The Intercept later also leaked Reality Winner's identity, so that sounds plausible.

Greenwald was probably blackmailed with something worse than the foot video he posted.

I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.

Re 2): because you can't have a handful of extremely wealthy people in a completely equal world; so one wonders if enough accidental topplings of foreign democracies would not an "inequality" enforcement agency make?

Reading a bit, it's become somewhat apparent to me that that little independent government agency is the instability enforcer in order to sustain the world as a set of abstractions to keep people artificially poor: from cartels (involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), to toppling of budding democracies (IIRC, Iran 1953) ... further revealing they and their masters consider that progress is a zero-sum game for them.

> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.

They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since. I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though

Maybe Americans will rid of both of them...

His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.

He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/461578-snowden-ultimate-go...

Snowden did not take refuge in Russia. He was trapped there when his passport was cancelled by the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...

He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.

A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.

I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.

Not wanting to be subjected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... doesn't unmake someone a hero

As loud as possible? That's naive. They would have black bagged him instantly, no trial. In fact a public trial is his only stipulation for voluntary return - that this has been denied should tell you everything.

I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.

Being killed for your reporting happens to a lot of journalists. I think your comment about "dumb people choosing fear" is incredibly tone deaf. I don't see you risking your life to expose the Panama Papers and being blown up with a bomb for it. It's easy to write something so brave from behind your keyboard.

Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.

Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.

But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.

I like that terminology.

I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.

History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.

It's a figure of speech. It's short for "care enough to to take action."

Easy advice to give as a bystander lacking context (2013!), hard to follow as a "martyr" living in that context. It wasn't even clear whether he'd be a martyr (he could have easily turned the politics around, wouldn't be the first time in the American history).

these are potentially the same people that killed epstein?

now, i don't believe that but you never know.

He gave up his life in the US to tell the people what the gov is doing. It's not like he then went and said hey Putin need some help destroying America? He just fled because otherwise the US would throw him in a hole for the rest of his life. What good would that do? It's not about martyrdom it's about getting the information out there. The information is out. Him being in a hole wouldn't do anything good for anyone.

As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.

If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.

Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?

At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?

Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.

> I am still a citizen and so was he.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Wasn’t he departing from Hong Kong to Ecuador and was stuck in Russia because his passport was revoked in transit?

I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.

> If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.

"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"

Hence established! ^

He couldn't take the trip to Ecuador because his passport was revoked.

Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, and the fact that Snowden was traveling with a Wikileaks representative, is the likely reason for Ecuador being the originally chosen destination.

It may be ironic (for the US) and lucky (for Snowden) that he was in Russia when the passport was revoked. Likely one of the few places the US may hesitate kidnapping him from. From a kidnap / rendition viewpoint, Ecuador is just one country on a long list of countries to which the US would probably not hesitate 'arranging a small excursion'.

It's partially propaganda, partially a result of a number of accounts on HN which are unwaveringly sympathetic to the US FedGov no matter what moral atrocities it commits. We know the US IC conducts social influence operations in forums far more obscure than HN, like cryptographic steering committees, it wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of that going on here, too. That said, having known people who work in the US IC, I'm not entirely sure whether inorganic influence ops are even distinguishable from them "getting high on their own supply" of propaganda.

Let's be realistic, very few networks had speed-improving caches that weren't surveilled. Transparent proxying was most often used to inject malware and fourth-party ads, instead.

Of course it can. Just not without the user's knowledge and consent. Let the user load your CA and you can cache and repeat whatever you want.

In practice, those caches were all done for malicious purposes, usually for injecting ads and selling tracking information through injected headers.

Those shared caches were monitored just as strongly, if not stronger, by the people doing internet surveillance.

What???

The internet is only more concentrated because most people choose price and convenience over a foolproof level of security. The cost/effort required to surveil traffic in coordination with TLS-terminating CDNs is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to throw some high-Tbps middlebox in an IX rack to siphon every packet passing through it.

Can't cache interactive content which is probably more invaluable than static. HTTPS is overall a massive win, which is why NSA wanted to surveil it in the first place.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place is almost the literal definition of stuck.

Yes, I'm using analogies, but I know which of the two I would choose. The US has only gotten worse in it's introversion since, so his choice seems to be increasingly correct - if personal liberty is the priority.

I like to remind those with security clearances, which are really just hyper-NDAs, that the oath to the constitution supercedes any NDAs! Thats true allegiance to the US, which Snowden demonstrated, and very few people have the backbone to be/do.

GP is implying that Russia is his canonical home because Snowden was acting like a spy

> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?

If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?

You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.

This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.

This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.

Was that the first time a journalist was assassinated?

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His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!

I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.

People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.

> it changed absolutely nothing.

The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.

> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.

The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.

I can't even tell if this is posted in earnest, or satire, or some sort of highly advanced shitpost I am failing to grasp the nature of.

This is a classic Russian perspective on the war - that Ukraine is a gang of neo-Nazis that are dead set on eliminating Russian speakers from Ukraine by force. Russians will further claim that this gang of Russophobic neo-Nazis is led by Zelenskyy, a Jewish man who speaks Russian as his mother tongue and Ukrainian as a second language.

The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.

Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.

Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.

He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.

There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.

Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.

... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.

Very generous indeed.

far-right lunatic? do you have a source for this or an example

I read his substack, he seems to be critical of the US security state and not inline with alt-right principles at all

It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.

But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:

* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.

* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.

https://masternotions.com

I am not party to all the information, but he was never charged for the alleged misconduct and Die Zeit’s investigation didn’t find it convincing. Given how the Assange allegations fell apart, I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was a defamation campaign.

He didn’t help himself with some public conduct/comments that painted him unfavorably. So there is that aspect to consider. But the scope of the campaign against him felt excessive at the time, to me.

A longish life has taught me to believe vulerable women who open themselves to ridicule, mistreatment and attack for outing more-powerful men who harmed them.

The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.

dont confuse 'anti right' with 'left'.

There's a huge component of the left which is quite directly 'anti-authority', which they see in 'the right' in classical form.

It's a form of personal identity less than ideology.

You can spot them often by their total silence on Russian (or Chinese) Imperialism (and racism), as they try to blame the CIA for all the world's problems.

Or maybe he just realized that politics is just one big club and he ain't in it. And neither are the people.

His politics have been remarkably consistent over time. He’s always been a slightly left-leaning, anti-war civil libertarian who is deeply suspicious of government, particularly the US government. He’s been posting lately about how Trump has been starting or expanding unjust wars and cracking down on press freedom. That’s hardly a “right-wing fringe” slant.

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The level of desensitisation…

Neither of those are theories. Both are well documented and have had public hearings and governmental disclosure.

What? MKUlta is absolutely not a conspiracy theory.

I think tribalism is inherent in humans, as we our species evolved in a tribal fashion. It is also certain that billions and billions of dollars have been invested by the CIA (and their equivalent in other countries) to perfect propaganda techniques by taking advantage of the tribal instincts (among other things).

>I see smaller versions of it in communities and groups I'm part of or adjacent to. This is just the country / global scaled up version.

Couldn't agree more. The more insular a group is, the more severe the tribalism is. The bifurcation of information sources has certainly added to this. If the people in your tribe all listen to the same networks and sources of information, and all of the people in the other tribe listen to entirely different networks and sources of information, you end up with people that have very little sense of shared reality. Any dissension from tribal dogma very quickly renders someone a heretic or an outcast. This is also what makes tribalism so powerful as a propaganda tool. The dehumanization and "othering" of a person, or a group, or a country renders them intrinsically evil and worthy of attack by the tribe. Which in my opinion is the real danger of so-called AI. We've already seen what happens when people outsource their judgement and critical thinking to media and government institutions. When the masses outsource their judgement and critical thinking to a glorified autocomplete that is programmed with "weights" by those with an agenda, the masses will believe whatever is spit out by this machine and act accordingly.

Parochialism.

Both.

The first part because the second part.

"It's not in the officially released files that the government itself provided, therefore it didn't happen" is the level of 'reasoning' going on here.

By the standards of "jaw dropping things we heard" for which we now know there is no evidence. Not even any leaks of suggestive circumstantial evidence. Nothing to back the awful fantasies of things done to children. Zero.

Most, if not all of the highly compensated victims were adults when they met the turd Epstein and made decisions as adults. Their claims are untested and uncorroborated but they are massively compensated. Good for them, they're getting paid but the hysteria and panic cost us all. Note how none of the massively compensated can manage to claim anything verifiable involving crimes of sleazebags still living?

Dig up his ranch, sure, why not? Would you bet on anything resembling evidence being found? On the Island? In his NY appartments? All just a massive, highly coordinated, perfectly executed cover-up? Is the govt really that good to get perfectly right, 100% no errors? Under this kind of spotlight with so many looking out for it?

It's a great distraction and there is zero doubt that plenty in washington are taking full advantage. The corruption rages across the aisles.

Everything you think you know about Epstein's crimes, ask yourself "Where is the actual evidence for that?" When you start ignoring the podcast-claims for which there is nothing at all to back it. It starts to look more mundanely awful. Than some monumental bonfire of evil previously un-imagined. He went whoring with Bill Gates who got an STD and it's there in the files trashing Bill's reputation. That was left alone in the cover-up but their pedo ring behaviour perfectly removed without the suggestion of a trace?

People think there is this big conspiracy to conceal the evidence of a grand pedo ring but they didn't protect the moron formerly known as prince andrew from the fall, he'll be well angry if he knows things about a pedo ring so that would be hugely risky. Unbelievably so. Literally.

People want to believe all the worst fabrications. You don't need it, it's bad enough without all that. There's sleaze enough with evidence to prosecute. Prosecutions, starting with Andrew and Mandelson, should happen. And also for everyone else identified by evidence.

Not so much the completely innocent, ordinary people named by Massie and Khanna who aren't in those circles and for whom it seems vanishingly unlikely had anything much to do with Epstein at all, let alone involved in these most hideous of crimes. And who they've now gone completely quiet about having pointed squarely at them and yelled "Evil!"

It's a real shame the extent to which it has polluted rational policy discussion. There's a cost. The cost is larger than you think.

I remember that being reported in newspapers in 2020 but did those allegations make it into "The Epstein Files"? (I have paid almost no attention since it's the most obvious limited hangout ever hung out.)

Quite a large amount of people have little empathy. Someone getting blown up somewhere else is a them problem. "I've never been blown up, they must have done something wrong to deserve it (I have heard things like this come out of peoples mouths)". Now, quite often those same people with little empathy have their own children therefore have an empathetic connection to the theoretical victim allowing them to contemplate the terror those children experienced. This allows the situation to be much more viceral to them. Also, pedophila is an act that is highly stimtized in most places in the world so the social shame and disgust phenomenon also applies.

Everyone should be incandescent with rage about that as soon as there's some evidence of it. And 100% it should be fully investigated.

Is it real? Are you being played with a lie? The further out we get the more it looks like the latter. But hey, I'll take evidence of a cover up. Not seeing anything much there either.

Maybe some real evidence will come soon? Thet can't keep dark forever, it's too big, too many people have touched it.

Moderately wild speculation: the genocide is directly related to the Epstein stuff. We know he had close ties to Mossad, and material that can blackmail the current president. All Mossad has to do is say: do this or we release the surveillance video. And they have been trying to get the USA to invade Iran for decades.

That would be massive if true.

What evidence leads you to think Epstein ran blackmail rings on a loathsome and loathed sitting US president that led to him starting a war?

If that were true and you were looking for evidence of a cover up, what would you look for?

You are correct of course.

Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).

So his whistleblowing is actually a deliberate act of government transparency, in your estimation?

People can be wrong about things

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I read the GGP comment several times and I still have no idea what their point is.

Bait… Pegasus… honeypot? What? Decoding: is this indicating you’re ready with the honeypot to detect attempts to compromise you? Still makes little sense.

What democratically supervised institutions are being alluded to?