Andreessen says he's surprised that people are surprised.
That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies.
Another thing is the wording - Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. That is a consequence of his disclosures. But this information was hidden from the American taxpayer (which is also easy to justify because we all don't have security clearances), but more egregiously, the information was hidden from Congressional Committees that actually have direct OVERSIGHT. And they have security clearances, so what's your excuse then?
So sure, the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to. But that was their full time job to find out and they are probably hardly surprised.
But thankfully, even Congress and the American public know exactly where our taxes are going. And we really aren't the enemy of the NSA.
What we ask our representatives to do with this information will say it all.
> Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies.
Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays.
Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody.
From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.
Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government. Which Andreessen may well.
No, not even then. The government and the nation are not the same thing. The oath of allegiance is to the nation and the Constitution, not to the government, and it specifically includes the proviso of protecting the nation against "all enemies, foreign and domestic". If there are traitors here, they are the ones who violated the Constitution, the ones who helped conceal those violations, and the ones who saw all this happening and said nothing.
> Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government.
While I don't buy into the "Snowden is a traitor" argument (as traitor has a specific Constitutional definition for a reason, unlike any other crime), you can certainly be guilty of espionage even if you also provide information to the American public.
E.g. The Soviet spies who got information on American nuclear weapons development programs were clearly guilty of espionage; note that this is true even if they didn't actually manage to get the information to their Soviet case handlers.
But if they leaked those same nuclear weapons programs to the American public (and by extension, the world public) in addition to their Soviet case handlers they'd still be guilty of espionage.
Snowden is the Manning case all over again. You can make an argument for whistleblowing for information he revealed showing crimes committed against the American people. For literally all other information (stuff that doesn't reveal crimes, stuff that reveals the NSA doing its literally assigned security mission, etc.) it's illegal espionage, whether the American public happened to be CC'ed or not.
If I give secret information to Bob, and Bob gives it to the enemy, that could land me on the hook for giving it to the enemy. Bob may not be at fault, either, since I'm the one that signed the secret clearance agreement with the government, not him.
I think this is all besides the point, though. Unless I'm missing something big, Snowden's crimes are all conditions of his having a security clearance.
Agreed - one might think Snowden misguided, but his reasonings seem to hold up given certain prior assumptions (e.g., allegiance to the constitution).
I would also be quite shocked if other major Powers didn't have a really good idea of what exactly the NSA is doing: they probably know better than most publics. Spies are gonna spy on spies, and that should be expected. The question is the limits on the spying the law & polity have put in place. I agree with Snowden that the polity of the US has a right to understand the scope of what's being done in their (our) name (specifics I think are quite fine being kept to trade secrets).
> That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise.
I've been as confused as Andreessen about the fact that there's been such a huge outcry (which is great per se) after decades of complacency. For those of us who found the NSA to be despicable before Snowden's leaks, I feel like there was just a feeling of resignation that people just didn't care (even in tech circles like HN). It was a similar feeling to
thinking about climate change in the late 90s/00s. I considered what you're describing as a potential cause, but I ruled it out because of the HUGE disparity between the reaction to this and the reaction to the warrantless wiretapping scandal of the 2000s. Wasn't that spying on American citizens as well? Why do you suppose that was essentially ignored by most people while this has become such a significant issue for so many?
I think the difference is that people could rationalize that warrantless wiretapping would never happen to them -- it was something that only happened to "criminals" -- whereas the new revelations show that the NSA is indeed spying on all of us all the time.
(I'm not saying I agree that warrantless wiretapping is not a problem -- just that I can see how it might not grab people.)
One of the revelations has simply been the capability level. The estimated computing and storage capacity of the NSA has long been treated as something of a growing constant in privacy equations and concerns that were waved off as tinfoil hat syndrome ten years ago happen to be absurdly commonplace.
And that is a reason that foreign countries should be concerned about doing business with american companies. There are questions as to whether major players were complicit or were infiltrated, but it was foolish not to expect infiltration at a minimum.
Anyway, fuck Marc Andreesen. He's on the wrong side of history if he thinks that the massive surveillance apparatus recording us through our social media apps should have been kept secret so that his portfolio would continue performing as expected.
That is the psychological profile of a traitor and he deserves a sound kick in the balls for using his influence and media reach to say this sort of nonsense.
I wouldn't accept investment money from him after this.
That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_.
You may have assumed that. I have always thought of the NSA as harvesting whatever signals they can pick up, not just analyzing known vectors like numbers stations or military radio traffic. I mean think about it, how are you going to find new hostile communications patterns if you don't do broad-spectrum data collection? It's not like you can just spider al-qaeda.com and follow the links you find there; for that matter foreign government signals traffic for espionage purposes isn't necessarily going to be hosted on government websites. I doubt that (for example) Russian spies check in with Kremlin.ru weekly, don't you? Ideally, you would not want to depend on any .ru address.
I don't think there are spies everywhere or anything like that, but the fundamental nature of espionage is that participants don't wear uniforms and instead employ informal and ad-hoc methods of communication - exactly the sort of patterns you look for in metadata analysis.
> [...] the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to [...]
I really fail to see which part of the Snowden revelations does directly help foreign agencies. They probably knew most of the things he disclosed years before, because it's their job to know in contrast with the average citizen who has other things to worry about.
>That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies.
Respectfully, I don't know how you could be surprised they were spying on everyone if you followed NSA news. We've had a consistent stream of leaks for _decades_ indicating that the NSA consistently expanded their capabilities to whatever the technology was capable of. Do you remember ECHELON? William Binney? AT&T fiber taps? Warrantless wiretapping? What else would those massive datacenters be for?
"What else would those massive datacenters be for?"
Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt.
Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.
Most of the shock over the NSA revelations is not to those of us who kept tabs and trusted the disclosures, but to the huge number of people that refused to accept that they could be true.
People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything.
But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it.
People are blind to it.
I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA.
Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan.
The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised.
The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter.
And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe.
Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.
I'm disappointed in Andreessen. It appears that a major part of his concern is the damage done to US firms trying to do business abroad. This damage, apparently, completely outweighs and potential damage to our liberties occasioned by trampling on rights that we won by painful and bloody struggles.
This is a really odious quote, especially if you read carefully. He says Obama is doing too little to counter the perception. In other words it's okay if you break the law, violate the constitution, and create enormous opportunities for institutional corruption as long as the perception remains intact and you don't get caught.
It seems that his major concern in all of this is money. This is a guy who will happily take ethyl bromoacetate out of Zyklon B if theres a buck to be made.
The good news is that there are tons of VCs out there who are really good and are well aligned with our opinions and interests. There is absolutely no need to talk to these guys much less take money from them.
Right now I'm reading a brilliant book on domestic abuse [1], and it talks about how abusers create double binds. E.g., family is supposed to go to a birthday party, but at the last minute the abusive dad blows up at something the mom says and refuses to let anybody go until she apologizes. The kids pressure mom to give a false apology so they can go. If she doesn't, she's the one who ruined the outing, not dad. If she does, she confirms that she's the problem, and later the kids are upset when she doesn't stick up for them. Meanwhile, the dad's tantrum is entirely out of scope of discussion, as is the repeated pattern of behavior.
The governmental theory that they could try to hoover up every detail of every digital interaction and never get found out was always insane. It wasn't a question of if that would come out, it was when. I find it hard to believe nobody internally asked that, but either way they are the ones to blame for the consequences, not Snowden.
[1] Lundy Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That?", http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519.... It's the single most astute thing I've read. It's one of those books where it's nominally about a relatively narrow topic, but I keep saying, "Well, this explains X! And that explains Y!" If anybody would like a copy, email me; it's good enough I want everybody to have read it.
this really hurts the respect I had for Andreessen. Really wish he didn't make that statement. Snowden is NOT a traitor, he is a bringer of truth, truth which will ultimately set us free, how can that be a bad thing?
He is believer of $$$. Someone (or some org such as NSA ) is stopping the China and others from buying the product/using the service his VC firm is investing it. That's what really upset him the most.
Under what circumstances is hiding the truth beneficial? If the truth is in someway upsetting then something should be done to fix it instead of wishing they were still ignorant of it.
I disagree with Marc, but he brings up a number of good points, so the video is worth watching.
And yeah, many people have known/could surmise that NSA was watching all. At least those people who paid attention to ECHELON, Cryptome, and James Bamford.
But Snowden's point was to get NSA's activities known to the general population, not the cypherpunks and tinfoilers. I'm unsure Marc sees or cares about this point.
I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had on "U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas," and yet he talks about Snowden.
Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. They are the ones that are intercepting American technology products, like Cisco routers, and modifying them before shipping them overseas. All without (as far as we know) the knowledge or consent of the companies that make the products.
All American technology products are now suspect, in ways they never have been perceived in the past. Not because of the NSA spying on foreign countries, or collecting domestic meta data. But because the NSA is now tampering with American technology products and companies.
The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.
This is the point. The actions of the NSA have irreparably damaged the reputation of American technology companies, and all Andreessen does is shoot the messenger.
Which part? Andreessen taking his anger out on Snowden or the NSA's tampering? To the latter, yes, yes I do. If for no other reason than the consequences of such tampering are obvious if ever discovered and nothing ever stays secret forever. They made the decision and we can only assume they did it knowing full well what would happen should it ever come to light, leak or not. Would things have been much different if this was discovered 5 years from now? How about 10? Can we assume they would stop tampering with equipment at any point without disclosure?
IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.
> I find it odd that Andreessen seemed most upset about effects the disclosures have had
Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders.
The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client.
These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately).
Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life.
Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.
I get that. But instead of saying "I'm upset with how the NSA's actions are impacting the revenue/growth of our technology sector, which is a major source of new jobs in the US, etc etc" he is talking about he thinks Snowden is a traitor.
This feels like a wasted opportunity.
He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.
From his point of view it's not NSA's abuse that caused the problem, but the actual whistle blowing that exposed that abuse. Were it to remain secret there would have been no damage.
I don't condone such an amoral approach, but at least he's honest.
The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.
Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be.
He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.
I think Andreesen's anger is misplaced. He should be railing against the NSA for what they were doing, not against Snowden for simply revealing it, vis-a-vis the harm being done to US companies.
I also think Andreesen is dead-wrong to call Snowden a traitor. One of the most essential principles of having a free and open society is having a government which is transparent, and which is accountable to We The People. Many of the things our government has done, and is doing, belong in the playbooks of 3rd world dictatorial regimes, or totalitarian governments like WWII era Germany, or Soviet era Russia, etc.
Secret laws? Secret courts? Secret legal interpretations? National Security Letters (something that acts like a warrant but isn't a warrant)?? Government agencies that spy on pretty much everybody in the world? Agency officials who are apparently allowed to lie to Congress with impunity???
"The Snowden reveals keep coming out. The [Obama] administration is letting the NSA out to dry. They're letting the American tech industry out to dry," Andreessen said.
Obama could hardly be construed as letting the NSA out to dry. If anything, Obama has gone on record as having the NSA's back and making sure that they are protected from the consequences of their wrongdoing. Obama's pro-NSA actions are in stark contrast to his pre-election discourses on this topic. You'd think that he would love the opportunity to make good on one of his campaign promises rather than double down on the opposite as he's chosen to.
Andreessen's complaints about hurting the tech industry probably wouldn't exist if Obama had thrown the NSA under the bus. The reason American companies are getting blowback is because of how unrepentant the government appears.
I'm not sure why we care what Andreessen thinks. I wish I had a downvote.
Second, he seems to be saying Snowden is a traitor because his revelations are hurting the US tech industry. I can see why that would make Andreessen feel betrayed, but that is hardly the definition of traitor.
Third, as others have said, nobody was surprised the NSA is spying. We're surprised it is conducting pervasive electronic surveillance in the US. (Personally, I'm horrified although not surprised by the scope of the spying outside the US. I would strongly support extending privacy protections to everyone, as unrealistic as that idea is.)
Finally, if we're going to get definitional, Snowden is certainly a traitor. He clearly broke the law, betrayed the trust placed in him and it seems very likely he would be convicted of treason. However, I also think he did the right thing for the right reasons.
If we're going to get "definitional," Snowden is not a traitor. "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Setting aside for the moment the definition of "Enemies" - a notion that is usually reserved for wartime - it is difficult to see how Snowden's revelations gave comfort to anyone, and aid only in the sense of "Oh, and by the way, we're reading your emails and listening to your phone calls," which any sane "enemy" already suspected. Witness the precautions the Osama bin Laden camp took to never let any electronic communication originate from their hiding place in Pakistan.
Snowden violated his contract with the NSA and broke the law, but neither of these amounts to treason.
People like to punish the messenger bearing bad news, for some bizarre reason.
American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected."
And the patient blames him for the injury.
All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now.
This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future.
I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time.
In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.
And there went any shred of respect I might have had for Andreessen.
Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.
No, he's upset that Snowdenrevealed that the government is doing things that affect his investments. His comments make it sound like the government is neutral or somehow the victim in this.
Listen to his statement again. He believes that foreign governments -- who already knew about US spy operations -- are using Snowden's leaks as political cover to enact protectionist policies. After all, every other wold power engages in exactly the same type of behavior. But, without a Snowden of their own, they don't have the PR problem that the US does.
Very much agreed. That fact that the consequences hurt his world is why is he wants to publicly shame Snowden as a traitor. If Andreesen can't see past investments and actually into public policy and our rights as American citizens, I'm very worried.
True, he didn't bring it up. But he also made it clear that he is largely unconcerned about what the NSA is doing per se. Making it clear he thought "everyone knew" and that nobody should be surprised that they're doing this. He seems surprised that it's causing a big stink.
But in his answer regarding the economics, that issue he describes as a big problem. Notice the word choices.
Jeeze, no kidding. ~"oh, I just assumed everybody knew this was happening", ~"this is d just what I thought was happening after following the NSA and reading all the books"
Thinking is different than knowing, no?
And, not everyone reads this stuff, so just because they don't have time to read all these books, etc they should not know?
Exactly. And everybody knowing is different than only a few people knowing. I read the books. Convincing people to be skeptical of the 'party line' was fruitless and frustrating. The gov't should have taken Thomas Drake and Bill Binney seriously.
I don't particularly respect Andreessen's position on this issue. But then, this isn't a huge surprise to me - he's espoused similar views on Hacker News before. It's been fairly obvious in his writings about Bitcoin, Carl Icahn, startups, etc. that he's out for his own bottom line, he defends his own self-interest, and if people are pissed off about that, oh well.
But you also have to admit that he's done a lot to bring technology to the masses, to educate prospective founders on what it's like to do a startup, and to make the current investment climate more founder-friendly. And he and his wife are two of biggest philanthropists in Silicon Valley.
I feel like most of the comments are from folks who put Andreessen up on a pedestal and only now just realized he's a flawed human being like the rest of us, with beliefs that we may not agree with. But that's par for the course; if you agree with everything that comes out of someone's mouth you have a cult, not a leader.
Andreesen and I have the same perspective that Snowden's leak was definitely not a "revelation." We both already assumed the NSA was spying because it's a spy organization. So, without any benefit, the only affect of Snowden's leaks are harmful to the US.
I took a venture capital class at Berkeley where I got to meet government groups from Russia, China, Poland (and a few others that escape me right now). They all shared a common goal of learning how Silicon Valley works so they can setup their own technology hubs in their home countries. Right now, Silicon Valley is a magnet for the best and the brightest in the world. Why wouldn't you be concerned that we're loosing that edge for no benefit?
No, there was a clear benefit from some of the revelations that were not commonly assumed pre-snowden.
You're telling me that, pre-snowden, you assumed that governments were inserting moles into open-standards processes and working to weaken ciphers ?
Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?
Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?[1]
I mean, I think we all thought in terms of traffic intercept and the worst-case scenario of a "global observer" ... but I know I for one was very complacent about how protected my SSL and SSH traffic was.
>You're telling me that, pre-snowden, you assumed that governments were inserting moles into open-standards processes and working to weaken ciphers ?
Yes. The first conversation I had about this was in the 90s
>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?
Yes. I know the TSA goes through my luggage when I fly, why wouldn't the NSA go through my mail? Intercepting physical communications/packages has literally been going on for thousands of years.
>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?
Hadn't thought of that but it's really not a revelation. We do know that when companies are contacted by the NSA, they are barred from even acknowledging that they were contacted. Again, the first conversation I had about the NSA inserting back doors into consumer technology was in the 90s. This is a novel approach but the general modus operandi is expected.
I think most people just don't appreciate what the NSA is. This is the organization that invented public key cryptography a decade before Ron Rivest and didn't publish the results. It wouldn't surprise me if they had made large advances in quantum cryptography that let them crack any cipher based on finite fields. I can imagine that all of this conventional spying is just a red herring to distract from much more insidious capabilities.
I can imagine their capabilities extend beyond computer networks to the power grid...
The point is that we funnel huge sums of money into an organization that hires the best and the brightest to spy on us. Why would you assume they aren't doing that well?
But, at the end of the day, I just look at the Snowden "revelations" as another Bengahzi or Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The political opposition will use it as a tool to further their interests but no one really cares. No domestic representative is going to cut funding to the NSA and no foreign government is going to act any differently when it comes to their security. They will get on the news and make a lot of noise as they use this as political cover to advance whatever ax they have to grind. But, I can't imagine them actually caring that the NSA spies on US citizens.
Why are you misrepresenting what Andreesen was saying? Are you not capable of addressing his assertion that the Snowden leaks are being used as political cover?
I would not under almost any circumstances, including the revelation that he was working directly with the FSB† when he decided what to leak, use the word "traitor" to describe a national security leaker. In addition to being inaccurate, the word sucks all the oxygen out of the room and makes it impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about what happened.
But if you can get past Andreesen's unfortunate choice of framing††, this story is useful as an indicator of how captive we are to our filter bubbles. The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird. Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that.
Finally, regardless of how I feel about Snowden, I agree (for once) with the consensus opinion of the HN thread that if there's economic blowback to the revelations, it's hard to pin that on Snowden. The only way I could see that being valid is if Snowden made up his own facts and was then taken seriously. Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility, but the most outlandish claims seem to have been widely dismissed by now.
† Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins.
†† You're not required to get around it; you might believe in a corollary to "bad facts make bad law" and think that continuing a discussion that has already been poisoned is a waste of time.
I'm an European and treason and espionage are political crimes (they not against universal ethics in any way). If Snowden is a traitor, then he spied on my behalf against U.S. government. For me and many other citizens of so called free word he is a hero. He should get a medal.
In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies?
First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.
I'm not a good person to argue with about Snowden's status as a traitor or a spy, because I don't think he is one either.
As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.
(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)
You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).
"I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them"
That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.
First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.
It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.
Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.
Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.
Europe has no scars: They still have the laws. Germany is doing a big push to bring all their cloud hosted data back in the country - because the German process for requiring data on German citizens requires no judicial oversight, and they regularly request vast swaths of data for minor crimes.
No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.
IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.
It's funny you should mention Poland, what with Operation Hyacinth.
And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.
Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.
You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.
But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.
Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.
> Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive.
So that giant data center in Utah isn't being turned against the American people? Maybe it could be demolished before it is used that way, and we could swap the NSA's budget for the BND's.
Taking away the NSA's money is the only way to trust that it's operations against Americans are curtailed.
The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.
I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.
London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.
People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)
There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.
This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)
As a German, I must disagree. It might seem that the situation with the German intelligence services is as bad as, for instance in France, but on closer observation, this is not true. There are multiple reasons:
1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.
2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.
3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.
You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.
Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.
EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.
If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.
Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).
It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.
> Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.
Worse now, perhaps. But remember that Snowden's original point, immediately after the leaks became public but before he became so outspoken against the USG, was that he wasn't worried about controls on NSA per se. He was worried that the controls on NSA were mostly policy instead of law; mostly internal and non-transparent instead of external and public.
In his words, NSA was only a single Administration away from being a "turnkey tyranny". Isn't that true for Germany too, if parliamentary control is laughable? Just because Germany inherited a lousy foreign intelligence service doesn't mean anything about what they can do in the future. Honda and Hyundai both used to make some of the worst cars on the world market.
Oh, I believe my own government(s) are spying on me. My native government (Norway) was finally caught in the mid-90's carrying out extensive illegal political spying. I have no illusions they're not still carrying out distasteful surveillance - not least because they're proudly admitting to handing data to the NSA (though the admissions makes absolutely no sense, and they're likely lying about what data they're handing over).
And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.
My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:
Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.
It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.
And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?
Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.
This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.
Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.
Well said. There are some exceptionally hateful things openly said by those in power (especially in the US) that face no repercussions. It isn't a stretch to imagine similar people working within the intelligence community. Perhaps they don't work there today but there's nothing stopping them working there tomorrow. Again the US has a history of abusive surveillance, the FBI has a very checkered past to say the least. I especially don't like what I'm hearing about the relationship between the DEA and the Mexican drug cartels. We really must not be complacent about abuses by these organizations. By the time it is indisputable that they have been subverted, it will probably be too late to change them.
>I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them.
Most European countries don't do mass surveillance. In my country there are two spy agencies, civilian and military one, and they both have less than 200 people working for them. their budgets are just too small for large scale spying.
> a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
There is nothing wrong with cooperation and SIGINT. Spy agencies should spy and exchange information. It's the mass surveillance that is the most problematic aspect.
Sure, the Dutch secret service is just as bad-intentioned as the NSA. We knew this already, and it got once more underlined by some NL-related fall-out from Snowden's leaks.
Of course they do not have the resources, the means or the opportunities to enact such global pervasive surveillance as the NSA is doing. Almost none of the other secret services even come close.
Some of them would love to if they could, but only the NSA is in that position (mostly due to so much bits of Internet traffic routing in some way or another through US servers).
Only the NSA is actually doing it to this extremely insane extent.
Think about that next time you're frustrated.
Of course I care about my own government spying on me. I care a hell of a load more about some other government (one that shouldn't have any business with my life) spying on the whole fucking planet. Is that so hard to understand??
The US and UK are not the only mass surveillance countries - as the Snowden revelations have confirmed, virtually every first world power is. It looks more to me as if the only countries not engaging in mass surveillance are those without the resources to do so.
It is not clear to me why the fact of foreign surveillance alone should have greater consequences for the US than for France, Germany, etc. To me it appears the NSA revelations have been exploited by certain political factors, especially in Europe, to strengthen their own mass surveillance efforts; for example, it strains credulity for me to believe European efforts to get more services located in Europe because of the NSA revelations are really for your protection and not so the BND and other European surveillance organizations can access the servers directly without having to negotiate for them with the NSA in a tit-for-tat. That would contradict everything we know about mass surveillance programs in European countries.
Blanket #surveillance, a domestic enemy to the Constitution? Discuss...
"I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will support & defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign & domestic...that I will bear true faith & allegiance to... same [constitution]; that I take this obligation freely, without any... purpose of evasion..."
4th Amendment to said U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, & effects, ... against unreasonable searches & seizures, shall not be violated, & no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, & ... particularly describing the place to be searched, & the persons or things to be seized."
---
If the NSA's ability to spy is a critical piece of national security -- then that which opposes it is a national security threat. It isn't the Greenwalds or the Applebaums who are the targets, it is the people who are elected President, run for Congress, or run big technology companies. The only people who have come close to spelling this out are Senator Ron Wyden and Bill Binney. That was before Snowden's leaks.
I'm not impressed by tech's leadership on this. Their fear today will mean a new generation will see secret pervasive surveillance as a feature to be added to; and perhaps that generation already does.
> If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.
What isn't true anymore (replace Germany with Pakistan for an extreme example) and don't really matter anymore, because it looks like all the mafias that own governments are supporting each other nowadays.
> If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.
Patently false. See, among numerous other incidents and legal cases, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). The US can and does arrest foreign citizens in foreign countries for offenses committed in foreign countries without the consent of any foreign country, and has done so overtly for quite a long time.
That is a disquieting case that sets an insane precedent, but note that it does not enable the USG to use unwarranted foreign SIGINT to introduce evidence in a criminal case. (Hopefully this comment clarifies instead of sounding dismissive; that citation was very helpful).
> That is a disquieting case that sets an insane precedent, but note that it does not enable the USG to use unwarranted foreign SIGINT to introduce evidence in a criminal case.
That's what parallel construction is for, which is rather orthogonal to the issue of whether the target is a foreign citizen located in a foreign country at the time of the arrest or a US citizen in the US at that time.
And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.
The parallel construction discussion is also very complicated. I should be clear: you're right, the comment made upthread about how noncitizens are insulated from the impact of US surveillance was not valid.
Parallel construction relies on having other law enforcement agencies available with which to conduct the parallel evidence (re-)gathering.
How would that work in a foreign country? It seems at the very least we'd have to have FBI or similar in their country (which limits the possibilities to nations with agreements that permit this).
The U.S. LE agent abroad would then still need to be able to detain and search for the evidence to re-locate, all while maintaining U.S. rules of evidence, and all while not getting arrested by the host nation in the process. The latter sounds like a guarantee to me if you should even whisper a hint that "parallel construction" is taking place over there.
A counter-argument is that Constitutional protections are not all considered to apply on foreign soil by U.S. courts, but given that these actions would be taken by an agent of the USG I'm still not sure how such a case doesn't get thrown out immediately.
> And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.
The fact that the person was in a foreign country doesn't mean that there isn't evidence available to domestic law enforcement agencies.
> But nor are the options literally infinite.
Sure, but while arrest and criminal prosecution may be more problematic (though not impossible) with a foreign citizen in a foreign country, extrajudicial killing is generally less problematic there, largely for political reasons (and, in large part, as a consequence of the perception that arrest and criminal prosecution is more difficult.)
So, I wouldn't agree that being outside of the USA makes you safer from any consequences imposed by the US government as a result of surveillance information gathered by the NSA.
> Sure, but while arrest and criminal prosecution may be more problematic (though not impossible) with a foreign citizen in a foreign country, extrajudicial killing is generally less problematic there, largely for political reasons (and, in large part, as a consequence of the perception that arrest and criminal prosecution is more difficult.)
Yes, that's a good point. Even with some form of executive due process it will never be likely that foreigners abroad have more or equal Constitutional protections than citizens on U.S. soil, and the NSA could tie back into that.
The argument was basically "Mexico didn't say we couldn't do it based on the extradition treaty, even tho they were aware of the Ker doctrine under which we'd be allowed to do this when the treaty was negotiated". So the argument was that there was consent (based on the Extradition Treaty).
That is very, very different than them saying "We can kidnap someone from county X for reason Y without an extradition treaty in place."
It was them basically saying "Mexico agreed to the unspoken terms that we'd use our legal precedents that preceded the treaty unless expressly forbidden to do so."
So, Mexico consented by way of treaty and by not excluding forcible abduction (which was considered legal at the time the treaty was signed). That isn't the same as "did not consent". That is the Mexican government saying "Oops, we consented 60 years ago but we want to take it back now. We just forgot to mention it."
https://www.aclu.org/safe-free/united-states-v-alvarez-macha...https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/504/655/case.htm...
"(b) Neither the Treaty's language nor the history of negotiations and practice under it supports the proposition that it prohibits abductions outside of its terms. The Treaty says nothing about either country refraining from forcibly abducting people from the other's territory or the consequences if an abduction occurs. In addition, although the Mexican Government was made aware of the Ker doctrine as early as 1906, and language to curtail Ker was drafted as early as 1935, the Treaty's current version contains no such clause. Pp. 663-666."
If I may add, they also seem to KILL foreign people without asking anyone for permission/consent/support/whatever. Of course, Osama Bin Laden is an extreme case, but still...
The NSA is a military agency. The Military is not afforded police powers. The NSA is restricted in its ability to cooperate with the FBI. Furthermore, any illegally gathered evidence is tossed out before it is told to the jury.
The US is allowed to spy on its citizens, as appropriate under the 4th amendment. IE: With warrants, due process, and all that good stuff. When the DoJ / FBI fails to comply with the rules, illegal evidence is tossed out before trials even begin.
On the books, legally and in front of a judge, the NSA and DEA are not allowed to work with each other. Parallel Construction is a (probably illegal) technique that DEA agents are using right now to get around the legal authorities.
But it involves DEA agents lying under oath towards judges. IE: I don't think the practice of parallel construction is going to hold up in courts in the long term.
Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility
Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.
Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.
Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.
Dividing the world into "Snowden's allies" and "Snowden's opponents" harms your ability to learn what really happened. I am not one of Snowden's allies, but I also don't attend the secret meetings of the "Hang Snowden For Treason" society.
> and makes it impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about what happened.
I don't mean to nitpick, but why would you want to be dispassionate about your rights?
If anything, being dispassionate has caused the steady erosion of our rights. Americans are asleep at the wheel and not looking out for the greater world (& their own) interests.
Instead, Americans dispassionately accept being told what to think and what to dream of.
Now detachment, I can get behind. But feel what you feel. It's good for you.
To play devil's advocate, one could argue that there are two separate narratives being employed by Snowden and the journalists he entrusted.
The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on.
The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere.
Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner.
In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight.
In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests.
Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate.
As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.
> The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird.
Of course it's weird. In one breath he says Snowden gave US national security secrets out to "everybody on the planet" and then proceeds to claim what came out shouldn't be surprising because everyone could have known already.
Either it's public knowledge or it's secret.
And that's not even counting the public knowledge and suspicions that, a year ago, simply weren't taken seriously because they was too far into tinfoil hat territory.
Now we know for sure that shit is going on, and people can form a real opinion about it and speak up about those opinions without immediately being labelled a paranoid schizophrenic, because we can't deny it any more either.
Read that again maybe, if you don't see how that's a huge deal, even if his revelations were merely things we already sort-of knew and suspected.
If that's not weird, it's at least stupid and disingenuous.
BTW there was no reason (at all) to insinuate the idea of Snowden working together with the FSB in the first sentence of that post of yours, similarly as there's no evidence at all that you're hired as part of one of those psyops campaigns to downplay all things related to Snowden/NSA here on HN, none at all. You know I feel really dirty for just writing this and planting that idea? Why didn't you?
This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.
Never like @pmarca. This is another perspective on who this guys really is. His involvement in the Bitcoin bubble is very indicative on the human material he's made of.
Andreessen comes across as amoral here. Actually, that's not completely correct; he believes what's right is anything that helps his bottomline, and anything that hurts his bottomline is wrong.
It's a very similar argument that Lanny Breuer put forth in not going after wall street.
"broadcasting an opinion that is extremely unpopular with the people who make up his dealflow?"
What do you think the actual net effect of that will be though? That Andreesen will actually lose out on the best or many deals?
Not only do people have short memories, but money and opportunity smooth over many problems in people's minds. Rationalization. [1] I remember reading how up in arms people were about MIT and Schwartz. Some alum threatened to pull support. So how many actually did? (I don't know the answer).
Of course if the "brand" continues to broadcast opinions on an ongoing basis that are unpopular that's a different story.
[1] Faced with economic opportunity the tobacco industry spreading around wealth and business opportunities did pretty well for many years.
Andreessen is a "grand master" when it comes to tech/startups. I really do respect his insights, he's obviously a very intelligent person. However, in this case, it seems Andreessen is not much of a student of history and government.
Anyone that listens to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" and "Common Sense" podcasts will know how dangerous these government powers can be.
I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so:
I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.
I remember that some of the talk at UIUC being that the school missed an opportunity there.
As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.
I really, really think we need a new breed of 'venture socialists' for the lack of better term that will optimize investment BOTH for potential returns and social good.
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[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadThat's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies.
Another thing is the wording - Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. That is a consequence of his disclosures. But this information was hidden from the American taxpayer (which is also easy to justify because we all don't have security clearances), but more egregiously, the information was hidden from Congressional Committees that actually have direct OVERSIGHT. And they have security clearances, so what's your excuse then?
So sure, the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to. But that was their full time job to find out and they are probably hardly surprised.
But thankfully, even Congress and the American public know exactly where our taxes are going. And we really aren't the enemy of the NSA.
What we ask our representatives to do with this information will say it all.
Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays.
Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody.
From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.
While I don't buy into the "Snowden is a traitor" argument (as traitor has a specific Constitutional definition for a reason, unlike any other crime), you can certainly be guilty of espionage even if you also provide information to the American public.
E.g. The Soviet spies who got information on American nuclear weapons development programs were clearly guilty of espionage; note that this is true even if they didn't actually manage to get the information to their Soviet case handlers.
But if they leaked those same nuclear weapons programs to the American public (and by extension, the world public) in addition to their Soviet case handlers they'd still be guilty of espionage.
Snowden is the Manning case all over again. You can make an argument for whistleblowing for information he revealed showing crimes committed against the American people. For literally all other information (stuff that doesn't reveal crimes, stuff that reveals the NSA doing its literally assigned security mission, etc.) it's illegal espionage, whether the American public happened to be CC'ed or not.
I think this is all besides the point, though. Unless I'm missing something big, Snowden's crimes are all conditions of his having a security clearance.
I would also be quite shocked if other major Powers didn't have a really good idea of what exactly the NSA is doing: they probably know better than most publics. Spies are gonna spy on spies, and that should be expected. The question is the limits on the spying the law & polity have put in place. I agree with Snowden that the polity of the US has a right to understand the scope of what's being done in their (our) name (specifics I think are quite fine being kept to trade secrets).
I've been as confused as Andreessen about the fact that there's been such a huge outcry (which is great per se) after decades of complacency. For those of us who found the NSA to be despicable before Snowden's leaks, I feel like there was just a feeling of resignation that people just didn't care (even in tech circles like HN). It was a similar feeling to thinking about climate change in the late 90s/00s. I considered what you're describing as a potential cause, but I ruled it out because of the HUGE disparity between the reaction to this and the reaction to the warrantless wiretapping scandal of the 2000s. Wasn't that spying on American citizens as well? Why do you suppose that was essentially ignored by most people while this has become such a significant issue for so many?
(I'm not saying I agree that warrantless wiretapping is not a problem -- just that I can see how it might not grab people.)
And that is a reason that foreign countries should be concerned about doing business with american companies. There are questions as to whether major players were complicit or were infiltrated, but it was foolish not to expect infiltration at a minimum.
Anyway, fuck Marc Andreesen. He's on the wrong side of history if he thinks that the massive surveillance apparatus recording us through our social media apps should have been kept secret so that his portfolio would continue performing as expected.
That is the psychological profile of a traitor and he deserves a sound kick in the balls for using his influence and media reach to say this sort of nonsense.
I wouldn't accept investment money from him after this.
You may have assumed that. I have always thought of the NSA as harvesting whatever signals they can pick up, not just analyzing known vectors like numbers stations or military radio traffic. I mean think about it, how are you going to find new hostile communications patterns if you don't do broad-spectrum data collection? It's not like you can just spider al-qaeda.com and follow the links you find there; for that matter foreign government signals traffic for espionage purposes isn't necessarily going to be hosted on government websites. I doubt that (for example) Russian spies check in with Kremlin.ru weekly, don't you? Ideally, you would not want to depend on any .ru address.
I don't think there are spies everywhere or anything like that, but the fundamental nature of espionage is that participants don't wear uniforms and instead employ informal and ad-hoc methods of communication - exactly the sort of patterns you look for in metadata analysis.
I really fail to see which part of the Snowden revelations does directly help foreign agencies. They probably knew most of the things he disclosed years before, because it's their job to know in contrast with the average citizen who has other things to worry about.
Respectfully, I don't know how you could be surprised they were spying on everyone if you followed NSA news. We've had a consistent stream of leaks for _decades_ indicating that the NSA consistently expanded their capabilities to whatever the technology was capable of. Do you remember ECHELON? William Binney? AT&T fiber taps? Warrantless wiretapping? What else would those massive datacenters be for?
Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt.
Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.
People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything.
But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it.
People are blind to it.
I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA.
Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan.
The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised.
The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter.
And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe.
Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.
Right now I'm reading a brilliant book on domestic abuse [1], and it talks about how abusers create double binds. E.g., family is supposed to go to a birthday party, but at the last minute the abusive dad blows up at something the mom says and refuses to let anybody go until she apologizes. The kids pressure mom to give a false apology so they can go. If she doesn't, she's the one who ruined the outing, not dad. If she does, she confirms that she's the problem, and later the kids are upset when she doesn't stick up for them. Meanwhile, the dad's tantrum is entirely out of scope of discussion, as is the repeated pattern of behavior.
The governmental theory that they could try to hoover up every detail of every digital interaction and never get found out was always insane. It wasn't a question of if that would come out, it was when. I find it hard to believe nobody internally asked that, but either way they are the ones to blame for the consequences, not Snowden.
[1] Lundy Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That?", http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519.... It's the single most astute thing I've read. It's one of those books where it's nominally about a relatively narrow topic, but I keep saying, "Well, this explains X! And that explains Y!" If anybody would like a copy, email me; it's good enough I want everybody to have read it.
And yeah, many people have known/could surmise that NSA was watching all. At least those people who paid attention to ECHELON, Cryptome, and James Bamford.
But Snowden's point was to get NSA's activities known to the general population, not the cypherpunks and tinfoilers. I'm unsure Marc sees or cares about this point.
Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. They are the ones that are intercepting American technology products, like Cisco routers, and modifying them before shipping them overseas. All without (as far as we know) the knowledge or consent of the companies that make the products.
All American technology products are now suspect, in ways they never have been perceived in the past. Not because of the NSA spying on foreign countries, or collecting domestic meta data. But because the NSA is now tampering with American technology products and companies.
The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.
IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.
Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders.
The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client.
These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately).
Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life.
Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.
I'm sadly surprised that there are still so many people willing to work on these things. :(
He's not angry about some moral issue, he's angry that revenue is going down.
This feels like a wasted opportunity.
He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.
I don't condone such an amoral approach, but at least he's honest.
Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be.
He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.
I also think Andreesen is dead-wrong to call Snowden a traitor. One of the most essential principles of having a free and open society is having a government which is transparent, and which is accountable to We The People. Many of the things our government has done, and is doing, belong in the playbooks of 3rd world dictatorial regimes, or totalitarian governments like WWII era Germany, or Soviet era Russia, etc.
Secret laws? Secret courts? Secret legal interpretations? National Security Letters (something that acts like a warrant but isn't a warrant)?? Government agencies that spy on pretty much everybody in the world? Agency officials who are apparently allowed to lie to Congress with impunity???
And he thinks Snowden is the problem? Get real...
Obama could hardly be construed as letting the NSA out to dry. If anything, Obama has gone on record as having the NSA's back and making sure that they are protected from the consequences of their wrongdoing. Obama's pro-NSA actions are in stark contrast to his pre-election discourses on this topic. You'd think that he would love the opportunity to make good on one of his campaign promises rather than double down on the opposite as he's chosen to.
Second, he seems to be saying Snowden is a traitor because his revelations are hurting the US tech industry. I can see why that would make Andreessen feel betrayed, but that is hardly the definition of traitor.
Third, as others have said, nobody was surprised the NSA is spying. We're surprised it is conducting pervasive electronic surveillance in the US. (Personally, I'm horrified although not surprised by the scope of the spying outside the US. I would strongly support extending privacy protections to everyone, as unrealistic as that idea is.)
Finally, if we're going to get definitional, Snowden is certainly a traitor. He clearly broke the law, betrayed the trust placed in him and it seems very likely he would be convicted of treason. However, I also think he did the right thing for the right reasons.
Snowden violated his contract with the NSA and broke the law, but neither of these amounts to treason.
American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected."
And the patient blames him for the injury.
All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now.
This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future.
I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time.
In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.
Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.
I guess fundraising with him is off :)
I don't see that - he didn't bring up the economic/business angle, the reporter did.
But in his answer regarding the economics, that issue he describes as a big problem. Notice the word choices.
Thinking is different than knowing, no?
And, not everyone reads this stuff, so just because they don't have time to read all these books, etc they should not know?
Seems like such strange thinking.
Exactly. And everybody knowing is different than only a few people knowing. I read the books. Convincing people to be skeptical of the 'party line' was fruitless and frustrating. The gov't should have taken Thomas Drake and Bill Binney seriously.
I don't particularly respect Andreessen's position on this issue. But then, this isn't a huge surprise to me - he's espoused similar views on Hacker News before. It's been fairly obvious in his writings about Bitcoin, Carl Icahn, startups, etc. that he's out for his own bottom line, he defends his own self-interest, and if people are pissed off about that, oh well.
But you also have to admit that he's done a lot to bring technology to the masses, to educate prospective founders on what it's like to do a startup, and to make the current investment climate more founder-friendly. And he and his wife are two of biggest philanthropists in Silicon Valley.
I feel like most of the comments are from folks who put Andreessen up on a pedestal and only now just realized he's a flawed human being like the rest of us, with beliefs that we may not agree with. But that's par for the course; if you agree with everything that comes out of someone's mouth you have a cult, not a leader.
I took a venture capital class at Berkeley where I got to meet government groups from Russia, China, Poland (and a few others that escape me right now). They all shared a common goal of learning how Silicon Valley works so they can setup their own technology hubs in their home countries. Right now, Silicon Valley is a magnet for the best and the brightest in the world. Why wouldn't you be concerned that we're loosing that edge for no benefit?
You're telling me that, pre-snowden, you assumed that governments were inserting moles into open-standards processes and working to weaken ciphers ?
Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?
Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?[1]
I mean, I think we all thought in terms of traffic intercept and the worst-case scenario of a "global observer" ... but I know I for one was very complacent about how protected my SSL and SSH traffic was.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/we-cannot-trust-inte...
Yes. The first conversation I had about this was in the 90s
>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?
Yes. I know the TSA goes through my luggage when I fly, why wouldn't the NSA go through my mail? Intercepting physical communications/packages has literally been going on for thousands of years.
>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?
Hadn't thought of that but it's really not a revelation. We do know that when companies are contacted by the NSA, they are barred from even acknowledging that they were contacted. Again, the first conversation I had about the NSA inserting back doors into consumer technology was in the 90s. This is a novel approach but the general modus operandi is expected.
I think most people just don't appreciate what the NSA is. This is the organization that invented public key cryptography a decade before Ron Rivest and didn't publish the results. It wouldn't surprise me if they had made large advances in quantum cryptography that let them crack any cipher based on finite fields. I can imagine that all of this conventional spying is just a red herring to distract from much more insidious capabilities.
I can imagine their capabilities extend beyond computer networks to the power grid...
The point is that we funnel huge sums of money into an organization that hires the best and the brightest to spy on us. Why would you assume they aren't doing that well?
But, at the end of the day, I just look at the Snowden "revelations" as another Bengahzi or Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The political opposition will use it as a tool to further their interests but no one really cares. No domestic representative is going to cut funding to the NSA and no foreign government is going to act any differently when it comes to their security. They will get on the news and make a lot of noise as they use this as political cover to advance whatever ax they have to grind. But, I can't imagine them actually caring that the NSA spies on US citizens.
But if you can get past Andreesen's unfortunate choice of framing††, this story is useful as an indicator of how captive we are to our filter bubbles. The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird. Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that.
Finally, regardless of how I feel about Snowden, I agree (for once) with the consensus opinion of the HN thread that if there's economic blowback to the revelations, it's hard to pin that on Snowden. The only way I could see that being valid is if Snowden made up his own facts and was then taken seriously. Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility, but the most outlandish claims seem to have been widely dismissed by now.
† Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins.
†† You're not required to get around it; you might believe in a corollary to "bad facts make bad law" and think that continuing a discussion that has already been poisoned is a waste of time.
In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies?
First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.
As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.
(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)
You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).
That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.
First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.
It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.
Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.
Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.
No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.
IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.
And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.
Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.
You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.
But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.
Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.
So that giant data center in Utah isn't being turned against the American people? Maybe it could be demolished before it is used that way, and we could swap the NSA's budget for the BND's.
Taking away the NSA's money is the only way to trust that it's operations against Americans are curtailed.
The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.
I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.
London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.
People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)
There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.
This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)
1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.
2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.
3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.
You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.
Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.
EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.
If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.
Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).
It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.
Worse now, perhaps. But remember that Snowden's original point, immediately after the leaks became public but before he became so outspoken against the USG, was that he wasn't worried about controls on NSA per se. He was worried that the controls on NSA were mostly policy instead of law; mostly internal and non-transparent instead of external and public.
In his words, NSA was only a single Administration away from being a "turnkey tyranny". Isn't that true for Germany too, if parliamentary control is laughable? Just because Germany inherited a lousy foreign intelligence service doesn't mean anything about what they can do in the future. Honda and Hyundai both used to make some of the worst cars on the world market.
And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.
My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:
Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.
It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.
And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?
Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.
This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.
Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.
Most European countries don't do mass surveillance. In my country there are two spy agencies, civilian and military one, and they both have less than 200 people working for them. their budgets are just too small for large scale spying.
> a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
There is nothing wrong with cooperation and SIGINT. Spy agencies should spy and exchange information. It's the mass surveillance that is the most problematic aspect.
Of course they do not have the resources, the means or the opportunities to enact such global pervasive surveillance as the NSA is doing. Almost none of the other secret services even come close.
Some of them would love to if they could, but only the NSA is in that position (mostly due to so much bits of Internet traffic routing in some way or another through US servers).
Only the NSA is actually doing it to this extremely insane extent.
Think about that next time you're frustrated.
Of course I care about my own government spying on me. I care a hell of a load more about some other government (one that shouldn't have any business with my life) spying on the whole fucking planet. Is that so hard to understand??
It is not clear to me why the fact of foreign surveillance alone should have greater consequences for the US than for France, Germany, etc. To me it appears the NSA revelations have been exploited by certain political factors, especially in Europe, to strengthen their own mass surveillance efforts; for example, it strains credulity for me to believe European efforts to get more services located in Europe because of the NSA revelations are really for your protection and not so the BND and other European surveillance organizations can access the servers directly without having to negotiate for them with the NSA in a tit-for-tat. That would contradict everything we know about mass surveillance programs in European countries.
"I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will support & defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign & domestic...that I will bear true faith & allegiance to... same [constitution]; that I take this obligation freely, without any... purpose of evasion..."
4th Amendment to said U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, & effects, ... against unreasonable searches & seizures, shall not be violated, & no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, & ... particularly describing the place to be searched, & the persons or things to be seized." ---
Who's committing the treason...?
I'm not impressed by tech's leadership on this. Their fear today will mean a new generation will see secret pervasive surveillance as a feature to be added to; and perhaps that generation already does.
If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.
However, when you spy domestically, the US citizen can't exactly defend himself and can get railroaded under National Security...then tossed in jail.
There is a very, very big difference between what domestic security forces can do to you vs. foreign ones.
What isn't true anymore (replace Germany with Pakistan for an extreme example) and don't really matter anymore, because it looks like all the mafias that own governments are supporting each other nowadays.
why arrest when we can blackmail them. (evil laugh)
Patently false. See, among numerous other incidents and legal cases, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). The US can and does arrest foreign citizens in foreign countries for offenses committed in foreign countries without the consent of any foreign country, and has done so overtly for quite a long time.
That's what parallel construction is for, which is rather orthogonal to the issue of whether the target is a foreign citizen located in a foreign country at the time of the arrest or a US citizen in the US at that time.
And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.
Parallel construction relies on having other law enforcement agencies available with which to conduct the parallel evidence (re-)gathering.
How would that work in a foreign country? It seems at the very least we'd have to have FBI or similar in their country (which limits the possibilities to nations with agreements that permit this).
The U.S. LE agent abroad would then still need to be able to detain and search for the evidence to re-locate, all while maintaining U.S. rules of evidence, and all while not getting arrested by the host nation in the process. The latter sounds like a guarantee to me if you should even whisper a hint that "parallel construction" is taking place over there.
A counter-argument is that Constitutional protections are not all considered to apply on foreign soil by U.S. courts, but given that these actions would be taken by an agent of the USG I'm still not sure how such a case doesn't get thrown out immediately.
> And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.
But nor are the options literally infinite.
The fact that the person was in a foreign country doesn't mean that there isn't evidence available to domestic law enforcement agencies.
> But nor are the options literally infinite.
Sure, but while arrest and criminal prosecution may be more problematic (though not impossible) with a foreign citizen in a foreign country, extrajudicial killing is generally less problematic there, largely for political reasons (and, in large part, as a consequence of the perception that arrest and criminal prosecution is more difficult.)
So, I wouldn't agree that being outside of the USA makes you safer from any consequences imposed by the US government as a result of surveillance information gathered by the NSA.
Yes, that's a good point. Even with some form of executive due process it will never be likely that foreigners abroad have more or equal Constitutional protections than citizens on U.S. soil, and the NSA could tie back into that.
That is very, very different than them saying "We can kidnap someone from county X for reason Y without an extradition treaty in place."
It was them basically saying "Mexico agreed to the unspoken terms that we'd use our legal precedents that preceded the treaty unless expressly forbidden to do so."
So, Mexico consented by way of treaty and by not excluding forcible abduction (which was considered legal at the time the treaty was signed). That isn't the same as "did not consent". That is the Mexican government saying "Oops, we consented 60 years ago but we want to take it back now. We just forgot to mention it."
https://www.aclu.org/safe-free/united-states-v-alvarez-macha... https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/504/655/case.htm... "(b) Neither the Treaty's language nor the history of negotiations and practice under it supports the proposition that it prohibits abductions outside of its terms. The Treaty says nothing about either country refraining from forcibly abducting people from the other's territory or the consequences if an abduction occurs. In addition, although the Mexican Government was made aware of the Ker doctrine as early as 1906, and language to curtail Ker was drafted as early as 1935, the Treaty's current version contains no such clause. Pp. 663-666."
The NSA is a military agency. The Military is not afforded police powers. The NSA is restricted in its ability to cooperate with the FBI. Furthermore, any illegally gathered evidence is tossed out before it is told to the jury.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
The US is allowed to spy on its citizens, as appropriate under the 4th amendment. IE: With warrants, due process, and all that good stuff. When the DoJ / FBI fails to comply with the rules, illegal evidence is tossed out before trials even begin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
NSA hands it over to the DEA who arrests you based on an investigation based on that information.
They've been doing it and getting away with it so I think your believe that the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree will protect you is false.
On the books, legally and in front of a judge, the NSA and DEA are not allowed to work with each other. Parallel Construction is a (probably illegal) technique that DEA agents are using right now to get around the legal authorities.
But it involves DEA agents lying under oath towards judges. IE: I don't think the practice of parallel construction is going to hold up in courts in the long term.
Ptacek's razor?
Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.
Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.
Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.
I don't mean to nitpick, but why would you want to be dispassionate about your rights?
If anything, being dispassionate has caused the steady erosion of our rights. Americans are asleep at the wheel and not looking out for the greater world (& their own) interests.
Instead, Americans dispassionately accept being told what to think and what to dream of.
Now detachment, I can get behind. But feel what you feel. It's good for you.
These are people that I would describe:
1) are in favor of establishment of totalitarian power 2) favor blaming the messenger over blaming the NSA's dogmatic and psychopathic overreach
The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on.
The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere.
Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner.
In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight.
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EDIT: I've moved this post from the duplicate thread; tptacek's reply can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468
In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests.
Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate.
As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.
Of course it's weird. In one breath he says Snowden gave US national security secrets out to "everybody on the planet" and then proceeds to claim what came out shouldn't be surprising because everyone could have known already.
Either it's public knowledge or it's secret.
And that's not even counting the public knowledge and suspicions that, a year ago, simply weren't taken seriously because they was too far into tinfoil hat territory.
Now we know for sure that shit is going on, and people can form a real opinion about it and speak up about those opinions without immediately being labelled a paranoid schizophrenic, because we can't deny it any more either.
Read that again maybe, if you don't see how that's a huge deal, even if his revelations were merely things we already sort-of knew and suspected.
If that's not weird, it's at least stupid and disingenuous.
BTW there was no reason (at all) to insinuate the idea of Snowden working together with the FSB in the first sentence of that post of yours, similarly as there's no evidence at all that you're hired as part of one of those psyops campaigns to downplay all things related to Snowden/NSA here on HN, none at all. You know I feel really dirty for just writing this and planting that idea? Why didn't you?
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.
Where are your principles now?
It's a very similar argument that Lanny Breuer put forth in not going after wall street.
What do you think the actual net effect of that will be though? That Andreesen will actually lose out on the best or many deals?
Not only do people have short memories, but money and opportunity smooth over many problems in people's minds. Rationalization. [1] I remember reading how up in arms people were about MIT and Schwartz. Some alum threatened to pull support. So how many actually did? (I don't know the answer).
Of course if the "brand" continues to broadcast opinions on an ongoing basis that are unpopular that's a different story.
[1] Faced with economic opportunity the tobacco industry spreading around wealth and business opportunities did pretty well for many years.
Anyone that listens to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" and "Common Sense" podcasts will know how dangerous these government powers can be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY
I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.
As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.