is a fatal affliction for democracy.
Intelligence tools, like guns and the IRS, can be misused. Safeguards should be employed to prevent abuse. We must keep in mind that other countries have and use similar tools so we need to be prepared from both a defensive and offensive standpoint. Perhaps we should have an arrangement where warrantless information obtained cannot be used but must be kept top secret. Leave it up to those with the appropriate top secret clearance to decide if and when to tell law enforcement to obtain legal warrants based on evidence other than the illegal wire taps. (Just like in the cop shows.)
The next massive government surveillance program and database to not be abused will be the first. The only way to win this game is to not play.
Perhaps not playing is not an option. Just like eliminating the military is not an option.
Well
Personally do I believe that Snowden is a hero there ought to receive:
1) A European medal of honour and courage
2) Asylum and citizenship in Europe
It is Bush and Obama there ought to be impeached for treason against NATO and the freedom of people in the west:
I am not amused to hear that USA via Britain have been spying upon the citizens and companies of European NATO countries in clear violation of European Data Protection laws.
I want to see credible responses from Europe in defense of our freedom against Stasi spying from foreign powers like USA.
Basically, I believe it is fair to tell USA
Impeach Obama and court martial the NSA top for the hacking of the TAT-14 cable used by European NATO countries like Britain, Germany, France, Nethlerlands, Denmark
Our freedom is not for sale
If the only way to protect our freedom is to limit the market access for US companies and instead establish European IT and communication infrastructure is that what we have to do even though I am a firm believer in free trade but our freedom rights and liberal democracy are not for sale.
Basically, I consider the actions of the Bush and Obama “yes we scan” system for being a direct attack upon the freedom of European citizens and the vital national security interests of Europe.
Basically, I consider this to be a sufficient serious issue that i consider it NATO article 5 material were the attack upon one has to be considered an attack upon all
I demand unlimited immediate EU alliance solidarity and NATO alliance solidarity in this governmental overreach attack upon the freedom and liberty of people in the west and upon the vital national security interests of Europe.
Nope, no surprise at all, except that there are people who still think privacy exists in this day and age.
Hooray for Edward Snowden!
Snowden worked for the spy machine. You don’t become a Police Officer if you have a problem arresting people.
Snowden collected his salary knowing his field. You have to be a big boy! This in’t Kansas Dorothy !
I don’t think he had a problem being part of “the spy machine”; he just believed in that whole Fourth Amendment thing, and saw the obvious conflict between that and the warrantless mass surveillance of Americans’ communications. Police should not have a problem arresting people, but if they were ordered to do something completely wrong, I hope that they wouldn’t all just follow orders.
You’ve kind of missed the point. Snowden had no problem being a “cop”, he had a problem with the “cops” doing bad things. The oath is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not protect and defend those who trash it.
Can you see no causal connection between the very concept of loyalty for sale and the destruction of the public interest?
Not necessarily. If I take a job it’s understood that I will be loyal to my employer regardless of the “public interest”. The question I would have to ask myself is whether the employer’s behavior is clearly illegal, not whether or not it is in the “public interest”. We all take advantage of the tax loopholes to which we are entitled even though it may be in the public interest to give the government even more than we are legally required to. Let’s not confuse public interest with legality.
There is no “public interest”. Only what morally vain people think we should do!
Usually “the government” is accused of being incapable of finding its ass with both hands. Now based on a sloppy PowerPoint presentation, NSA is considered a better search engine than Google, a better social graph than Facebook, and a better credit researcher than Dunn & Bradstreet. And its being bandied about that NSA has somehow gotten every shred of information from every FBI report, sheriff’s office, local hospital, middle school, IRS audit, etc. into their datacenter, because as any federal IT contractor can tell you, different agencies love handing their data to each other.
Clearly these NSA guys are the elite of the elite.
Yes, “the government” is often thought of as a bumbling, semi-incompetent big brother. But, and this is a big point, the NSA has never been considered so. I know of very few people, maybe none, who think the NSA is either. For years when activities in the FBI, CIA and other agencies were exposed and discussed, the “No Such Agency” went along completely under the radar. I wouldn’t consider this a completely impossible system, process or capability for them.
Systems that don’t support some stakeholder’s mission rot, however frivolous or craven that mission may be. Therefore it should be presumed that systems which are ongoing and maintained do suit some stakeholders as they are. It follows that an apparent failure for a system to achieve the stated mission(s) suggests the presence and maybe precedence of an ulterior mission (which often enough boils down to “asserting prestige and status at a distance”).
That the US government is incompetent is disinformation. It’s not incompetence, but indifference to the public interest. They’re stunningly competent when it comes to protecting the wealthy and their fortunes, even if that means a face-saving token settlement from time to time.
A bunch of Peeping Toms if you ask me. There is no difference between this warrantless spying and peeping in peolple’s windows in the middle of the night.
The 4th amendment of the law of the land is quite clear that government cannot violate individual privacy (“personal papers and effects”) without a court order on each individual suspect. In other words, our personal information cannot be subjected to mass, blanket searches. The only legal way to get around this law is to meet the threshold of a constitutional amendment. The public “servants” who swore to uphold the constitution and subsequently trampled all over it are the real traitors to the country and it’s historic American ethic encapsulated in the bill of rights. The real news is the government’s complete disregard for the law of the land and the complacency of the American sheeple.
“Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because he’s a so-called Millennial.”
But Steve Wozniak is not a Millennial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xOWDwKLJAfo#t=66s
For all the boomers who dropped out of college, Jeffrey Rosen describes how at the time of the Founding, Americans despised the British use of the so-called ‘general warrants’—warrants not grounded upon a sworn oath of a specific infraction by a particular individual, and thus note limited in scope and application.
“incapable of finding its ass with both hands”
Michael Hayden is incapable of finding his ass – In 2006 Trailblazer was shut down, after waisting billions of dollars. Trailblazer was chosen over a similar program named ThinThread, a less costly NSA project which had been designed with privacy protections for US citizens.
“Clearly these NSA guys are the elite of the elite.”
Snowden was not working for the not the NSA, he worked for Carlyle Group (through Booz Allen), .
“To me, the bigger scandal is the access given to private companies, in particular the Carlyle Group”
The Bin Laden and Bush families are both connected to the Carlyle Group:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlyle_Group#Documentaries
It comes down to imperfect humans, as you say. A human in the mix means there’s potential to corrupt … and there’s always a human somewhere. Even Google’s algorithms are (or were) written by humans at some point. Case in point: as Bruce Schneier has often written, staffers of the NSA and the like have been caught using their system to spy on their own wives / girlfriends, all the better to discern if they were cheating.
I guess when you get access, you assume you have special privileges.
As Bob says, of course this system monitors foreign politicians. That’s why we built it. As an analogy, the USAF has the capability to nuke Boise, Idaho … and if they didn’t have that capability, we’d drag them in front of Congress to explain why the hell not. We don’t worry about the USAF, though, because for the most part we trust them, and we believe we know how they’ll behave, and we’re content with their expected behavior.
The capability isn’t necessarily what scares everyone. It’s the intent of its users. The reason this is blowing up now is that the overall system has suffered loss of trust. It’s easy to do your legitimate job, and get away with shenanigans, when people trust you to do what you’re expected to do, and not misbehave. When trust is gone, not only do your shenanigans cause more concern, but even your legitimate work.
The NSA really should thank another massive, data-mining federal agency as the reason this is blowing up. Of course I’m referring to the IRS.
After all, if the targeting and scrutiny given to Obama’s political enemies in the past few years hadn’t come to light, PRISM would be a bit less frightening. And don’t doubt that it was targeting of political enemies. You might argue that Tea Party and Constitution-teaching outfits are engaged in politics and deserve some additional scrutiny, but then ask yourself: does the Administration demand the local UAW or SEIU chapter send then printouts of every tweet, every Facebook post, and a full roll-call and minutes of every meeting? And then wait years to approve / reject the application, while others get an answer in mere months? When a left-leaning organization asks for non-profit status, does it get raided / audited by the FBI, OSHA, BATF, and IRS repeatedly?
This absolutely happened. Look up Catherine Engelbrecht. Her business was never raided / audited by any of the above, until she registered a non-profit aiming to root out voter fraud. It seems the current administration takes any scrutiny of voter fraud very seriously (moreso than actual voter fraud itself). Within a year or two of starting that non-profit, she, her husband, and their business were raided / audited 18 times by the alphabet-soup of agencies listed above.
Can you say “chilling effects”?
Or take Eric Holder, who personally ensured the Black Panther party would not be prosecuted for voter intimidation, after their antics in Philadelphia. Would the KKK get the same protection from on high? Of course not, nor should they.
The other scandals, as Richard Fernandez has noted, showed what the current leaders in DC intend to do. PRISM shows what they’re capable of doing. That’s why this is such a massive blizzard.
I’m with Bob: it’s a good thing this scares people, and as a small way of the system regulating itself it’s good that Edward did what he did.
What frankly scares me is how many of my fellow countrymen think the IRS targeting and NSA snooping are just fine, so long as it’s their guy in the White House. It’s depressing to see college students sign a petition demanding the NSA watch all employees of Fox … because when you work for Fox News, somehow your constitutional rights no longer matter.
Howard, I think you get your info a little too much exclusively from Fauxnews. Anyway, wasn’t all this really
expanded during the Bush/Cheney Years, by the Patriot Act the Republicans rammed through Congress, after they pretty much let 9/11 happen on their watch? But I imagine you have conveniently forgotten about it, right?
I rest my case.
Did you happen to miss that Pew poll, in which the palatability of surveillance to self-identified Democrats rose 40% between 2006 and just after Snowden came out?
As another sign of the system regulating itself, I noticed an article describing how the Swedish government has banned all of its employees from using Google apps. I expect to see more of this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other countries try developing their own competing products (though they’ll probably never be anywhere near as good … remember the E.U. backed search engine that France was certain would reach parity with Google? what, you don’t remember it? exactly).
When people stop using Google (as much) and their market share is hit, that means their stock price will also take a hit (eventually, and at least a little). Thereby the market punishes Google, at least a little, for its collusion.
I like this.
The cynic in me says, this won’t stop programs like PRISM … they’ll just double-down on what they’re already doing and be even more interested in stopping whistle-blowers and preventing the public from seeing what they’re up to. Hiding is what they know how to do, and to a man with a hammer …
“A huge revelation for me in this Snowden business was in his Q&A yesterday morning with the Guardian in which he explained that the information – all the information being stored”
This would not be huge revelation for you if you read Glenn Greenwald more often. Little surprise that Snowden went to Greenwald with the material anf for the interviews. Greenwald spends more time on US foreign policy than the NSA. Here he is debating Bill Maher:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/bill-maher-muslims-islam-benghazi
Greenwald reported that a poll found that 54% of Americans believe Snowden did “a good thing”.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/edward-snowden-worst-fear-not-realised
Snowden seems like some of the other young people we’ve read about recently. Maybe like Manning or Aaron Swartz. They grew up in the USA and believed the story, and believed it with their heart and soul. And they’ve clung to that vision of this country. So, when they saw something, they said something, or did something. Their perhaps naive belief in freedom and liberty and the Bill of Rights and the whole story empowered them to speak up. I credit their bravery. I credit their patriotism, even if others don’t. Some of these kids are among the best and brightest among us. These bright kids who aren’t cynical. And we’re chewing them up. Sometimes with glee, sometimes with vile intent. Some enhance their political careers on their demonization, even their corpses in some cases. These bright kids are the canaries in the coal mine. Heaven help us.
“Goodnight stars. Goodnight moon. Goodnight spooks on iChat, peeking into my room. Goodnight PRISM. Goodnight cell. Goodnight Verizon. Goodnight, Orwell.” – Radley Balko via Michael Williamson ( https://www.facebook.com/MichaelZWilliamson )
It’s human nature for those in power to become corrupted by their power. To expect otherwise is just dumb. Likewise, it is human nature for many people to forgive the corruption of their own government while cursing the corruption of foreign governments. And if you lack courage, such as I do on occasion, it’s human nature to ignore the corruption around you and just hope that it will go away. Ha — fat chance of that.
People in the US often wondered why the people in Germany let the Nazis do their evil deeds back in WWII days. Humm, probably for the same reasons that the people in the US let the Bush Jr administration invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Two countries that never harmed the US, but had resources desired by some of the corrupt people who control the US government.
Human nature can be warm and fuzzy at times, but not always.
By collecting and storing this information Google and others have made a target too juicy for the government and big criminal organizations to ignore.
Now to find out that the government is collecting all of this info into a leaky bucket…
The world should thank Snowden for his allegiance to his country and the guts to sacrifice his well being to defend his democracy. He has taken what his elders have told him his country stands for and stood up where they have failed.
And for all of those with “nothing to hide”… I suggest you consider that your views align more closely with the evolutionary path to a dictatorship.
p.s. I too visited Snowdon as a child and was shocked to find out people died on it the very week I was there.. the narrow gauge railway to the top makes it seem quite tame.
Recall also that Snowden was the name of the dying airman in the opening scene of catch-22 with yossarian.
Yeah, Heller’s Snowden literally spilled his guts … “I’m cold.” This Snowden, just metaphorically.
sorry to change the theme, but
Bob are you happy with your new web service? for me the pages load slower than heck
When I read your post I felt I should respond just to test the speed. For the past couple of days the performance of the platform has been significantly better than most of this year. But compared to last year (and the decade before it) it is still slower since it is not “instantaneous”. All things considered, I currently can’t complain, since everything is relative.
OK you do have a point. The above post did not appear for a minute and twenty seconds after I pressed the “post comment” button. Performance is very inconsistent.
As a young boy growing up in England, not far, as the crow flies, from Snowdon, my neighbor was killed climbing the mountain. He’d climbed it at least 20 times previously, so be wary of familiarity … we take our privacy for granted, be wary of complacency.
The question of ethics and loyalties that you bring up at the end I think is an important one.
The Eisenhower era was a vastly different era. The rich were taxed at 90%, workers had bargaining power. From 1945 to 1972 GNP doubled, and each sector of society, poor, working, middle, upper middle and rich classes each saw their relative economic position double. Most everyone felt they had a stack in the establishment, and the elites of our establishment seemed to be acting in the public interest.
Since 1972, GNP is up over 150% but the median is flat, and in fact, down from 1972. We’ve had nearly 2 generations of failure in our elites to run the establishment in the public’s interest. We’ve had MCI, World Com, wars created on out right lies, in the last decade over $10 trillion dollars was shifted from the demand side/commercial side of the economy to the 0.1%. 90% of the recovery since 2008 has gone to the rich. In 2009 the stock market lost half its value. The bailout for the rich was legislated in 3 days. The bail out for the rest of the economy took 3 months and was a compromise package that was about one fifth of what it should have been. We now know what needs to be done to fix the economy of Europe and North America, yet the elites still refuse to act. Now if you are in your 20s or 50s, your lucky to have any job. The entire social contract appears to have been thrown out the window, and the elites are taking care of themselves.
Murphy’s law on politics says “Where you stand on an issue depends upon where you sit.”
Your view on Snowden*, hero or villain, depends greatly upon where you sit in relationship to the establishment and the degree to which you have benefited over the last 34 years from it’s workings. In my family, my hard working father, born in 1929, with a great mind and work ethic and temperament, but only a GED, (at least one, of his ideas receive a patent for a company he designed machinery with, also decorated in the airforce for another) made the equivalent of $250k a year at a large Midwestern brewing company. He bought a decent house, housed, clothed, fed and educated my family we went on vacations to lakes in the region. He sent me off to college, where I knew if something bad happened to me, or I got in trouble, he had enough resources to rescue me. My mother worked only when and where she wanted to – mostly to get out of the house.
None of my father’s children have half the deal he had. All are better educated, hard working, have their own particular specialities.
I think it’s pretty clear here what’s going on. After thoroughly defeating and discrediting him, the elites are doing their damnedest to resurrect Marx (try googling David Harvey Crisis in Capitalism and watch the little white board animation: it’s clear, while Marx’s ‘solution definition’ was clearly and widely wrong, his ‘problem definition’ was deeply insightful which is why he never quite seems to die).
The multitude appear to not be as gullible this time as to gravitate to a leader who can then be attacked, thus thwarting the movement. Their reaction is mostly amorphous, but it’s slowly growing. I don’t think the elite fully realize this. It’s like watching events in Turkey right now. People are dissatisfied. As Bob says, Snowden isn’t an idiot. In a better economy he’d had found a better job outside the NSA. With limited opportunities, that’s where he ended up. Oops.
He’s blown the cover off a part of the establishment. Most people are expecting to find an establishment that is not working in the public’s best interests. Watching the establishments reaction then, is most interesting. Then again, watching the public’s reaction is most interesting too. At least half think he’s a whistle-blowing hero.
* There’s a caveat on the Murphy’s Law thing. There are people who are psychologically adherent to authoritarian hierarchical structures, or what you might call the “law and order” type. These are people who want to maintain the structure and it’s elites despite or whether or not they are benefiting from their actions – this is a kind of derivative, I assume, of Stockholm syndrome – for psychological reasons they need the hierarchy there, the authorities there, and will reacting against anything that threatens the structure or its occupants.
Follow up on Marx:
A Russian coworker confirmed to me a Russian joke, I think I heard here first – the joke in Russia says: “Everything Marx told us about Communism turned out to be a lie. Unfortunately, everything he told us about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”
TimK,
The problem isn’t Communism or Capitalism. The problem is human nature and self-interest. If your despair is in my self-interest, run if you see me coming.
Part of the self-interest problem is also that too many choose immediate self-interest over long-term self interest. Short term self-interest is more frequently a zero-sum game. Growing the game so that everybody wins is almost always a long-term strategy that gets ignored by those with the power to satisfy their immediate self-interest.
Bruce,
I totally agree.
What if a broad underclass is part of their long-term in-group interest? Seven billion of us can’t all live like suburban WASPs, never mind Donald Trump.
Jonathan,
I don’t think that anyone knows what the long-term future will hold for the human race or the planet itself. We may run out of the resources needed to sustain the current population of the world. On the other hand, if the secret technology (that some people believe is being held by the super elites) actually exists and is released, many of our current problems may be solved.
As for everyone being able to live the good life, that may not be possible or even desirable. Many people may come to realize that the “good life” really isn’t very rewarding. Perhaps enjoying a simple life with everyday pleasures may begin to appeal to some people. Unfortunately, many people in Western countries have been seduced by baubles and silly pleasures. Perhaps if all the troubles and chaos of our affluent lifestyles are closely examined, it may not be envied as much by the disadvantaged people.
As for those rich and powerful people who have become corrupted, who cares what happens to them. Just do what you can to avoid their evil schemes. As I said, run if you see them coming.
In regard to limits:
Per Marx, via David Harvey: “Capitalism does not abide limits.”
David Harvey continues: “It turns them into barriers and either circumvents or transcends them.”
The Marxist see that as a bug. But it could easily be regarded as a feature (or in the final analysis, just a characteristic).
Again, if you have 10 spare minutes, google “David Harvey Crisis in Capitallism” and enjoy the white board animation to his lecture. Pro-Marx, anti-Marx, or indifferent, it is quite an enjoyable lecture by an academic. Good Marxist academics are anachronistic and rare and in light of all our history enjoyable to watch and listen to.
Capitalism was faced with a limitation of land and space on Manhattan island. Faced with that limitation, capitalism sent that city vertical. Faced with limitations on resources, capitalism then, is our best chance to transcend them, perhaps ultimately projecting mankind off of the planet.
In regard to this characteristic, it also means that regulating Capitalism is quite difficult and we need to be careful and diligent.
Back to Bob … great analogy comparing cloud storage to banks. That should give everyone who uses iCloud, Amazon, Mozy, Carbonite, Dropbox, SkyDrive, GDrive, et al, pause. And serve as a reminder that “cloud storage” is simply storage on somebody else’s hard drive.
I’ve read/heard so many comments like, “they shouldn’t be tracking data for ordinary citizens,” as if there’s a metadata field set to either “ordinary” or “suspicious.” You can’t determine suspicious activity without seeing it in the big-picture context of its relations to the rest of the “ordinary” dataset.
The NSA analyzes our phone and data transactions to look for patterns of behavior that might fall outside of normal/ordinary. Just like the IRS analyzes tax returns to look for patterns that might flag an audit or whatever they call it now. That doesn’t mean the IRS is “surveilling ordinary taxpayers” and it doesn’t mean the NSA is “surveilling ordinary phone users.”
Reminds me of the talking points of Obama and Mike Rogers:
GOP Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA “is not listening to Americans’ phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.”
Listening every ordinary phone user is inefficient. The NSA is not listening to the phone calls of every American, but is Recording all American phone calls – creating a hay stack.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
Michael Hayden and the NSA also Lie With Numbers – they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order – a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered Every phone call made by Every customer. Targeting any one customer without a warrant is against the secret law – but targeting everyone is OK.
https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers/
Google IBM and the Holocaust
They have the haystack of recorded calls and the Verizon and other CDRs can be used to perform the social network analysis to decide what calls in the stack to listen to. Put in a phone number of a known (suspect, celebrity, politician) and get a list of the closest associate numbers and see what those have to say. Lather rinse and repeat until you reach diminishing returns.
IN other words, basically what Facebook does with their social networks, but without that inconvenient informed consent part, even if it’s just a click-through “terms of service” in FB’s case.
It would seem that Mr. Snowden is yet another disillusioned liberal acolyte of The Great and Wonderous Obama. He’s been allowed to peek behind the curtain and has seen that politician’s lie, even those so-called liberals that claim to be all about reversing the march on the road towards totalitarianism by big bad meanie conservatives. That this self-centered little snot even made it into government employ, let alone at CIA and NSA (although his roles are grossly overstated and self-aggrandized) is but a symptom of the dysfunction that permeates our government.
I strongly suspect that the government is not talking about this much now in order to let the story run its’ course in the news cycle and at some point Mr. Snowden will be quietly picked up and renditioned to some place like Gitmo (although NOT Gitmo) and then eventually charged with some minor infraction short of treason, which is terribly difficult to actually prove. Enough to dismiss him from government service, and have a felony on his record, and a year or so in ClubFed somewhere.
Unless he actually discloses some of the information he claims he has to a foreign power, that is. That actually would be treason. In that case, he will at some point feel a sting on the back of his neck, and the lights will go out permanently.
Right now, Mr. Snowden thinks he is some kind of just crusader, but he has at least the potential of becoming a marginally useful puppet of those who do what they can to diminish the stature of the US in the eyes of the world (and those of us here). He may or may not already be under the control of the PLA. Unless he voluntarily turns himself in to the US Embassy he is a man without a country (just like in all the ‘graphic novels’ he used to read) and his life is essentially over. This is no great man; he doesn’t even have the tenuous ‘moral authority’ of Julian Assange. He is another little corporal who should have been weeded out long ago.
The spy game is a real thing. We don’t live in never never land. Be an adult, don’t be employed ( take a salary ) in the spy business and then because you disagree with the tactics that somehow spying is a bad thing.
“Policing is a real thing. We don’t live in never never land. Be an adult, don’t be employed ( take a salary ) in the police and then because you disagree with the tactics that somehow policing is a bad thing.”
Make any more sense?
Spying vs Policing. Big difference.
The best comparison is between Stop & Frisk and NSA surveillance. Under Stop & Frisk, cops patrol high-crime areas and detain and search individuals who meet minimal suspicion standards. Minimal is not none. The visible presence of the police is often a sufficient deterrent. Records of Stop & Frisk cannot be used for personal identification.
The NSA can scan records which are minimally suspicious, too. But to do that, they must first collect information on everybody, including people who meet no standard of suspicion. A person frisked on the street knows what has happened to him. The citizen whose records are pored over remains ignorant. The former can complain of abuse, the latter cannot. This is why there are no complaints of harassment.
Revealingly, the government does not claim electronic snooping does deters, only that it discovers. Perhaps people would feel better were they to learn the spying programs have uncovered innumerable foreign spies and stopped countless attacks. The government is understandably reticent to admit these successes, assuming they exist, fearing its enemies will backward engineer its methods and thus countervail them.
[…] SNOWDEN and the NSA reflect a millennial climate change … […]
“government is understandably reticent to admit these successes”
We’ve seen them brag about some successes – but NSA Disruption of Stock Exchange Bomb Plot is Disputed:
https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-stock-exchange/
“According to court records, the plot failed, not because the authorities broke it up, but because the alleged attackers decided against it.”
Some of these successes are suspect. Jeremy Scahill wrote a book called The Terror Factory where he describes pseudo plots by pseudo gangs -Cointelpro style.
One thing I find particularly interesting about this spying affair is that pretty much all the politicians of the Right, who decry “Big Government”, are lining up to support this surveillance program. I’m not saying the Democrats have nothing to answer for, but the Republicans are flat out hypocrites. They should be going nuts over this. They go on about death panels for public healthcare but the government spying on everyone doesn’t register as Big Brother at all.
Government “spying” is part of national defense…the main reason we have a federal government in the first place. Of course, it must not be abused. Conservatives consider mandatory health care an excuse for more wealth distribution, higher taxes, and government bureaucracy. Let’s not confuse opinions on specific issues with hypocrisy.
I thought conservatives were the first to invent, and then implement, mandatory health care.
But then, I think you are really talking about mandatory health insurance, right? (I don’t mean that rhetorically, I mean that seriously, because you could be talking about something other than insurance)
Ironically, all insurance is a form of socialism – and wealth redistribution. I buy car insurance, you have an accident, some of my money goes to pay to fix your car.
Now, on the other hand, if you meant health care, if some one is in an accident, an ambulance shows up, asks do you want health care, he could say no (for a variety of reasons, and if he is knocked out, lets say he has a dog tag on him saying he doesn’t want health care), and then we just let him die in the street. Then I guess we still have to talk about how to pay to remove that guys body from the street because it’s blocking traffic. Perhaps the death benefit in social security, which is an insurance policy, would cover that removal. Currently the ambulance takes the guy to the emergency room an he gets health care, and we figure out how to pay for it later. Which means hospitals over charge for aspirin to people who do have health insurance. The insurance companies hate getting hit up like that, so perhaps they had something to do with the invention of mandatory insurance. I don’t know that for a fact, but it sounds reasonable.
The principle of conservatism, relies on the free market to set the cost of stuff. That implies that nothing is mandatory. Of course individual politicians will listen to the voters when it comes to what is in the public interest, and the extent to which that public interest will be financed with mandatory taxes.
Take a look at this Russ Tice video might change your mind. It did mine when I looked and saw Cryptome posted some stuff that obviously came from Snowden including one caled “White House spying” manual.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130619/09064523528/germanys-spies-have-nsa-envy-working-their-own-comprehensive-snooping-system.shtml
Snowden and the three wise NSA whistleblowers:
https://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-210613.html
Sorry I never bought into any of this idea that setting on a globalized world is sustainable. We have banks, corporations and governments running amok —-. Now our individual country’s laws no longer can be applied especially in lieu of layered anti-sovereignty bilateral trade agreements. So we are left under (if you will) a menacing global set of predators that have to be forced through mass protests and embarrassing ‘I know what your doing’ just to remind them that there can be limits. I am beginning to believe that it will take a back turning stand financially before these particular out of control “feds” doing bad for those who think they are the only ones in charge—are made to see that no one really profits from shorting manufactured chaos.
Hey, defenders of the government abuse and spying on its citizens. When you wake up in a cell because you said something “they” don’t like, remember to smile in the mirror and thank the only one responsible for saying and doing nothing. Oh, I almost forgot … Fuck you. Damn, I always violate those darn rules about what you can and can’t say.
Shackle me, I guess. Count me as a person from the generation before Snowden that wished he was from Snowden’s gen against the machine. I hope one day that someone won’t be reading this back to me from a “Black site” in the Indian ocean.
You people … lambs to their own slaughter. You are no more a citizen of a country any more than a leader of a country is your “countryman.” He has as much in common, and therefore incentive to assist you, as a lion has with a zebra. He is a predator and you … are meat.
S
While I definitely don’t work for the federal gov’t, I do work for a state gov’t, one of which uses a very large national contractor company to oversee servers, desktops, security, etc. and *many* within the company as well have quite a large amount of access. I’m not really surprised at all, especially with Cringely’s comment about Snowden saying “all the information being stored – is generally available to analysts who are trusted not to read the bits they aren’t supposed to see” … no doubt. Unless restrictions were actually built into the systems the analysts are using, why wouldn’t they be able to have such high levels of access?
Still, I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a system monitoring access to the information…
“…Still, I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a system monitoring access to the information…” I guess the NSA hasn’t figured out how to use passwords. Oh well, thank goodness we don’t get the government we pay for. Maybe they should consult John MacAfee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bKgf5PaBzyg#at=29
https://www.pcworld.com/article/16331/article.html
It seems like every once in a while a guy like Snowden reminds us of this. We get out hackles up, grouse about it, then go back to biz as usual. The more things change…
oops … meant “our” not “out.” Damn typnos…
Big Government Data isn’t new or only newly revealed by Snowden. This link is almost a year old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE
Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras made this video of William Binney.
Laura Poitras also made the video of Snowden, in which he introduced himself to the public and his first point of contact for the NSA disclosures.
“Snowden himself is I think the most interesting part of this because he’s a so-called Millennial. His ethics and allegiances are not those of his father or grandfather”
William Binney is also, an interesting character. He shares ethics and allegiances (constitution?) with Snowden, but he is no Millennial – he could be his grandfather. The New rules, New threats, and New reward structures don’t work with Binney. He completed high school, and a BSc in math from the Pen State.
As a highly placed NSA intelligence official, Binney was furious that the NSA hadn’t uncovered the 9/11 plot…
In this Surveillance Teach-In, Laura Poitras, William Binney and Jacob Appelbaum present practical commentary on living in our Panopticon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A
“This link is almost a year old.”
Snowden saw that Journalist Laura Poitras NYT’s piece on Bill Binney – that is how she got the scoop.
With 3 decades with the NSA, Bill Binney can describe the corporate frenzy that happens there – This link is also a year old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dxnp2Sz59p8
UK — USA Spy arangements are recyprical USA spies on UK and then gives the info to UK and UK spies on USA and then gives the info to USA that way both deny everthing.
But with phones its different.
The problem of spying is you have to know what you have gotten.
The USA failed to understand 9/11 even when the flying schools told them months before.
Total spying is just perverts looking at the the lives of all just for a thrill as J Edgar did of the rich and powerfull and Ustachi did in DRG.
I agree with Bob. It isn’t over yet, and the tattle-tale hasn’t told all his tales, either. His biggest problem at the moment is the encrypted email server he used is no longer active. Surprise! As for spying we had a few years practice even before the Boston Tea Party.
If you want to keep your critical information private, create your own Cloud off line and keep it there. A 1T external drive will hold a lifetime of information quite safely and securely when it is locked in a vault and you have the only key..
3-letter agencies have a big personnel problem headed their way. If you facebook, or fileshare, or use flickr, or do any of the things millenials do, you won’t pass the security background check. And if a millenial does pass it and gets hired, he will be expected to be loyal to his employer and follow the rules. Patriotism has been the norm in our society, but that’s not gonna work anymore. These concepts are alien to millenials. So who will work for these agencies in the future. Snowden is a proto-typical-millenial. People like him are the future.