Comment by sunaookami
3 days ago
This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files, should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my country that they literally said that "spying between friends is a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-pa...
Hacker News would be better named Tech Industry Professional News. Most people here are very invested in corporations and government organizations, are very well paid for being so, and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.
> and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.
Couldn't agree more, but not for the reason you think
> The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.[13]
Sorry, couldn't help myself
Most people here are very invested in corporations and believe they should (and do) supercede governments, nation states and all other organizations globally.
My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.
This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=5850590
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i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?
unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?
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Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.
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"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included. Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
Too radical is in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the most intelligent people I know, people who rather carefully analyze their own beliefs, tend to have at least a few things that they are extremely outside the Overton window on. It's not particularly hard to see why: if you apply even a surface-level analysis of the world around you, a lot of stuff is "we all believe X because we've always done X that way".
On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.
What's the phrase? Think about how stupid the average person is, and then remember that half of everyone is stupider than that.
>Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
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That was before he became (or probably always was) a part of russian disinformation campaign. So everything he released became suspect.
"It's a russian disinformation campaign" must be one of the lamest accusations that one can throw around. Don't agree with anyone? Just say that they are russian bots!
Or was forced to to receive asylum.
I'm sympathetic to snowden and think he should just be pardoned, but in retrospect was this actually huge news? Other than reaffirming that telcos were a weak link and that we should encrypt everything, what was a major revelation?
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
Yes
One cannot just release whatever one wants, and some of the docs should not have been released.
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
I find it very strange that so many people are more exercised by the small crime of Snowden releasing this information than by the large crime of the federal government spying on us all.
It's not strange, it's purposeful. It's the same logic as "well George Floyd had a counterfeit 20!"
It's an extremely effective propaganda technique whereby you discredit the person(s) who were affected by injustice, while simultaneously shifting the narrative away from said injustice. It preys on the human minds simple morality reasoning skills - bad people don't do good things, and good people don't do bad things.
Of course, that's not how it works, and it's both. George Floyd maybe did counterfeit a twenty, and that's illegal. But is the punishment for that public execution? What motivation do people have to bring that up? No good motivations, in my mind.
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Snowden's documents revealed that the federal government wasn't "spying on us all," as had been feared but was in fact paring down domestic data collection and had only one illegal program left (phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for "spying") that was pared down and then shut down soon after. They did reveal a lot of Chinese targets, which Snowden unsuccessful used to try to parlay into Hong Kong asylum.
As the other commenter said, the crimes the NSA did/still does far outweight any "crimes" Snowden did. And whistleblowing is by definition illegal since you have to release confidential files. That's why functioning countries should have laws protecting whistleblowers.
Whistle-blowing is not illegal (in the US) that's what the laws are there for, though obviously it's dicey and depends on media portrayal, and those laws could stand to be reinforced.
The Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison scandal) whistle-blower was protected by the system even if some people were very upset.