> Because of national-security concerns, they couldn’t take work home, or talk with anyone on the outside about what they did all day.
I wonder if that would be an advantage. You are a clear separation between work and life. No one is allowed to call or message you at home about work when you are out of the office.
about https://wikileaks.org/ "the site had released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee which had been stolen by hackers working on behalf of the Kremlin"
is this true? i don't think there has never been a definitive evidence or proof about this. just "journalistic evidence" (= news outlets repeating the same info without any real evidence).
There has never been any evidence released, definitive or otherwise. The assertions have always been along the lines of, "we know Russia is capable of doing this and we know Russia would like to do this therefore Russia did this".
It’s been said in various news outlets over and over again that Dutch Intelligence watched them carry out the DNR hack. Of course they aren’t going to release actual evidence. The info was released to the press much later presumably after the Dutch hack was no longer useful.
>It’s been said in various news outlets over and over again
Try a little thought experiment: substitute "China" for "USA" and ask yourself, would you believe claims by Chinese espionage agency official, repeated by numerous Chinese outlets? Even if he wasn't known for committing crimes, like James Clapper is?
>Of course they aren’t going to release actual evidence. The info was released to the press much later presumably after the Dutch hack was no longer useful.
No, the "evidence" was never released. If I'm mistaken, I'd be grateful if you provided a link. If you make an assertion and claim you have secret evidence that you can't show it is exactly the same as making as assertion with no evidence.
It was released in a “talking indictment” of some GRU hackers.
You’d very rarely want to release this as it would compromise sources and methods. Due to the extreme public interest we do actually know the info came from the Dutch intelligence agency, who among other things were tapping the GRU’s security cameras.
This is a complicated story that's been made murkier by politics, I'm honestly not sure where the best starting place is. Marcy Wheeler is has been researching and documenting a whole cloud of related stories. These two are probably no worse than others as starting points.
I do not know why it is, but the second anyone uses quotation marks like this, my trust in what they're saying instantly goes down by an order of magnitude
I've realised why it is, and it's because they're disowning the responsibility of what they're saying. the second you state a concept in quotes, it's as if it's not your concept and you do not have to back it up
You may recall Clapper from his previous film, titled "I perjured myself before Congress and lied to the American public, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that damn Snowden kid." So take anything he says with an entire truckload of salt.
Wikileaks has always claimed that the emails were leaked to them by someone inside the DNC, not by hackers, Russian or otherwise. The claims to the contrary have essentially all come from sources related to US intelligence services, and the publicly available evidence amounts to "trust us, we're the experts".
It's not surprising that the cause of the leaks was petty and personal. "Deep Throat" Mark Felt's reason for exposing Nixon seems to be that he was upset he didn't get the director job, a similarly petty reason.
Ideological cases like Ellsberg, Snowden, and Manning are the exception.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they each had their ‘petty’ reasons as well. You have to lose faith in the people around you and the system at large before you feel you can go rogue. I personally burned a pretty significant relationship and my career in the process when the Trump military trans ban came through. I had by that point been hit with many petty injustices and indignities, but it was ban that finally brought me over the edge.
Looking back at everything that transpired with Snowden boggles the mind. I still have no idea if he's an adversarial plant by some government (meant to sow distrust, etc) or if he was genuine from the get-go. It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things, and the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder.
I wonder if the Ukraine war has affected Snowden with all the sanctions? An America, exiled in Russia who has a job and works. Is he paid in Rubles? Is life immensely more difficult for him now than it was 6 months ago? Curious.
I read an article just today - sorry, forgot which one, and too many in my history to find - reporting about foreigners still in Russia, who refuse to leave.
They say there is a lot less variety in stores, but life is really quite normal. Except, everybody really makes sure what to say (and what not), especially to strangers. They report difficulties - or impossibilities - with money transfers.
I have a friend with decades of business ties to Russia, he and his (Russian) wife live in Germany but he has a residency-type visa (whatever it's called) for Russia and even after the war flew there several times, via Turkey. There still are quite a few businesses present, smaller ones I think. I fully support Ukraine, but personally I'm content with those kinds of contacts remaining.
They - several interviewed people independently - reported that they did not experience any problems from normal Russian people or from the authorities but where treated normally.
I think if Snowden just removes himself from public view and does not talk about politics and the... special operation, he'll be just fine, as will all the other foreigners.
Note that "Moscow Times" is not aligned with the Russian government, and is registered in Russia as "foreign agent"- Please don't let the name deceive you. As you can see from their articles, they freely report on the war and the impact of the sanctions and other stuff. There Russian language website has even more detailed articles about Russian internal things, quite unfiltered (Google Chrome can auto-translate, if necessary).
> None of the Westerners in Russia interviewed by The Moscow Times said they had feared for their physical safety since the start of the war. Nor did they report any instances of hostility from authorities or ordinary Russians.
> But the military campaign has undoubtedly cast a cloud over their relationships with others, making them more cautious when voicing opinions.
From what I understand, and I'm not sure if it's propaganda or not, but the ruble dropped and then bounced back. The only Russians affected by the embargoes are the expats. They have to exchange rubles for dollars but can't. Even NATO members are still buying Russian oil and gas. Cutting it off completely would destabilize their own economies.
Understandably, the Russian authorities blamed the West for the drop in the ruble exchange rate, and depreciation for inflation. At the same time, they reacted by enforcing capital controls, restricting convertibility, offering more rubles to support bank liquidity and raising interest rates on ruble deposits.
Shortly afterward, they also announced that in the future Moscow would honor its euro- and dollar- denominated debts, but would ask “hostile countries” to pay for their energy imports in rubles. Some dubbed this policy the “ruble clause.”
The authorities can now boast that the ruble has stabilized. By the beginning of April, one euro bought 85 rubles, marking a slightly stronger exchange rate than before the war began. Western operators are perhaps not overly interested in Russian monetary policy. But what about the ruble clause? Is it little more than a flash in the pan with little practical relevance, or should we take it more seriously?
It doesn't mean much. If I remember it right, back in USSR time, the ruble rate was about 1.6 for a dollar. Yet people couldn't buy toilet paper whenever they needed it. There was a severe deficit of pretty much everything. It's not going to be like in the 90s - the economy is very different, but sugar shortages just three-four weeks into the war is not a good sign. It will get tough for Russians, which is not beneficial to anyone - not for them, nor for Europeans, Americans, or Chinese.
Sugar isn't a good indicator of much. Russia basically got their sugar from the country they just invaded. And Ukraine is just in a shitty strategic location. No one really cared about them until it became blindingly obvious they have a strategic location important to Russia. The sugar problem will resolve itself in a few months. The oil-based energy problem (where Russia holds the advantage) is going to take years to untangle.
I agree, sugar perhaps is not a good indicator. There wasn't an actual shortage of sugar, it was a short-lived market panic. But, still, many other sectors of the Russian economy are already suffering - automakers, air travel & cargo are good examples. Some big tech companies like Cisco have entirely left the market, which is neither good for Russians nor Cisco. They already come $200M short in their quarterly. The layoffs didn't follow only because Cisco already slashed thousands of jobs last year due to the pandemic.
Yes, there will be a lot of money in hard currency from oil and gas, but without access to high-tech & parts (which not many countries would sell to Russia), it's gonna pull the entire country into stagnation.
Ruble "bounced back", because it's no longer exchangeable, its exchange rate is fictional now. Russians can't withdraw more than $10k per year, and 80% of any USD income must be deposited within a week or so.
From what I understand, and this definitely isn't propaganda the reality is that people are much happier to have 'hard' currency than rubles and a lot of hard currency is coming into Russia in physical form via for instance Turkey but also other countries.
It is, and it's how media manufactures consent for punishing/outing whistleblowers who should be protected from any type of harassment.
We saw something similar recently with the leak of the SCOTUS Roe v Wade opinion. There was a huge push to move the discussion from how controversial the opinion was & what the fallout would be towards "leaks are bad & we have to find who did this".
>It is, and it's how media manufactures consent for punishing/outing whistleblowers who should be protected from any type of harassment.
Agreed; but…
In your example, it’s both. In that case, it’s a completely legal and expected part of the process for the justices to decide things, even if it’s things you don’t like.
In the case of Snowden or Manning or others, they were leaking something that the government says it does not do, should not do, and expressly illegal things.
So it’s not a great example. While we likely agree on abortion; Roe has always been on “shakey legal ground” (RBG’s words) and the 7 justices that decided it could not agree if it was because of the 9th or 14th amendments, and offered no explanation how one or both of these superseded the 10th in this scenario. If you haven’t, read the full opinion, do, it gives insight into what is going on… legally anyhow.
So as to your example, it wasn’t a whistleblower or shooting the messenger to find the scotus leaker - it’s literally protecting the sanctity of that institution’s process.
If you can’t imagine a scenario you would be upset a decision you agreed with was leaked in order to bully justices or influence a coming election, you aren’t thinking hard enough.
From what he reportedly took and what's been released, I'm still so confused.
It was a hot mess in the media for a few months about how the reporters he fed stuff to was going to release it all. Then, once the story died down, you didn't hear anything and there were no more releases. At least none that were so groundbreaking, they hit the media. You could say the media was culpable and simply ignored subsequent releases though.
Is there somewhere you can go to see what's been released? I'm still under the impression the bulk of what he said he had has yet to be released.
>Is there somewhere you can go to see what's been released? I'm still under the impression the bulk of what he said he had has yet to be released
Most of what he took he gave to reporters so it wouldn't be released, that's why he didn't release everything online.
The several organizations he gave information to continued to go through it for a couple of years, periodically releasing stories based on the disclosure. They all slowly stopped funding going through the documents, until only the Intercept was left.
They continued with a limited staff until 2019, and it's end is one of the reasons both Poitras and Greenwald have left the organization.
I don't know. If a ton of news came out about shady stuff happening at the Coca-Cola company, I'd want to know if it was all coming from corporate espionage paid for by Pepsi.
We assume an impartial news organization will investigate Coke and Pepsi equally, so if the org comes out with a bunch of stuff about Coke acting badly, we figure that Coke really is bad, otherwise the org would have gone after Pepsi too, or both. On the other hand if a less scrupulous news org one day receives a mysterious package with a ton of bad stuff about Coke and just verifies and prints it, then Pepsi could be good or bad or anything, but most people will think they're good because of all the bad stuff only coming out about Coke.
I don't follow that line of reasoning. The NSA massively invading the privacy of Americans, often without disclosure, has nothing to do with a Pepsi vs Coke scenario.
This isn't a competition between two corporations, this is about democracy and people's rights. What is this other side you would like to see presented more "impartially"?
PS: [a completely fictional scenario] if a leak disclosed that Coca-Cola was secretly implanting mind-controlling substances via their soft drinks, and that these substances made every consumer broadcast their most intimate thoughts to Coke marketing execs, you should publish this and damn Coke. Who cares about what Pepsi is doing? Their turn will come.
The context of this thread is democracy and the rights of Americans.
I'm not even sure what "selectively attack an enemy" means in this context. What Snowden disclosed was unequivocally bad, who cares what his motives were? We are not comparing soft drinks.
> The context of this thread is democracy and the rights of Americans.
That is part of the context. It might be one person's entire notion of the context. However, different people, all reasonable, may have different contexts.
Not realizing or recognizing this can contribute to thinking someone else is "off topic". But on what basis can one person claim that someone else is not on topic?
In these comments, myself (and others too) include information (and disinformation) tactics as part of the context here too.
I remember the trend on HN back when the Snowden leaks occurred. It wasn't palatable back then to express your views -- shooting the messenger, casting doubts on his motivations -- and most people were rightly appalled by the spying going on on Americans.
Thinking differently is a dangerous trend against whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are a good thing.
Unequivocally good. Yes, I used that word you dislike.
> -- shooting the messenger, casting doubts on his motivations -- and most people were rightly appalled by the spying going on on Americans.
Yes, shooting the messenger and casting doubts on his motivations were (and are) tactics used when a message reflects poorly on someone or some thing.
For what it is worth, in my comments around here, I'm not using these tactics as a way to deflect criticism away from institutions that Snowden criticizes. There was a huge breach of public trust in the NSA.
At the same time, it is interesting and important to understand Snowden's motivations.
> I'm not even sure what "selectively attack an enemy" means in this context.
It sounds like you are having cognitive dissonance. It seems to me that you have fixated on your definition of the context. In so doing, other perspectives aren't making sense to you. Having more flexibility might help you understand.
I interpret you as saying the act of disclosing this information was "unequivocally bad". Fair?
If so, no.
From the Apple dictionary, unequivocal means "leaving no doubt; unambiguous".
Please don't take this comment as "for" or "against" Snowden. Rather, please interpret this comment as "for" critical thinking and clear writing.
Students of philosophy and ethics, as well as many thoughtful people, know that weighing right and wrong is hardly simple. There are many schools of thought. Whatever one's views might be, it is clear that different people have different views of the ethics of Snowden's leaks.
For example, a utilitarian style philosophy could easily argue that Snowden's leaks resulted in more benefit than harm.
In an ideal world voters would rationally consider leaks, blame would be allocated appropriately, and the importance of the whole situation would be weighed against other concerns.
In the real world voters are at the mercy of cognitive and other biases, tend to blame the current government no matter what, and a leak's importance depends as much on media attention and trivialities like how close the leak is to an election as it depends on actual merit.
So, even true leaks can be effective tools to remove a government you don't like.
Suppose some government opposes the U.S. in some important way. That government then gets voted out at the next election due to a leak. Would you care if that leak came from a CIA mole? I would. I doubt the CIA would investigate and reveal foreign corruption or illegal overreach purely out of the goodness of its heart.
I seem to remember the Snowden leaks generated backlash against the NSA and the "deep state", and blame was not assigned along partisan lines. That is, it was believed this was a common thread that ran across all governments, somewhat but not entirely under their control.
People across the political spectrum got upset at the government. I remember being swept up at the time in the general nerd rage against the NSA. I particularly remember watching left-wing media about it from creators that were, around that time, partly sponsored by Russia's propaganda arm RT, though whether RT specifically sponsored pro-Snowden content from those creators I don't know.
However the actual political results were mostly favorable to Republicans. Trump himself popularized the term "deep state" and criticizing it was a key part of his administration's PR.
Russia benefited, not only by getting Republicans in power, but also by embarrassing and casting doubt on U.S. intelligence, a year before Russia's invasion of Crimea. Now in the current Ukraine war it's obvious how vital NATO intelligence is to resisting Russian aggression.
I don't think much actually changed at the NSA or any other agency. Trump didn't actually care about the ethics, he just thought it was some huge, personal injustice that he couldn't command everyone in the executive branch the way he could in his businesses. He didn't even pardon Snowden.
So overall the only changes were political and it all worked out great for Russia. Maybe Russia didn't plan it but they sure benefited from it, with the public and the media doing the heavy lifting. Something to keep in mind the next time some theoretically nonpartisan government scandal appears.
> So, even true leaks can be effective tools to remove a government you don't like.
Yes, and it doesn't have to be that dramatic either. Even relatively small shifts in public opinion can matter when it comes to specific areas and/or legislation and/or funding.
You can say only true things but still mislead by selectively releasing information. That's why it is essential to try and understand the motivations behind the leaked information.
Yes. On the other hand, the NSA illegally spying on Americans is bad. You don't need to know the motivations, it's just bad. You cannot build a robust democracy on top of such a shaky foundation.
They can claim "Snowden was a KGB mole!" but if they hadn't been doing such nasty things, there wouldn't have been something so damaging for the mole (or a disgruntled ex employee, whatever) to disclose. There will always be dirty laundry to disclose of course -- nobody is 100% clean -- but this was major.
I can't get past the question about the conditions under which the disclosures became deemed necessary. Everything else definitely never ought to be clear or you have a problem with arbitrary decision making agency out of hand.
>> I can't get past the question about the conditions under which the disclosures became deemed necessary. Everything else definitely never ought to be clear or you have a problem with arbitrary decision making agency out of hand.
> I honestly don't understand your reply, could you reword it please? Thanks.
I also find it confusing.
Here's my understanding: the commenter is asking something akin to this question: Why did Snowden's deem his disclosures to be necessary? Based on my understanding of Snowden, he deemed his disclosures necessary because he views these NSA programs as unjust and/or undemocratic and would continue (and probably get worse) if not revealed.
>> Everything else definitely never ought to be clear or you have a problem with arbitrary decision making agency out of hand.
I'm unclear on what this sentence as a whole means. First, I wonder if "never ought" was a typo and the commenter meant just "ought". Second, I'd guess that "arbitrary decision making agency out of hand" probably was meant to be "arbitrary agency decision making out of hand", suggesting that the NSA was overstepping its bounds.
>>> Was what [Snowden] disclosed true or not? In the end, that's all that matters.
>> Incorrect. One person -- or one group -- or one ideology -- doesn't get to decide all that matters for everyone.
> Your reply is worded so generally and vaguely I don't even understand what you mean.
I know the feeling. I've struggled to understand what you write as well.
Yes, I was making a general point. When you wrote "In the end, that's all that matters." you are claiming that the truth (or lack thereof) of what Snowden said is all that matters. This is an overly simplistic and narrow view. Such a view disregards the rest of the situation, including ethics, impacts over different time scales, disinformation, and geopolitics.
> It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things,
What are you a sock puppet? Everyone knows about deniable ops in the Special Forces world, assassinations are not something new, what makes you think Edward Snowden isnt telling the truth?
Personally I dont think he's exposed that much, but then he may not have been in the thick end of it.
Just read some of the stuff published by ex-military, and if you were a kid growing up around those sort of people, you probably got to hear about it.
The vast majority of the population, less than 1% are like Mother Theresa, which means _everyone_ _has_ _secrets_ and today, science can extract those secrets against your will without you even knowing.
> the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder
Even journalists & news organisations including state broadcasters dont realise, they are giving away secrets at the subconscious level. There will come a point when they want to shut up shop because of what they are implicated in.
AI is an arm's race that has no boundaries, and the winner takes it all!
>> It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things,
> What are you a sock puppet?
In case you haven't seen the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
In addition to that, saying "It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things" is hardly a convincing argument that an account is a sock puppet, which I'm defining as "A pseudonymous online identity adopted to further the user's real-life interests or to agree with sentiments the user has already expressed online." (per Wordnik)
Given that there is massive interest in getting people to believe that he is an adversarial plant, I would adjust your biases in the opposite direction to offset.
I have seen no credible evidence that he didn't do this for ideological reasons.
If Snowden has an ideology it is 'to do what's right by his personal ethics', I don't see any East vs West or other usual suspects like claim to a pre-packaged position, from what I've read about him and from him he genuinely wanted to make a stand for a public that does not care about their privacy being destroyed.
Too bad, really, he took one for the team and we failed to support him.
If he were an adversarial plant by some government who intentionally sowed distrust by revealing factual things, would you lean more towards upset or thankful towards that third party government?
> I still have no idea if he's an adversarial plant by some government
He was an Aaron Swartz type who just wanted information to be free. It is clear Snowden wasn't a mole. He just hated closed-doors spying on innocent people, & having their privacy invaded at every instance. His legacy will not be forgotten[0]
I just listened to an episode of The Darknet Diaries with an ex-CIA (I think) agent and he was talking about MICE. I'm pretty sure he said the C was for Coercion, but that does include blackmail as you said.
Manning was ideological? I was under the impression that she was simply immensely unhappy and dissatisfied with her experience in the military as a whole and so released a huge amount of info without going through it.
While I know much of what inspired her was the depression she was going through, I thought her knowledge of the illegal acts she knew were carried out also inspired her action. It's been a while since I've read her story though, so I could be misremembering.
No, and they weren't intended to be dumped in public. The Guardian journalists published the key for the file containing them, changing it from a leak that a team of journalists were going through to choose what to publish to one everyone had full access to. Manning can't be blamed for that.
Plus, far more of Manning's leaks were about the wars than the diplomatic cables.
Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The claim that the US foreign policy agenda is promoting democratic values and human rights around the world, then, I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act?
The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?
your first paragraph is just a reflection of the way the world works. You can take sides - most people do - or not. Either way the ethics are steeped in a complex of nationalism, ideology, media, state control, and everything in between.
Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.
Having met someone who was at the top of my country's intelligence machine: CIA is corrupt, other countries fare a bit better but not too well. It's a difficult problem to concentrate so much power and not have corruption.
"Democratic values and human rights" is just how we refer to "how we want it done" - when what we want goes against them, they fall away to the side and aren't talked about.
> Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray.
I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about.
> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets.
Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.
Well, the NSA and CIA and the State Department have long claimed that their cyber-espionage activities have nothing to do with securing economic information for the advantage of say, US oil companies, right?
Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?
> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else
Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.
out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak.
At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !!
How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.
You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed.
Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.
> in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed
Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.
States occupy a distinct place in the legal spectrum. If you kill someone deliberately, you're a murderer. If a government kills someone, it's either a capital punishment, an act of war, or an assassination. But the idea that national governments can commit "crimes" has always been tenuous at best, because there is exists no supranational entity with the willingness and the authority to enforce violence against rule-breaking states. The United States and international coalitions have acted as the surrogates of the rules-based order several times, like in Korea and Afghanistan, but a CIA employee acting on behalf of and on direct order from his government enjoys a certain immunity from prosecution, like states at large.
States can't just "kill someone," they have to initiate criminal proceedings. You're describing a version of sovereignty that hasn't been recognized since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. In the modern world authority derives from the consent of the governed and is bound by law.
This would be a better link to make that point with [0] since the controversy section on that one only links to it, but my response would still be that government employees cannot overturn the rule of law by getting away with a few crimes any more than people who are not government employees can. Could you imagine if the police would give up on a law every time they had a cold case?
Maybe some states have to initiate criminal proceedings before killing people, but other states are happy to kill people, including their own citizens, including children, without any criminal proceedings:
(To be fair, most countries have vague laws and corrupt courts so having a court in country X decide that someone should be executed is hardly any better, in practice, than having Barack Obama order the execution.)
> States can't just "kill someone," they have to initiate criminal proceedings. You're describing a version of sovereignty that hasn't been recognized since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. In the modern world authority derives from the consent of the governed and is bound by law.
Bullshit. Millions of people have directly lost their lives due to the actions of the American government and citizens. Where were the criminal proceedings and due process for "collateral" damage in dozens of countries worldwide?
Oh, please. We have a confirmed account of Obama ordering the (successful) execution of an American citizen without due process. So it's not just theoretical.
I'm sure when the CIA / FBI reads this, they have a smile on their faces.
Plenty of people i.e US citizens / residents have been killed not just on foreign soil but on US soil as well. Extra-judicial killings happen to this day. Foreign one's well that's just collateral damage ;)
if you're a non threat of course, they might put the child-porn charge just to extend your suffering.
> but a CIA employee acting on behalf of and on direct order from his government enjoys a certain immunity from prosecution, like states at large
Said employee enjoys immunity from prosecution in the United States.
The US prosecutes foreign hackers operating on behalf of other countries all the time. They're rarely apprehended for obvious reasons, but the US is playing a very dangerous game with the liberty of their own hackers.
Many, Many, US "Hackers" have shown up on lists in foreign countries. After OPM and associated Briefs, many in the top offices of these agencies were explicitly briefed as such. Some have dealt with harassment with stolen identities, some have even been approached in "friendly" countries and questioned. This isn't new. While other governments may not be as overt with the vast majority of know "hackers" the same happens to many in the US that are found out. Some have to be strategic on flights out of the country to make sure they maintain friendly countries etc.
All said, most of it is political posturing and I don't expect people to be eradicated or disappeared but that is a very real possibility in some countries.
When it becomes "fun" is when you're at Defcon and you see people that also recognize you, but both of you know you're on opposite sides.
So the US isn't playing any game that other countries aren't. Unless you work in the US govt. in one of these agencies doing this type of work, respectfully, you are looking at it from a tainted lens.
> But the idea that national governments can commit "crimes" has always been tenuous at best, because there is exists no supranational entity with the willingness and the authority to enforce violence against rule-breaking states.
There shouldn't be any supranational entity. In a democracy, governments should be accountable for their doing.
Regardless of proaganda, the CIA is literally authorized by act of Congress, while I am prohibited by various acts of Congress. The CIA, the Congress, and the United States may be evil in your opinion, but there are facts which differentiate my actions from that of the CIA.
As in the USA, certain acts that individuals do in China and Russia are prohibited in their respective regimes and yet practiced by their foreign intelligence agencies. We agree fully.
That is not the point you were originally making. You seemed, facetiously, to be confused that behavior prohibited to US citizens was permitted to the US intelligence apparatus.
It seems like this disconnect is something that riles you up. Context is key and the weaponization of cyberspace by Nation State actors is being defined as we go along. It's getting to be more than a bit dated but the book and documentary "Countdown to Zero Day" hits on this kind of stuff. I enjoyed the hell out of it mostly. The rest of the time was me getting more and more pissed about how short sighted we were with Stuxnet. Blowback and all that.
Just a recomendation for your reading list since I was thinking a similar pithy comment and figure you might also enjoy that book like I did.
This article is a waste of time at best and a deliberate misdirection at worst. Focusing on the (alleged) leaker and ignoring the content of the leak is a classic propaganda tactic. Right at the beginning we see this claim in defense of the CIA program:
This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.
Perhaps the most news-making program in that leak was something called "Marble Framework", and as I recall NSA whistleblower Bill Binney talked quite a bit about it in relation to Russiagate. I don't care about Russiagate, so let's search Google with 'verbatim' (under tools) on.
binney "marble framework" CIA -russiagate
So, here we get a lot of interesting results and a description of Marble Framework. Here's one source for example, not sure I agree with their characterization of Binney, who was at least trying to be responsible and follow the laws that banned mass domestic warrantless collection, and who seems like a decent person (plus B-tree tutorial) but at least this source discusses the central matter:
> "Description: The Marble Framework is designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation when developing tools. When signaturing tools, string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop. This framework is intended to help us (AED) to improve upon our current process for string/data obfuscation in our tools. The framework utilizes pre and post-build execution steps to apply obfuscation to the tool. [CIA Marble Framework docs]"
This is a tool allowing for things like 'false flag' cyberattacks, such as planting malware that looks like it came from whoever - North Korea, Iran, etc. - but which reports back to CIA. Rather tellingly, this article doesn't even mention it. Nor does it dig into the issue of economic espionage, something the US government claims it never does. See the above source's discussion of something called 'Longhorn' for the counterexample.
The issue is this makes all the US government claims about 'detecting the signature of foreign hackers' in all manner of news reports completely suspect. How do we know they didn't put those signatures there themselves? Now they have a massive credibility problem (see also lies about WMDs in Iraq, etc.) - and that's something the New Yorker apparently doesn't want to dig into. Kind of pathetic really.
> But WikiLeaks had also shown, quite recently, a willingness to be a mouthpiece for foreign intelligence services: in 2016, the site had released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee
That is certainly one perspective you can have.
Another perspective is that if the DNC hadn't engaged in corrupt practices then foreign intelligence services wouldn't have anything to leak.
Reasonable people can disagree on what "Rigged" means.
For example, the 45th President of the United States never won the popular vote, yet was elected. Was the election "rigged?" Well, no; the laws of the US do not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the post popular votes and they never have. Or, yes, because the laws of the US are stacked against the demonstrated will of the people via the vote.
It's the same with the DNC. The DNC leadership did some things that can be considered subjectively unsavory. But they broke no laws, nor party rules. The rules themselves do not favor a candidate like Sanders (the Democratic party tilts heavily towards something like seniority, especially relative to their peer major party; Sanders was an outlier who ran an outlier campaign).
Rigging a primary would, by definition, involve the alteration or removal of votes cast. There is no evidence of this in the stolen emails nor outside the stolen emails.
The above article mentions leaked emails that bashed Sen. Sanders.
>Rigging a primary would, by definition, involve the alteration or removal of votes cast
There are many ways to rig an election without altering any of the votes cast. The clearest example is elections in one party states, where your only choice is to vote for the approved candidate. But there are much less overt ways too
Sadly, today, I don't think an email leak itself is embarassing. It's more like "yup, email is weak, and we don't think about its security at all, so this is normal". Today, the only thing embarrassing is for the person whose job it is to leak specific emails didn't do the leaking.
"The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality,[6] as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions"
That would hardly qualify as corruption. The DNC is well within its rights to determine how they wish to conduct their debates. A single question that was not posed in the exact same form would not meet the definition of corruption.
...It's very, very hard to take your comments in good faith. MANY people have taken the time to point out other DNC corruption. Please consider aligning your position a little more with reality.
Seems like it’s just the one point repeated in different articles?
No need to question anyone’s sincerity.
The reality is the emails were hacked and released in order to damage the Clinton campaign by a foreign power that wanted her to lose (or win but severely weakened). This is much more serious than some unseemly infighting within the DNC. Nothing in the Clinton emails was a crime, right?
It would be a frightening world indeed if all unethical behaviour was covered by law, and worrying to think that the defence for unethical behaviour could possibly be to point to the absence of a law for it.
Lots of lawyers and CYA means you can do things that are bad but won't break the law and gives an out for people on online forums to defend you with "but it didn't qualify as legal corruption!".
As an outside observer, I never had the sense that it would be considered fair, or non-corrupt, for one of the candidates to have the questions in advance.
To me, when I first saw this news story, I felt it was one of the most shockingly corrupt things I had ever seen. The fact that you could see this news and find that it "would hardly qualify as corruption"... this gives me hope that philosophers can gleefully debate reality forever without messing things up by accidentally tripping over the truth. No sarcasm implied!
I struggle to think of a situation as public as this that could be more corrupt.
They'd probably be better off by doing so. After the 1968 primary, the Democratic Party made a number of changes to how they hold primaries, mainly in order to avoid a split between the conservative and progressive wings of the party. But the 2016 and 2020 primaries were so visibly rigged that they may well have done worse in that respect than simply choosing Clinton and Biden in a smoke-filled room would have done.
Didn't they clearly show bias from the DNC against Bernie? [0]
This also resulted in the DNC apologizing to Bernie. [1]
And did it not result in the DNC chair CEO, CFO, and Communication Director resigning? [2]
With actual email proof, public apology, and resignations it seems to me that there was more than just an aura of corruption.
Or do you still disagree?
There isn't anything corrupt about having bias against Bernie any more than it's "corrupt" that DNC leadership has a bias against Donald Trump.
Party leadership is allowed to have preferences; the party isn't the public, it's a party. The primary election's purpose is to show the party who the public favors (because it is, ostensibly, politically-suicidal to run an unpopular candidate).
And in the end, the actual votes favored Clinton over Sanders. These votes may have been influenced by the party leadership suggesting to the rank-and-file that Clinton was a better candidate, but as it's not a general election that's well within their purview to do.
(Whether state machinery should be used to run elections for what is essentially a private political club is a great question that I think people should be asking about the way elections are structured in each state).
Corruption is something a government can have; what does it mean for a party to be corrupt?
If people think it means the party doesn't reflect the will of the voters... Not exactly. That's always been the structure of the Democratic party. Popular will is tempered by party leadership. That's baked into the structure of the Democratic party itself. The party that lacks that kind of tempering is the GOP, and as a result it tends to run populists who may or may not actually have any government qualification (one won the Presidency in 2016; a couple have won state governorship over the years).
The resulting apologies and resignations were an attempt to reconcile with voters who, fundamentally, did not understand how the party they support actually works. No shame in that; it's a big and complex machine. But it's never been a machine that just reflects the unmodified will of the people who toss ballots into the box with a 'D' next to their name in the primaries. That's one source of signal the party uses to decide who it will run.
To give another example: in 2008, in response to the Florida party leadership running their primary earlier than the national committee authorized them to run it, the committee stripped all the Florida delegates of their vote in the national convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Florida_Democratic_presid...). Then, it compromised (at its discretion) by seating them but only counting half of each of their votes. That is the nature of the power the democratic party national leadership has to wield at its discretion, without oversight, as per its charter.
People just don't know this because people don't know the parties.
I'm sorry, but this seems to me like you are advocating a point. of: "The peasants don't know what is good for them, the party will decide for them."
This would have been fine the DNC came out and said that this is what they are doing.
But the DNC has explicitly stated that is unbiased in action (in the [0] of my earlier post) and then they go and do the opposite. This is just plain corruption.
If the contents of the food product you just bought are not the same as the label of the product then fines are levied against the company that sold it.
Yes, the people weigh on elections and they make their choice. But if they make their choice according to a party that claims honesty yet betrays that honesty with lies, isn't that an issue with the party being corrupt and the people being lied to?
Thus corruption, which these leaks ultimately have shown us.
Being truthful isn’t the goal, achieving the parities political goals is. Gerrymandering for example is a perversion of the core idea of democracy, but failing to use it when your opposition does is a problem. Politics exists in the real world and what should be often takes a back seat to what is.
"Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’..."
The DNC can say it's unbiased, but the rules-as-written allow broad, sweeping bias in how the Democratic party conducts its affairs. It's a party. They're biased by default. The whole point of parties is, basically, as you put it, "The peasants don't know what is good for them." There's a reason so many politicians throughout history have been anti-party. Unfortunately, they stick around and grow in power because they tend to work; focused political alignment beats unfocused noise consistently.
What happened with the Sanders campaign is a whole bunch of voters crashed headlong into a system that works other than the way they assume it does.
Excuse me then, we were discussing semantics vs legality. My point was that by dishonest the DNC was corrupt as by the dictionary definition of corrupt: "having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.". Or the Latin origin of the word: corruptus (along the lines of broken)-
Which seems to fit the description of the events and my arguments. You argue that because court rules this as political promises (regularly broken and legal to do) then it was not corruption as the court saw it.
This then seems that politics can be legally corrupt (deceitful). You don't have to agree with me but I vote out candidates that lie even if they fit under my political umbrella. In my opinion this machevellian behavior will end up more painful down the line and it is better to lose one election than to have a broken political system long term.
No, the party should be acting. If party leadership cares about winning the general election for example, they should promote the person more likely to win.
Party leadership could very well prefer candidate X personally, but promote candidate Y strategically. Politics goes beyond the election into actually implementing the candidates proposals, which adds yet another dimension here.
Young people will first have to demonstrate that they are capable of going to the polls for anything. Democracy is a civic duty, it's not some customer support department. "2/5, wasn't friendly, will not go to the polls again"
Why would they waste their time on something that's, as been found time and time again, simply doesn't work? US policy is shaped by lobby groups, not voter's beliefs.
That'll show em! You guys just need to have a few more disastrous election losses on they will come back begging to vote for the leaderships preferred candidate.
If young people don't go to the polls, they are a non-factor in election wins & losses. Eventually they'll figure that out when politicians continue to spend their tax dollars serving the interests of the people who vote, not the people who whine.
But sure, continue snarkily throwing away your vote, continue whining about disastrous elections. Who cares if you have to live in the society you threw away your vote in, as long as those snooty leadership preferred candidates suffer it's all worth it.
Indeed, and Sanders does seem to have a consistent problem with young people claiming they're going to vote for him and then just... Not.
Every alleged slight the DNC made against Sanders would not have excluded him from the party nomination if voters had voted for him in the primary. But at the end of the day, the numbers didn't manifest.
It is common in political parties for the presidential candidate in a presidential election year to "install" their people within party leadership prior to the General Election.
It is also not uncommon, as we've seen, for leadership to resign after large hacks occur. The infiltration and subsequent resignation of corporate leadership after data leaks does not indicate that there was any corruption. It may indicate some level of incompetence, but not corruption.
I'm not saying this is anything new, just pointing out that this is called corruption.
If the party claimed that they are in-fact biased against Bernie, as the evidence mostly shows, then this would have been fine.
However, if the party claimed it was neutral but yet secretly worked against Bernie then this seems to me like it is corruption.
You're playing Humpty Dumpty here: A word — here, "corruption" — supposedly means what you say it means. This reminds me of a libertarian colleague who shouts "bigotry!" whenever someone disagrees with his views.
I don't know what else to call having campaign insiders inside a media outlet feed debate questions to their affiliated campaign ahead of time so they can prepare.
Is it policy to only leak debate questions ahead of time to candidates who have previously run as democrats? I must have missed it in the party platform.
Please explain which part of my post led you to believe that?
That is not my belief nor the point of my post. I am only stating that the way the NewYorker looks at this is not the same how some other people look at it.
Also I'm not from the US nor do I really care about US politics, I do love pointing out obvious things like these :).
> Another perspective is that if the DNC hadn't engaged in corrupt practices then foreign intelligence services wouldn't have anything to leak.
There was no leakage of GOP emails, therefore there was nothing to leak, i.e., no corruption of concern.
If I misread your intent I apologize, it can be challenging in the most benign situations and it's more so tricky when its a subject of disagreement.
But my claim still unfortunately holds. The DNC leak was a political hit job that only intended to smear the opposing party. A better example is Hunter Biden -- his employment really was with corrupt intents and if there really was evidence that corruption was rewarded it should be prosecuted.
But if that very concern is legitimate, then it should be applied to all. There's plenty of evidence of that a certain son-in-law engaged in far more egregious affairs and there is not a peep about that.
So I couldn't help but read your comment as yet another "gotcha" that fuels this false narrative.
How is encryption for individuals comparable to, in your account, wanting an organisation to be more transparent, or - given a fair reading of what you're responding to - hoping that an incredibly powerful and influential group that may provide a majority of top level politicians isn't engaged in corruption?
Next you'll be arguing for less oversight for the 3 letter agencies because they should have strong privacy rights!
I enjoyed the beginning of the article because it was actually informative. Once you get to the part where it becomes a blatant smear and misdirection campaign, it loses its interest and credibility. Why does half the entire read just focus on destroying this guys character?
If he actually did get caught with what they say he did, then sure he deserves to go down but it's weird how hyper focused they are on painting this guy as the devil in his personal life. It seems like it's because their isn't any real evidence present to nail this guy. It's all circumstantial and worse, in ways that could very easily be planted/faked.
When the article revealed the child porn, my first thought was "of course they 'found' child porn." Such a coincidence how tough cases like this always turn up with child porn charges.
"Just sprinkle some child porn on him Johnson, and let's get out of here"
That said, it sounds like they caught him fair and square with actual evidence (the backdoor, the access logs, and the versioning of the leak) and the mistrial was the result of a confused jury.
But they were missing the key piece, which is that he leaked it. Without that, it's all circumstantial. Was he probably the one who leaked it? Yeah, I think it's safe to say that. But that's not where the bar lies in a criminal trial.
I believe possession of unauthorized copies of classified information is already a crime, though I think the possible charges are far less than leaking it.
But, do they need to prove that he leaked it? Surely the backdoor and exfiltrating the data alone would be enough to put him away from a long time, even if he never shared it with anyone.
The jury may only be confused because prosecutors never take their duty to bring exculpatory evidence to light seriously because it would harm their conviction rate and they would rather let an innocent person suffer than have their career affected. We should count all trials where innocent people are found not guilty because of evidence introduced by prosecutors as an exceptional win for the prosecutor. Their job shouldn't be focused on convictions but on delivering justice so this would be a case where justice is served even though they don't convict.
He didn’t deny he had the child porn though did he? Hardly seems like a frame up job if he admits it was there, hidden behind 3 encryption layers. I thought his excuse was someone uploaded it to his server “back in college”.
Even ignoring his troubling sexual history and the chat logs, it sounds pretty legitimate.
Well, he's being charged with having child pornography on his computer. Whether or not he was the one who put it there and used it is debatable.
As someone else noted, it seems statistically unlikely that so many people who the government brings national security cases against are pedophiles.
One of the following must be true: a surprising number of all government workers in intelligence are pedophiles, pedophilia and propensity to leak government secrets are highly correlated, or the government is planting evidence.
I'm not going to discount the mental health correlation possibility, because being crazy enough to work for the government and then ineptly leak classified materials... doesn't bode well for an individual's baseline mental stability.
> Why does half the entire read just focus on destroying this guys character?
Yeah, this was my question reading this piece as well. This article overwhelmingly reads like uncritical character assassination. I think whether the guy was a giant dick to coworkers should be tangential at best, if not outright irrelevant, but definitely not the centerpiece of the story, and yet it is.
You're quite right, and the answer to the original question is "Because the US mainstream media are, knowingly or not, part of the US national security establishment's propaganda wing." But apparently, domestic propaganda is something only $BAD_COUNTRY engages in.
The description of his character is a fascinating part of the story. Keep in mind that this a story, and not (just) an indictment. Showing his character is also critical background for the reader to understand why he allegedly leaked that backup.
Having worked in similar environments, I found that most of the features in this article are both believable and typical.
The workplace hostility, the various office personas, the drudgery, humiliation and bureaucracy even the VM that's triple encrypted isn't unusual for even the most benign cybersecurity researcher. Ironically, the lapse in OPSEC isn't either. Time and time again, people who are doing bad things always seem to have a lapse in OPSEC that is routinely double underlined in these types of articles.
And of course, the last typical bit is the Child Sexual Abuse Material being found. Isn't it something that when the NSA/CIA/FBI wants to take someone down they always seem to find CSAM? I'd hazard that this approach is used when the state's most "powerful and prominent police agency" isn't able to decrypt/bypass what they're truly after. Consider the frustrations they encountered with DPR[1]. another commenter quipped, "sprinkle a little CP in there and call it a day". After all, doesn't this fit the MO of the FBI/CIA when you consider the Stonewall investigations[2]? Find something that is absolutely anathema to the public, charge the suspect with that. Not surprised.
Regardless of planted or no - feel sorry for whatever digital forensic examiner had to confirm it was indeed what it was. Not the victim in this scenario, but its an often-overlooked and extremely unpleasant role to confirm this stuff.
If it were just CSAM, then that would be one thing and we could write it off as the government trying to railroad him. But the government also claims to have access to chat logs in chatrooms focused on CSAM, as well as a video of him sexually assaulting an old roommate.
Just because they are focusing on his atypical and undesirable character attributes doesn't mean that it's not a credible work.
Its also - dare i say lacking in creativity. The smear checklist, in order and always the same. Why cant they hire artists to at least invent new and creative crimes.
What's with the uncritical pro-CIA tone throughout this whole article?
Quotes like this go completely unchallenged:
> Karen, the O.S.B. supervisor, later recalled. “That information getting out into a forum like that can hurt people and impact our mission. It’s a huge loss to the organization.”
What about the people who could be hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
>What about the people hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
How exactly was someone "hurt" because of said spyware?
>How did they reach this conclusion
The CIA (or any TLA) does not comment on ways & means of investigations. That's just silly to think they would as it would expose those ways & means.
I'm all for being critical of anything spoken out of which ever side of the mouth the CIA PR people are speaking, but I'm not sure you're arguments are really effective here.
> How exactly was someone "hurt" because of said spyware?
What do you think the information gleaned from the targets is used for, if not to harm the targets or others? This is beyond the fact that you don't think the mere act of having spyware installed on your devices is hurtful?
I equate this to those that say that downloading warez is not hurtful as it's just some electrons shifting around, so nothing was actually stolen.
Having spyware sucks, and I do the best of my ability to not let it get installed. However, random internet thiefs vs nation state operatives are not the same and I do not humor myself to think I am adequetely equipped to prevent it. If the CIA plants stuff on my, a US citizen's computer, then that is absolutely something to be pissed off about and they need to be punished for this behavior. However, I know in my personal life there is nothing they will find of value and it is ultimately an absolute waste of their time and resources. If some random internet thief also can make use of the US Gov't agency's spyware in a way that is harmful to me (stealing money, etc), then it's even worse as they TLA probably think "secret" backdoors are safe.
> This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.
Mhmm. Pray tell what oversight should make me believe this is true?
> Snowden and Manning were not seeking to blow the whistle on any one particular policy, in the manner that Ellsberg was; theirs was a more generalized disaffection, and the troves of data that they exposed were indiscriminate
Both good whistleblowers who I do not care what ideological principles inspired them.
> Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower.
I guess you have to be a good person to be a whistleblower in the CIA. Maybe that's why they don't hire good people.
On your last bit, I don't see your point. It was obvious from the article that Josh didn't have a problem breaching personal privacy/security provided he was wielding/creating the tool that did it. It didn't track that he leaked data for any ideological reason other than he could, and felt the CIA deserved to get egg on their face for how they treated him. Also, beyond the idea that the CIA knew of vulnerabilities on public companies that exposed Americans and neglected to cooperate to patch them, the data, largely made up of exploits, that was leaked can't really be ideologically driven unless you're operating under the assumption that it isn't widely known that intelligence agencies hack their adversaries.
It sounds like a leak was inevitable given their IT security. Encrypted virtual machine with an encrypted home folder containing an encrypted archive with passwords kept unencrypted on his phone is pretty comical but Op Sec is hard.
The only evidence that is mildly convincing is that he accessed the same archive as the one uploaded though just because the leak might have came from a credential he created as an administrator doesn't necessarily tie it to him. Still from this it's a wonder anyone with talent wants to work for government - get paid less and possibly prosecuted if you leave on bad terms.
What are the chances someone working in OpSec would leave his personal devices so insecure? Either the CIA had much more access than what this article claims, or the article is missing details.
Why does the article repeat this known-to-be-false assertion about Wikileaks?
"But WikiLeaks had also shown, quite recently, a willingness to be a mouthpiece for foreign intelligence services: in 2016, the site had released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee which had been stolen by hackers working on behalf of the Kremlin."
The DNC leak was an inside job and not a result of a "hack".
There are plenty of other contemporaneous sources all saying the same thing. Similar to the now dis-proven Russia-gate hoax, the DNC are the ones pushing the narrative that the leak was a Russian operation. The analysis of the time stamps on the DNC files has proven that they were not copied over a network, but copied locally.
CrowdStrike is a 40 billion dollar cyber security company. You must be deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole to be convinced it is a front for a think tank. Dmitri Alperovich is a well respected and experienced security professional.
If this story is credible, it shows glaring incompetence on the part of CIA management and leadership in letting simple HR and team issues spin wildly out of control.
Like drone pilots who destroy villages in Afghanistan from an air-conditioned trailer in Nevada, the engineers of the O.S.B. experienced an uncanny incongruity between the safety of their surroundings and the knowledge that their work supported high-stakes covert operations abroad.
Drone pilots don't destroy villages in Afghanistan, what is this nonsense.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadI wonder if that would be an advantage. You are a clear separation between work and life. No one is allowed to call or message you at home about work when you are out of the office.
Just be warned that season one ends on a cliffhanger, and season two is a year away (or more). I didn’t know that and found it frustrating.
is this true? i don't think there has never been a definitive evidence or proof about this. just "journalistic evidence" (= news outlets repeating the same info without any real evidence).
See another commenters article from Ars above.
Try a little thought experiment: substitute "China" for "USA" and ask yourself, would you believe claims by Chinese espionage agency official, repeated by numerous Chinese outlets? Even if he wasn't known for committing crimes, like James Clapper is?
No, the "evidence" was never released. If I'm mistaken, I'd be grateful if you provided a link. If you make an assertion and claim you have secret evidence that you can't show it is exactly the same as making as assertion with no evidence.
You’d very rarely want to release this as it would compromise sources and methods. Due to the extreme public interest we do actually know the info came from the Dutch intelligence agency, who among other things were tapping the GRU’s security cameras.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/04/why-was-gru-using-open...
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/03/28/what-was-the-relations...
I do not know why it is, but the second anyone uses quotation marks like this, my trust in what they're saying instantly goes down by an order of magnitude
I don't see this as a personal problem
You may recall Clapper from his previous film, titled "I perjured myself before Congress and lied to the American public, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that damn Snowden kid." So take anything he says with an entire truckload of salt.
Edit: Source regarding his perjury - https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73...
Russiagate is QAnon for liberals.
Ideological cases like Ellsberg, Snowden, and Manning are the exception.
Looking back at everything that transpired with Snowden boggles the mind. I still have no idea if he's an adversarial plant by some government (meant to sow distrust, etc) or if he was genuine from the get-go. It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things, and the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder.
He really does try to inform the People.
They say there is a lot less variety in stores, but life is really quite normal. Except, everybody really makes sure what to say (and what not), especially to strangers. They report difficulties - or impossibilities - with money transfers.
I have a friend with decades of business ties to Russia, he and his (Russian) wife live in Germany but he has a residency-type visa (whatever it's called) for Russia and even after the war flew there several times, via Turkey. There still are quite a few businesses present, smaller ones I think. I fully support Ukraine, but personally I'm content with those kinds of contacts remaining.
They - several interviewed people independently - reported that they did not experience any problems from normal Russian people or from the authorities but where treated normally.
I think if Snowden just removes himself from public view and does not talk about politics and the... special operation, he'll be just fine, as will all the other foreigners.
EDIT: Found it: "Westerners Who Stayed in Russia Find Home Transformed By War" (published yesterday) https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/06/05/westerners-who-sta...
Note that "Moscow Times" is not aligned with the Russian government, and is registered in Russia as "foreign agent"- Please don't let the name deceive you. As you can see from their articles, they freely report on the war and the impact of the sanctions and other stuff. There Russian language website has even more detailed articles about Russian internal things, quite unfiltered (Google Chrome can auto-translate, if necessary).
> None of the Westerners in Russia interviewed by The Moscow Times said they had feared for their physical safety since the start of the war. Nor did they report any instances of hostility from authorities or ordinary Russians.
> But the military campaign has undoubtedly cast a cloud over their relationships with others, making them more cautious when voicing opinions.
You are correct.
Understandably, the Russian authorities blamed the West for the drop in the ruble exchange rate, and depreciation for inflation. At the same time, they reacted by enforcing capital controls, restricting convertibility, offering more rubles to support bank liquidity and raising interest rates on ruble deposits.
Shortly afterward, they also announced that in the future Moscow would honor its euro- and dollar- denominated debts, but would ask “hostile countries” to pay for their energy imports in rubles. Some dubbed this policy the “ruble clause.”
The authorities can now boast that the ruble has stabilized. By the beginning of April, one euro bought 85 rubles, marking a slightly stronger exchange rate than before the war began. Western operators are perhaps not overly interested in Russian monetary policy. But what about the ruble clause? Is it little more than a flash in the pan with little practical relevance, or should we take it more seriously?
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/ruble-clause/
It doesn't mean much. If I remember it right, back in USSR time, the ruble rate was about 1.6 for a dollar. Yet people couldn't buy toilet paper whenever they needed it. There was a severe deficit of pretty much everything. It's not going to be like in the 90s - the economy is very different, but sugar shortages just three-four weeks into the war is not a good sign. It will get tough for Russians, which is not beneficial to anyone - not for them, nor for Europeans, Americans, or Chinese.
Yes, there will be a lot of money in hard currency from oil and gas, but without access to high-tech & parts (which not many countries would sell to Russia), it's gonna pull the entire country into stagnation.
Update... no wait, dollar was about 60 kopeeks, so for 1 dollar you'd get 1.6 soviet roubles, I was right, no?
Was what he disclosed true or not? In the end, that's all that matters.
We saw something similar recently with the leak of the SCOTUS Roe v Wade opinion. There was a huge push to move the discussion from how controversial the opinion was & what the fallout would be towards "leaks are bad & we have to find who did this".
Agreed; but…
In your example, it’s both. In that case, it’s a completely legal and expected part of the process for the justices to decide things, even if it’s things you don’t like.
In the case of Snowden or Manning or others, they were leaking something that the government says it does not do, should not do, and expressly illegal things.
So it’s not a great example. While we likely agree on abortion; Roe has always been on “shakey legal ground” (RBG’s words) and the 7 justices that decided it could not agree if it was because of the 9th or 14th amendments, and offered no explanation how one or both of these superseded the 10th in this scenario. If you haven’t, read the full opinion, do, it gives insight into what is going on… legally anyhow.
So as to your example, it wasn’t a whistleblower or shooting the messenger to find the scotus leaker - it’s literally protecting the sanctity of that institution’s process.
If you can’t imagine a scenario you would be upset a decision you agreed with was leaked in order to bully justices or influence a coming election, you aren’t thinking hard enough.
It was a hot mess in the media for a few months about how the reporters he fed stuff to was going to release it all. Then, once the story died down, you didn't hear anything and there were no more releases. At least none that were so groundbreaking, they hit the media. You could say the media was culpable and simply ignored subsequent releases though.
Is there somewhere you can go to see what's been released? I'm still under the impression the bulk of what he said he had has yet to be released.
Most of what he took he gave to reporters so it wouldn't be released, that's why he didn't release everything online.
The several organizations he gave information to continued to go through it for a couple of years, periodically releasing stories based on the disclosure. They all slowly stopped funding going through the documents, until only the Intercept was left.
They continued with a limited staff until 2019, and it's end is one of the reasons both Poitras and Greenwald have left the organization.
For what has been released, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
And https://theintercept.com/collections/snowden-archive/
We assume an impartial news organization will investigate Coke and Pepsi equally, so if the org comes out with a bunch of stuff about Coke acting badly, we figure that Coke really is bad, otherwise the org would have gone after Pepsi too, or both. On the other hand if a less scrupulous news org one day receives a mysterious package with a ton of bad stuff about Coke and just verifies and prints it, then Pepsi could be good or bad or anything, but most people will think they're good because of all the bad stuff only coming out about Coke.
This isn't a competition between two corporations, this is about democracy and people's rights. What is this other side you would like to see presented more "impartially"?
PS: [a completely fictional scenario] if a leak disclosed that Coca-Cola was secretly implanting mind-controlling substances via their soft drinks, and that these substances made every consumer broadcast their most intimate thoughts to Coke marketing execs, you should publish this and damn Coke. Who cares about what Pepsi is doing? Their turn will come.
But in the context of the thread, the common thread is clear. Negative information, even if true, can be chosen selectively to attack an enemy.
I'm not even sure what "selectively attack an enemy" means in this context. What Snowden disclosed was unequivocally bad, who cares what his motives were? We are not comparing soft drinks.
That is part of the context. It might be one person's entire notion of the context. However, different people, all reasonable, may have different contexts.
Not realizing or recognizing this can contribute to thinking someone else is "off topic". But on what basis can one person claim that someone else is not on topic?
In these comments, myself (and others too) include information (and disinformation) tactics as part of the context here too.
I remember the trend on HN back when the Snowden leaks occurred. It wasn't palatable back then to express your views -- shooting the messenger, casting doubts on his motivations -- and most people were rightly appalled by the spying going on on Americans.
Thinking differently is a dangerous trend against whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are a good thing.
Unequivocally good. Yes, I used that word you dislike.
Your comments are mean-spirited. This is what you intended, right? To attack me?
Do you intend this as an insult directed at me?
Yes, I separate out different comments intentionally, because I think they warrant separate points.
Yes, shooting the messenger and casting doubts on his motivations were (and are) tactics used when a message reflects poorly on someone or some thing.
For what it is worth, in my comments around here, I'm not using these tactics as a way to deflect criticism away from institutions that Snowden criticizes. There was a huge breach of public trust in the NSA.
At the same time, it is interesting and important to understand Snowden's motivations.
It sounds like you are having cognitive dissonance. It seems to me that you have fixated on your definition of the context. In so doing, other perspectives aren't making sense to you. Having more flexibility might help you understand.
I interpret you as saying the act of disclosing this information was "unequivocally bad". Fair?
If so, no.
From the Apple dictionary, unequivocal means "leaving no doubt; unambiguous".
Please don't take this comment as "for" or "against" Snowden. Rather, please interpret this comment as "for" critical thinking and clear writing.
Students of philosophy and ethics, as well as many thoughtful people, know that weighing right and wrong is hardly simple. There are many schools of thought. Whatever one's views might be, it is clear that different people have different views of the ethics of Snowden's leaks.
For example, a utilitarian style philosophy could easily argue that Snowden's leaks resulted in more benefit than harm.
Your comment is sarcastic and unhelpful to any meaningful conversation.
I can see it doesn't matter to you about Snowden's motives.
However, many informed and reasonable people care about his motives. Perhaps this can be a motivation to think more and dig deeper.
In the real world voters are at the mercy of cognitive and other biases, tend to blame the current government no matter what, and a leak's importance depends as much on media attention and trivialities like how close the leak is to an election as it depends on actual merit.
So, even true leaks can be effective tools to remove a government you don't like.
Suppose some government opposes the U.S. in some important way. That government then gets voted out at the next election due to a leak. Would you care if that leak came from a CIA mole? I would. I doubt the CIA would investigate and reveal foreign corruption or illegal overreach purely out of the goodness of its heart.
However the actual political results were mostly favorable to Republicans. Trump himself popularized the term "deep state" and criticizing it was a key part of his administration's PR.
Russia benefited, not only by getting Republicans in power, but also by embarrassing and casting doubt on U.S. intelligence, a year before Russia's invasion of Crimea. Now in the current Ukraine war it's obvious how vital NATO intelligence is to resisting Russian aggression.
I don't think much actually changed at the NSA or any other agency. Trump didn't actually care about the ethics, he just thought it was some huge, personal injustice that he couldn't command everyone in the executive branch the way he could in his businesses. He didn't even pardon Snowden.
So overall the only changes were political and it all worked out great for Russia. Maybe Russia didn't plan it but they sure benefited from it, with the public and the media doing the heavy lifting. Something to keep in mind the next time some theoretically nonpartisan government scandal appears.
Yes, and it doesn't have to be that dramatic either. Even relatively small shifts in public opinion can matter when it comes to specific areas and/or legislation and/or funding.
They can claim "Snowden was a KGB mole!" but if they hadn't been doing such nasty things, there wouldn't have been something so damaging for the mole (or a disgruntled ex employee, whatever) to disclose. There will always be dirty laundry to disclose of course -- nobody is 100% clean -- but this was major.
This is classic "shooting the messenger".
> I honestly don't understand your reply, could you reword it please? Thanks.
I also find it confusing.
Here's my understanding: the commenter is asking something akin to this question: Why did Snowden's deem his disclosures to be necessary? Based on my understanding of Snowden, he deemed his disclosures necessary because he views these NSA programs as unjust and/or undemocratic and would continue (and probably get worse) if not revealed.
>> Everything else definitely never ought to be clear or you have a problem with arbitrary decision making agency out of hand.
I'm unclear on what this sentence as a whole means. First, I wonder if "never ought" was a typo and the commenter meant just "ought". Second, I'd guess that "arbitrary decision making agency out of hand" probably was meant to be "arbitrary agency decision making out of hand", suggesting that the NSA was overstepping its bounds.
Incorrect. One person -- or one group -- or one ideology -- doesn't get to decide all that matters for everyone.
Who "gets" to "decide" what in your reply? Please be specific.
>> Incorrect. One person -- or one group -- or one ideology -- doesn't get to decide all that matters for everyone.
> Your reply is worded so generally and vaguely I don't even understand what you mean.
I know the feeling. I've struggled to understand what you write as well.
Yes, I was making a general point. When you wrote "In the end, that's all that matters." you are claiming that the truth (or lack thereof) of what Snowden said is all that matters. This is an overly simplistic and narrow view. Such a view disregards the rest of the situation, including ethics, impacts over different time scales, disinformation, and geopolitics.
What are you a sock puppet? Everyone knows about deniable ops in the Special Forces world, assassinations are not something new, what makes you think Edward Snowden isnt telling the truth?
Personally I dont think he's exposed that much, but then he may not have been in the thick end of it.
Just read some of the stuff published by ex-military, and if you were a kid growing up around those sort of people, you probably got to hear about it.
The vast majority of the population, less than 1% are like Mother Theresa, which means _everyone_ _has_ _secrets_ and today, science can extract those secrets against your will without you even knowing.
AI detecting subconscious bias in judges https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/17/18186674/daniel-chen-mach... is just the tip of the iceberg.
> the media outlets spinning it in their own ways (based on who donates to them and who owns them) makes it even harder
Even journalists & news organisations including state broadcasters dont realise, they are giving away secrets at the subconscious level. There will come a point when they want to shut up shop because of what they are implicated in.
AI is an arm's race that has no boundaries, and the winner takes it all!
> What are you a sock puppet?
In case you haven't seen the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
In addition to that, saying "It is incredibly hard to get to the truths of these things" is hardly a convincing argument that an account is a sock puppet, which I'm defining as "A pseudonymous online identity adopted to further the user's real-life interests or to agree with sentiments the user has already expressed online." (per Wordnik)
I have seen no credible evidence that he didn't do this for ideological reasons.
Too bad, really, he took one for the team and we failed to support him.
He was an Aaron Swartz type who just wanted information to be free. It is clear Snowden wasn't a mole. He just hated closed-doors spying on innocent people, & having their privacy invaded at every instance. His legacy will not be forgotten[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect
Ego includes appealing to someone’s desires for sex, positions of power, or revenge - this case fits well end truly here.
Plus, far more of Manning's leaks were about the wars than the diplomatic cables.
If a CIA employee infects a foreign finance minister's device with malware so US can obtain unfair advantages, he's an unsung hero.
If the CIA does something against another country it’s still illegal.. just not inside the US.
The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?
Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray.
I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about.
> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets.
Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.
Citation needed. What a ridiculous thing to say.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cybe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?
Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.
Are you kidding me?
Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.
Of course it was. Read Chomsky.
out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak.
At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !!
How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.
You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed.
Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.
Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
(To be fair, most countries have vague laws and corrupt courts so having a court in country X decide that someone should be executed is hardly any better, in practice, than having Barack Obama order the execution.)
Bullshit. Millions of people have directly lost their lives due to the actions of the American government and citizens. Where were the criminal proceedings and due process for "collateral" damage in dozens of countries worldwide?
Said employee enjoys immunity from prosecution in the United States.
The US prosecutes foreign hackers operating on behalf of other countries all the time. They're rarely apprehended for obvious reasons, but the US is playing a very dangerous game with the liberty of their own hackers.
All said, most of it is political posturing and I don't expect people to be eradicated or disappeared but that is a very real possibility in some countries.
When it becomes "fun" is when you're at Defcon and you see people that also recognize you, but both of you know you're on opposite sides.
So the US isn't playing any game that other countries aren't. Unless you work in the US govt. in one of these agencies doing this type of work, respectfully, you are looking at it from a tainted lens.
There shouldn't be any supranational entity. In a democracy, governments should be accountable for their doing.
As in the USA, certain acts that individuals do in China and Russia are prohibited in their respective regimes and yet practiced by their foreign intelligence agencies. We agree fully.
That is not the point you were originally making. You seemed, facetiously, to be confused that behavior prohibited to US citizens was permitted to the US intelligence apparatus.
State-state interactions are bound by different rules & norms than person-person or person-state interactions.
Just a recomendation for your reading list since I was thinking a similar pithy comment and figure you might also enjoy that book like I did.
Trying to take moral reasoning as it applies to individuals and apply it to states just doesn't work.
This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.
Perhaps the most news-making program in that leak was something called "Marble Framework", and as I recall NSA whistleblower Bill Binney talked quite a bit about it in relation to Russiagate. I don't care about Russiagate, so let's search Google with 'verbatim' (under tools) on.
binney "marble framework" CIA -russiagate
So, here we get a lot of interesting results and a description of Marble Framework. Here's one source for example, not sure I agree with their characterization of Binney, who was at least trying to be responsible and follow the laws that banned mass domestic warrantless collection, and who seems like a decent person (plus B-tree tutorial) but at least this source discusses the central matter:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2017/04/14/why-cia-and-n...
> "Description: The Marble Framework is designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation when developing tools. When signaturing tools, string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop. This framework is intended to help us (AED) to improve upon our current process for string/data obfuscation in our tools. The framework utilizes pre and post-build execution steps to apply obfuscation to the tool. [CIA Marble Framework docs]"
This is a tool allowing for things like 'false flag' cyberattacks, such as planting malware that looks like it came from whoever - North Korea, Iran, etc. - but which reports back to CIA. Rather tellingly, this article doesn't even mention it. Nor does it dig into the issue of economic espionage, something the US government claims it never does. See the above source's discussion of something called 'Longhorn' for the counterexample.
The issue is this makes all the US government claims about 'detecting the signature of foreign hackers' in all manner of news reports completely suspect. How do we know they didn't put those signatures there themselves? Now they have a massive credibility problem (see also lies about WMDs in Iraq, etc.) - and that's something the New Yorker apparently doesn't want to dig into. Kind of pathetic really.
That is certainly one perspective you can have.
Another perspective is that if the DNC hadn't engaged in corrupt practices then foreign intelligence services wouldn't have anything to leak.
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/dec/18/john-podes...
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
The purpose of the 2016 political email "leaks" was entirely embarrassment and to create the aura that the emails were proof of corruption.
"The 2016 Democratic primary wasn’t rigged by the DNC, and it certainly wasn’t rigged against Sanders."
so, i guess it was rigged
For example, the 45th President of the United States never won the popular vote, yet was elected. Was the election "rigged?" Well, no; the laws of the US do not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the post popular votes and they never have. Or, yes, because the laws of the US are stacked against the demonstrated will of the people via the vote.
It's the same with the DNC. The DNC leadership did some things that can be considered subjectively unsavory. But they broke no laws, nor party rules. The rules themselves do not favor a candidate like Sanders (the Democratic party tilts heavily towards something like seniority, especially relative to their peer major party; Sanders was an outlier who ran an outlier campaign).
The above article mentions leaked emails that bashed Sen. Sanders.
That is not an example of corruption.
There are many ways to rig an election without altering any of the votes cast. The clearest example is elections in one party states, where your only choice is to vote for the approved candidate. But there are much less overt ways too
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donna-brazile-wikilea...
Ethically weak? Sure.
No need to question anyone’s sincerity.
The reality is the emails were hacked and released in order to damage the Clinton campaign by a foreign power that wanted her to lose (or win but severely weakened). This is much more serious than some unseemly infighting within the DNC. Nothing in the Clinton emails was a crime, right?
>Brazile, on two separate instances, tipped off the Clinton campaign ahead of time on questions that might come her way at CNN events
It's pretty wild that you don't consider this corruption.
To me, when I first saw this news story, I felt it was one of the most shockingly corrupt things I had ever seen. The fact that you could see this news and find that it "would hardly qualify as corruption"... this gives me hope that philosophers can gleefully debate reality forever without messing things up by accidentally tripping over the truth. No sarcasm implied!
I struggle to think of a situation as public as this that could be more corrupt.
This also resulted in the DNC apologizing to Bernie. [1]
And did it not result in the DNC chair CEO, CFO, and Communication Director resigning? [2]
With actual email proof, public apology, and resignations it seems to me that there was more than just an aura of corruption. Or do you still disagree?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/he...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-dnc-statemen...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/dnc-ceo-resigns-...
Party leadership is allowed to have preferences; the party isn't the public, it's a party. The primary election's purpose is to show the party who the public favors (because it is, ostensibly, politically-suicidal to run an unpopular candidate).
And in the end, the actual votes favored Clinton over Sanders. These votes may have been influenced by the party leadership suggesting to the rank-and-file that Clinton was a better candidate, but as it's not a general election that's well within their purview to do.
(Whether state machinery should be used to run elections for what is essentially a private political club is a great question that I think people should be asking about the way elections are structured in each state).
EDIT: punctuation correction.
If people think it means the party doesn't reflect the will of the voters... Not exactly. That's always been the structure of the Democratic party. Popular will is tempered by party leadership. That's baked into the structure of the Democratic party itself. The party that lacks that kind of tempering is the GOP, and as a result it tends to run populists who may or may not actually have any government qualification (one won the Presidency in 2016; a couple have won state governorship over the years).
The resulting apologies and resignations were an attempt to reconcile with voters who, fundamentally, did not understand how the party they support actually works. No shame in that; it's a big and complex machine. But it's never been a machine that just reflects the unmodified will of the people who toss ballots into the box with a 'D' next to their name in the primaries. That's one source of signal the party uses to decide who it will run.
To give another example: in 2008, in response to the Florida party leadership running their primary earlier than the national committee authorized them to run it, the committee stripped all the Florida delegates of their vote in the national convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Florida_Democratic_presid...). Then, it compromised (at its discretion) by seating them but only counting half of each of their votes. That is the nature of the power the democratic party national leadership has to wield at its discretion, without oversight, as per its charter.
People just don't know this because people don't know the parties.
This would have been fine the DNC came out and said that this is what they are doing. But the DNC has explicitly stated that is unbiased in action (in the [0] of my earlier post) and then they go and do the opposite. This is just plain corruption.
If the contents of the food product you just bought are not the same as the label of the product then fines are levied against the company that sold it.
If anything the party always staying out of primaries would be a much larger issue.
Being truthful isn’t the goal, achieving the parities political goals is. Gerrymandering for example is a perversion of the core idea of democracy, but failing to use it when your opposition does is a problem. Politics exists in the real world and what should be often takes a back seat to what is.
"Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’..."
The DNC can say it's unbiased, but the rules-as-written allow broad, sweeping bias in how the Democratic party conducts its affairs. It's a party. They're biased by default. The whole point of parties is, basically, as you put it, "The peasants don't know what is good for them." There's a reason so many politicians throughout history have been anti-party. Unfortunately, they stick around and grow in power because they tend to work; focused political alignment beats unfocused noise consistently.
What happened with the Sanders campaign is a whole bunch of voters crashed headlong into a system that works other than the way they assume it does.
Which seems to fit the description of the events and my arguments. You argue that because court rules this as political promises (regularly broken and legal to do) then it was not corruption as the court saw it.
This then seems that politics can be legally corrupt (deceitful). You don't have to agree with me but I vote out candidates that lie even if they fit under my political umbrella. In my opinion this machevellian behavior will end up more painful down the line and it is better to lose one election than to have a broken political system long term.
Party leadership could very well prefer candidate X personally, but promote candidate Y strategically. Politics goes beyond the election into actually implementing the candidates proposals, which adds yet another dimension here.
It's a club and you ain't in it, isn't really going to get the young people to the polls.
https://libraries.wm.edu/exhibits/irrepressible-conflict-or-...
But sure, continue snarkily throwing away your vote, continue whining about disastrous elections. Who cares if you have to live in the society you threw away your vote in, as long as those snooty leadership preferred candidates suffer it's all worth it.
Every alleged slight the DNC made against Sanders would not have excluded him from the party nomination if voters had voted for him in the primary. But at the end of the day, the numbers didn't manifest.
It is also not uncommon, as we've seen, for leadership to resign after large hacks occur. The infiltration and subsequent resignation of corporate leadership after data leaks does not indicate that there was any corruption. It may indicate some level of incompetence, but not corruption.
If the party claimed that they are in-fact biased against Bernie, as the evidence mostly shows, then this would have been fine. However, if the party claimed it was neutral but yet secretly worked against Bernie then this seems to me like it is corruption.
Or do you disagree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#Party_affiliati...
The key thing is that conservatives don't care about corruption itself, just the opportunity to smear their opponents.
I'd be more than fine with even more sunshine exposing the workings of the DNC and addressing what was found. Can you say the same about the GOP?
Edit: I'd like to be proven wrong, so tell me what I missed.
I read no such implication.
Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
> Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
Yes, most formally unaffiliated voters are still close to single ticket voters.
That is not my belief nor the point of my post. I am only stating that the way the NewYorker looks at this is not the same how some other people look at it.
Also I'm not from the US nor do I really care about US politics, I do love pointing out obvious things like these :).
There was no leakage of GOP emails, therefore there was nothing to leak, i.e., no corruption of concern.
If I misread your intent I apologize, it can be challenging in the most benign situations and it's more so tricky when its a subject of disagreement.
But my claim still unfortunately holds. The DNC leak was a political hit job that only intended to smear the opposing party. A better example is Hunter Biden -- his employment really was with corrupt intents and if there really was evidence that corruption was rewarded it should be prosecuted.
But if that very concern is legitimate, then it should be applied to all. There's plenty of evidence of that a certain son-in-law engaged in far more egregious affairs and there is not a peep about that.
So I couldn't help but read your comment as yet another "gotcha" that fuels this false narrative.
'You have nothing to hide so what's wrong with everyone checking out what's there in your search history and what's on your hard drives.'
You sound like the same people that want to make encryption illegal: politically naive and maliciously, selectively ignorant.
Next you'll be arguing for less oversight for the 3 letter agencies because they should have strong privacy rights!
Is there a stronger argument to be used in place of that one?
If he actually did get caught with what they say he did, then sure he deserves to go down but it's weird how hyper focused they are on painting this guy as the devil in his personal life. It seems like it's because their isn't any real evidence present to nail this guy. It's all circumstantial and worse, in ways that could very easily be planted/faked.
That said, it sounds like they caught him fair and square with actual evidence (the backdoor, the access logs, and the versioning of the leak) and the mistrial was the result of a confused jury.
Even ignoring his troubling sexual history and the chat logs, it sounds pretty legitimate.
As someone else noted, it seems statistically unlikely that so many people who the government brings national security cases against are pedophiles.
One of the following must be true: a surprising number of all government workers in intelligence are pedophiles, pedophilia and propensity to leak government secrets are highly correlated, or the government is planting evidence.
I'm not going to discount the mental health correlation possibility, because being crazy enough to work for the government and then ineptly leak classified materials... doesn't bode well for an individual's baseline mental stability.
Yeah, this was my question reading this piece as well. This article overwhelmingly reads like uncritical character assassination. I think whether the guy was a giant dick to coworkers should be tangential at best, if not outright irrelevant, but definitely not the centerpiece of the story, and yet it is.
The workplace hostility, the various office personas, the drudgery, humiliation and bureaucracy even the VM that's triple encrypted isn't unusual for even the most benign cybersecurity researcher. Ironically, the lapse in OPSEC isn't either. Time and time again, people who are doing bad things always seem to have a lapse in OPSEC that is routinely double underlined in these types of articles.
And of course, the last typical bit is the Child Sexual Abuse Material being found. Isn't it something that when the NSA/CIA/FBI wants to take someone down they always seem to find CSAM? I'd hazard that this approach is used when the state's most "powerful and prominent police agency" isn't able to decrypt/bypass what they're truly after. Consider the frustrations they encountered with DPR[1]. another commenter quipped, "sprinkle a little CP in there and call it a day". After all, doesn't this fit the MO of the FBI/CIA when you consider the Stonewall investigations[2]? Find something that is absolutely anathema to the public, charge the suspect with that. Not surprised.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-too...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
It's not mentioned in the WP article but automated planting of the aforementioned material on a target computer was one of the capabilities they sold.
Just because they are focusing on his atypical and undesirable character attributes doesn't mean that it's not a credible work.
Quotes like this go completely unchallenged:
> Karen, the O.S.B. supervisor, later recalled. “That information getting out into a forum like that can hurt people and impact our mission. It’s a huge loss to the organization.”
What about the people who could be hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
How exactly was someone "hurt" because of said spyware?
>How did they reach this conclusion
The CIA (or any TLA) does not comment on ways & means of investigations. That's just silly to think they would as it would expose those ways & means.
I'm all for being critical of anything spoken out of which ever side of the mouth the CIA PR people are speaking, but I'm not sure you're arguments are really effective here.
What do you think the information gleaned from the targets is used for, if not to harm the targets or others? This is beyond the fact that you don't think the mere act of having spyware installed on your devices is hurtful?
Having spyware sucks, and I do the best of my ability to not let it get installed. However, random internet thiefs vs nation state operatives are not the same and I do not humor myself to think I am adequetely equipped to prevent it. If the CIA plants stuff on my, a US citizen's computer, then that is absolutely something to be pissed off about and they need to be punished for this behavior. However, I know in my personal life there is nothing they will find of value and it is ultimately an absolute waste of their time and resources. If some random internet thief also can make use of the US Gov't agency's spyware in a way that is harmful to me (stealing money, etc), then it's even worse as they TLA probably think "secret" backdoors are safe.
Correct. Leaked operational secrets, like say via spyware installed on devices, = people killed. Which brings me back to my original question:
> What about the people who could be hurt as a result of the intelligence the CIA collects via the spyware?
So why is the fact that this leak could also save lives not pointed out?
Mhmm. Pray tell what oversight should make me believe this is true?
> Snowden and Manning were not seeking to blow the whistle on any one particular policy, in the manner that Ellsberg was; theirs was a more generalized disaffection, and the troves of data that they exposed were indiscriminate
Both good whistleblowers who I do not care what ideological principles inspired them.
> Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower.
I guess you have to be a good person to be a whistleblower in the CIA. Maybe that's why they don't hire good people.
The only evidence that is mildly convincing is that he accessed the same archive as the one uploaded though just because the leak might have came from a credential he created as an administrator doesn't necessarily tie it to him. Still from this it's a wonder anyone with talent wants to work for government - get paid less and possibly prosecuted if you leave on bad terms.
Yeah, I scoffed at this part.
What are the chances someone working in OpSec would leave his personal devices so insecure? Either the CIA had much more access than what this article claims, or the article is missing details.
"But WikiLeaks had also shown, quite recently, a willingness to be a mouthpiece for foreign intelligence services: in 2016, the site had released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee which had been stolen by hackers working on behalf of the Kremlin."
The DNC leak was an inside job and not a result of a "hack".
https://nypost.com/2017/08/15/new-report-claims-dnc-hack-was...
That's just a front for a think-tank: https://web.archive.org/web/20200930134745/https://www.atlan...
And CrowdStrike is so deeply involved with the DNC that they ended up lying for them: https://mate.substack.com/p/indicted-clinton-lawyer-hired-cr...
Drone pilots don't destroy villages in Afghanistan, what is this nonsense.
Did everyone who signs up for The New Yorker newsletter get this one, or was this another "targeted" "share"? ;-)