[str33t_punk]

What I find interesting is that my opinions on Edward Snowden have drastically changed over time.

When the leaks first came out, I regarded him as a hero, for exposing what the US Government was doing. At this time my view of the world was extremely America centric, where all other countries were pretty powerless and the US was the only one doing such deeds. I think this view was fairly naive.

In the last decade my thinking has changed. After seeing that Russia, China, many EU countries, Iran, and Israel have similar programs and are also weaponizing the internet, I've come to think of Edward Snowden as a traitor. It is not just the US doing these things, everyone is. He exposed the US's tools and has weakened the US's security position immensely. Countries like China and Russia are gaining in this new battlefield, and what advantage the US had has was lost with Snowden. It is now more like if he leaked the schematics of US weapons to Russia during the cold war. I find it telling as well that he fled to Russia.

I find many people have had a similar turn of opinion with Julian Assange. Perhaps it is because Geo Politics has simply gotten more confusing -- it does seem that America is no longer the 'World Police'

But on the other hand, he did wake up Americans to the concept of security. Once the cat was out of the bag that everyone was being spied on, and that governments have the power to breach systems, it seems that people have come to care more about these matters. I would say this a good thing

He is definitely a very interesting topic

[dTal]

It's not about inter-nation spying. It was about the NSA secretly spying on the US's own citizens, on its own companies. This is not acceptable, and that is why it's illegal - it subverts democracy. "China and Russia are doing it" is not an excuse for that - they are examples of countries we should not aspire to be like.

Also, regarding this geopolitical information warfare business - none of us were told about this, or asked if this was a game we wanted to play. That is not how democracy is supposed to work. Defense, sure. But the best defense against the current way that Russia/China is weaponizing the internet is sunlight, not secrecy. In this too, the NSA is derelict.

Also Snowden didn't "flee to Russia" - that's pure right-wing "talking point" (lie). His passport was suspended by the US State Department while on layover in Moscow.

[octosphere]

> I've come to think of Edward Snowden as a traitor

For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him.

Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...

[lern_too_spel]

> I find it telling as well that he fled to Russia

He didn't flee to Russia. He fled to Hong Kong, hoping to live a good life outside the great firewall by getting into the PRC's good graces via transfer of classified material to them. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266777/exclusiv...

Unfortunately for him, China just laughed at him and kicked him out.

If there's a lesson in all this, it's to pay attention in reading comprehension lessons in elementary school or you might misread documents, get paranoid, and flee to oppressive regimes.

[jascii]

The linked article talks about Snowden publishing data on US operations in China as parts of the leaks, it does not seem to corroborate your claim that he was trying to be "getting into the PRC's good graces via transfer of classified material to them".

[lern_too_spel]

He "published" that data by specifically leaking it to a Chinese newspaper. He was seeking asylum in Hong Kong at the time. Of course, Beijing did not want a prolonged diplomatic tussle with the US, so they could not let him stay. Their choices were to extradite to the US or to let him go somewhere else, and both options make it not their problem, so they let him (forced him to) go. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/10/hong-kong-edwa...

[jascii]

Yes published. the link you posted is a link to a publication. I am not sure what you are trying to insinuate with the rhetorical quotation marks.. The fact that it is a Chinese newspaper that publishes it seem logical, it is after all information of interest to the Chinese population. (I imagine a US paper's response being something like "NSA spies on China? Duh, that's their job..")

[lern_too_spel]

What legitimate reason is there for an American citizen to tell a Chinese newspaper about Chinese computer systems US intelligence agencies have compromised? Is it fine to leak information about CIA-compromised Russian systems as long as I leak it to Pravda and not the NYT or directly to GRU? Your distinction has no practical use.

Also, "published" because Snowden didn't publish anything. He showed documents to SCMP, which publishes a newspaper.

[mindslight]

The simple answer is that you have been consuming too much mass media, and have succumbed to its insidious bias.

This "weaponization" of the Internet narrative is based around casting vulnerabilities as if they're "nobody's fault", rather than mundane gross negligence. The digital realm inherently favors defenders - if there is no logic error, packets just bounce off. And this applies even in the less-certain psychological realm - foster a culture of rejecting sensationalized propaganda and it will no longer rule elections!

But a narrative based around shoring up defenses and being diligent would be pretty boring. And the news media certainly doesn't want to attack propaganda generally, merely stave off "Russian" propaganda to preserve their own authority. So the whole topic gets sensationalized as the age-old escalation-aimed status quo - governments saber ratting at each other to drum up internal support.

But free people are not countries and we are especially not governments. What Snowden exposed was how governments, specifically the US government, are attacking their own citizens in the name of this "security". Everybody involved in tech should have already known, but just didn't want to admit it to themselves because it is so "anti-American" and conflicts with the web 2.0 gravy train. Snowden certainly wasn't the first, but he was at the right time with the right information the public can grok (XKEYSCORE vs 641A).

Additionally, the government has no philosophical mandate without the oversight of and subservience to The People. If you want to throw around the term "traitor", look no further than these agencies that swear oath to the Constitution and then work to undermine it by escaping from its governance! No matter how much "collateral damage" was done to that game of USG spooks playing with other spooks, spilling the beans is justified to push these activities back under control of the People.

"Blindly trust us, we're working behind the scenes to keep you safe, but can't tell you how" is not the setup of a Free society. This is the overarching dynamic that the mass media generally downplays in their present narrative, preferring people identify with the power structure rather than emphasizing how it is acting against them.

[dTal]

>Everybody involved in tech should have already known

Yeah, I knew back in 2008 or so, well pre-Snowden, and it freaked me out. Room 641A was the major giveaway, but there were lots of little things. I told all my friends about it - and got shrugs. They either didn't care, or didn't believe me and wrote it off as conspiracy-theory nonsense. The sad fact is that it takes the media telling people something is a scandal before they'll believe it is one, and for that to happen there has to be an event to report on. Snowden's role was more that, and making the evidence really incontrovertible. Before that, what could we, as tech people, have done?

Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience. Only one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right". It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

[mindslight]

I don't know when I personally could claim to "know". It's more like reading rumors, looking at the motives of the parties, and accepting it as the most prudent understanding. Klein/641A was low level and so the major confirmation to technical people - we can extrapolate general implications from the fundamental setup. Binney addressed a higher level but was too early to be appreciated at large.

> "that can't possibly be happening" ... "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal"

At first glance these appear to be opposed, but they are actually both just cognitive dissonance modulo different unignorable facts.

> one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right".

This is called taking responsibility. The hurdle wasn't even the admitting you were right, but rather themselves coming to terms with the implications.

[torified]

>It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

Very perceptive. What blows me away is that even knowing the past, they still think the future won't be different.

I'm in Australia, and the amount of apathy is astounding.

Scary developments like the AABill which is to literally force citizen sysadmins to secretly spy on other citizens under threat of 10 years jail, with no oversight and no ability for legal representation.

Passed with bipartisan support, except for some amendments that were meant to happen in February which would have made the catastrophic bill just disastrous.

No amendments have happened, there is no media interest, and no concern from the lobotomized public.

[lern_too_spel]

> Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience.

It certainly was frustrating because "that" still isn't happening. It taught me the unpleasant fact that people will believe any conspiracy theory as long as a newspaper prints it, even if every other newspaper points out everything wrong with the conspiracy theory.