While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
In this framing what are the factions? What does geographically sorting mean - are the factions moving themselves from place to place?
Can we call that Overton window defenestration?
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.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
Interesting times indeed.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
"Irresponsible disclosure" for the short term may be equivalent to "responsible disclosure" for the long term.
There must be some pretty dark stuff yet to be disclosed, and/or some pretty overt threats for those relatively fearless journalists to close ranks. The "Assange example" may have done its job perfectly.
Snowden did ask them not to get into any direct military secrets that were in the leaks, so that could explain some of the restraint.
That's a pretty generous and kind way to say "became a far-right lunatic regurgitating the same talking points you see from AfD politicians". I don't know what the hell happened to that guy. But he clearly went off the deep end.
Very generous indeed.
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.
The women who outed Jason Applebaum knowingly opened themselves to some harsh treatment. I believe them.
A longish life has taught me to cast a very skeptical eye on anyone who comes out of the woodwork to cast evidence-free allegations on people who have raised the ire of the entire "national security" establishment.
It wasn't one. It was eight women who put themselves in the firing line of (mostly) men, who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
I believe them.
>who craft no end of reasons to not believe them.
The reason is that these allegations surfaced after he aroused the ire of the national security state. That's the end of the reason.
Greenwald didn't "have" to do anything. His politics took a sharp turn towards the right-wing fringe and he lost his original audience.
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.
Other than speaking up against the surveillance state, he's been solidly aligned with conservative viewpoints.
It's not people's views that are really changing, but those of the parties. A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC. I think that's a problem for the DNC that needs to be tackled, because it's self defeating.
2028, after this presidency, should be an overwhelmingly massive landslide the likes of Reagan-Mondale. But it's going to be a coin flip, and this sort of otherizing is precisely why.
You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.
Eventually, he touched a real nerve by speaking against vaccines, and had an instant following of very devoted crazy people.
He grifted that carefully for a while and partnered with DJT - a very similar kind of grifter of a different kind.
Neither of them are particularly principled, it's not reasonable to put them into some kind of camp.
RFK probably does have some very legit ideas about 'organic and environmentalism' I have no doubt, but they're behind layers of egoistic and geriatric incoherence. Just like DJT.
Greenwald might be just as close to RFK than he is to Snowden, who is relatively consistent. (Assange surely is).
Why? Well it's fairly obvious that some things like the internet are having some sort of a role, but in general nobody knows for certain. And so it's, at the minimum, quite reasonable to suggest that something, or more likely - some thingS, that we believe are completely safe, are not.
In living memory we believed that lobotomy was a great idea as a cure for various mental issues, that DDT was perfectly harmless - to the point that you'd have children playing in the large DDT fog clouds from neighborhood sprays, and so on. To imagine we now aren't doing the same thing, in ways that will seem equally absurd in the future, requires quite an unreasonable degree of arrogance and/or ignorance of the past and present.
... because hey, look at the thing we used to do that was bad!"
Is exactly the kind of absolutely horrible logic that RFK Jr. spews to his acolytes that causes the problems.
It's fine to be be an antagonist, but you have to have a high bar, which RFK Jr does not have, therefore, he's a liar and a scammer, along with the rest of them.
He's chosen for his position for his 'Tabloid PR' and appeal to people who want 'slogan solutions' to problems of our era.
We have to understand things before we start throwing around sand.
Please make an actual argument; tell us what "conservative" views he holds.
I’m not opposed to people hosting interviews with political opponents, and reasonable people shouldn’t be opposed to that either.
Your comment reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union: "This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Was it possible to criticize Hitler? We’re answering: Sure. The same way as you criticized Stalin. You had to lock yourself in your bedroom, hide under two, or better three covers, place a pillow, or better two pillows on top of the blankets over your head, and then whisper whatever your soul wishes about the dictator, strictly adhering to a five-minute limit." [1]
The USSR had constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech: "Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations." [2] But there are rights, and then there is ability to exercise those rights.
[1] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
[2] - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
A lot of what sounded extraordinary in 2013 is now baked into everyday discussion like metadata and mass surveillance. He is also available less for interviews because he is in Russia.
Basically bigger fish to fry
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.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?
Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
The word "flee" is not a pejorative in any way. For example flee North Korea all the time.
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually even though it undermines further debate on the question
Can't be serious.
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
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.
Not what I'm saying. No coordination is necessary. I'm talking about metadata, not encrypted contents — just the fact that you made some number of connections, at a certain time, from a certain network, to a certain network, in a certain order, with requests and responses of a certain size. It really doesn't matter what's inside.
- https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072 “First of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata […] is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata.” ― Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden (2014)
It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
It's true that general resources could be cached in some cases, but personalized information couldn't be (and yes was served over HTTP, not just HTTPS).
> It really doesn't matter what's inside
It certainly does matter what is inside, and it's trivial to think of cases where it does. Hiding that content is much much more valuable.
> We kill people based on metadata.
Sure, but they also kill people based on content.
I wholeheartedly disagree :)
If you will refer to the “survivability onion”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivability#/media/File:Surv...
Don't be there
I am here → Don't be seen
Don't be acquired
You are here → Don't be hit
Don't be penetrated
Don't be killed
> I am here → Don't be seen
My point is that you aren't. For example under the old HTTP only internet they could see you were visiting HN, who you were and what you published.
Under HTTPS they see you are visting HN.
It's strictly better except in cases of visiting highly popular data which was cached in public caches. These public caches were much less wide spread than you appear to believe (for example in Australia the Internode ISP tried one for a little while but abandoned it because of the problems with it serving info one logged in person to another - cache invalidation was frequently buggy)
> One will note that it's called ‘HTTPS’ and not ‘HTTPP’
Not sure who that is aimed at but I didn't write HTTPP, and yours is the only mention of it on this page.
> lol
If you are going to lol you had better make sure you are correct about what you are laughing about....
You can keep your belief or disbelief. I ran my own, transparently with Squid on my FreeBSD PF gateway box back in The Day when we had a cable ISP with a restrictive data cap. I could send my roommate a link, or reload a link myself any number of times, and it never left the edge of my network after the first. It was really cool.
These days you don't even need to actively do anything for most operating systems' default configurations to loudly announce your presence and behavior to the ‘Room 641A’s of the world:
- Join any Wi-Fi network and your OS or browser (or both!) will automatically hit a well-known captive portal test URI.
- Most OSes will hit an NTP server that reveals the OS maker (depending on if it's Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's or the NTP-dot-org pool) as well as providing a heartbeat to tell the network you're still physically present when you make subsequent requests every ${default-periodicity} minutes following the first time sync following the captive portal check.
- Then once TLS' regressive dependency on synchronized time is satisfied, many default OS installs will hit a weather API whose transport layer is “secure” but whose response size is, if not unique among all possible geolocations that could be requested at the same timestamp, at least a piece of identifying information to combine with others. If I were NSA I would be making requests to APIs like Foreca for every possible geolocation at every ${change-frequency} seconds and storing every bit of sidechannel metadata about them forever for comparison with other recorded traffic.
- And most people's machines will announce their unique collection of software to the world through the act of making network connections to the known networks for the background update checks and “““telemetry””” (remember when the term was “spyware” for anything that remotely reported user behavior?) that have sadly become normalized in modern software.
It seem you concede the point about survivability though?
Those other things that seem unrelated to the utility of HTTP vs HTTPS.
and doesn't pervasive tls termination mean that Cloudflare/etc sees plaintext anyway? do we really believe that palantir isn't tapping into that?
i can imagine just a few scenarios where hiding content on the web actually achieves something. mainly stuff like webmail, web chats, banking.
And of course the additional options available
He had the option of either not reporting what he saw wrong at all, or getting killed or arrested after doing that had he not chosen a place where USA (or lackies) either couldn't touch him with impunity, or rather wouldn't dare to touch him with impunity.
He could have returned to the US however he would have most certainly faced arrest. So he asked and was granted temporary asylum in Russia. If my passport is voided for whatever reason then I am returning to the US. I am still a citizen and so was he.
But naturally he didn’t want to be arrested so by definition became a fugitive.
I thought that’s what I remembered hearing. I think all of his meetings with reporters were in Hong Kong.
"firesteelrain = Edward Snowden"
Hence established! ^
If a person has a 'state', but that state would immediately jail the person for treason upon their return, is that materially different to stateless?
That feels like the reason that many countries allow 'political asylum'.
Some people actually voluntarily seek statelessness, but they’re either crazy or have enough resources to fly under the radar somewhere.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
Snowden’s status is more of a political exile. Theoretically he could return legally and safely if there was a complete regime change where the new regime was aligned with his beliefs and actions, although the chances of this happening are approximately zero.
The only problem with getting asylum anywhere while being stateless is proving who you are. And it wasn't a problem for him.
He basically is on self imposed exile in Russia.
You seem to continue to minimise the seriousness of the situation.
It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.
No, it won't hold up in court, because definitions exist and the law is an ass, as they say. But you'll never understand human behaviour if that's the only lens you look through.
Does that make my thread of explanations any more clear?
(inb4: No, you're wrong, he wasn't stateless.)
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'.
At the time and date that he likely came to that regrettable conclusion, he found himself in one of the few places in the world where the US cannot arbitrarily rendition someone from without significant risk and possible consequences.
The passport revocation means nothing, he had nowhere else he could possibly go without high likelihood of rendition even if he had a valid passport or wanted to leave Russia.
I am not making the case one way or the other because https everywhere was beneficial. But he signed up for a security clearance and knew what his obligations were (eg allegiance to the US)
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'm not sure that materially changes the point does it? (Unless the implication is that by saying "he fled to Russia" it somehow implies that he was on the side of Russia instead of "anywhere he can be safe from the US").
Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.
The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.
Also, please refer to a reply to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781990
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
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.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
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.
The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.
Also, remind me, when did the Ukrainian parliament last celebrate the Nazi collaborator (Bandera) during its new years posts?
"The individuals captured during the Palmer raids were held in abysmal conditions: at Deer Island, six hundred prisoners were placed in barracks intended to house three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food; many were marched through Boston in chains and handcuffs, showered with the spit and trash of bystanders. In Detroit, eight hundred prisoners were crammed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds. At Ellis Island, hundreds of men were forced to sleep on steel slabs without mattresses."
Edit: Down voted without comment after being upvoted. I seldom reply but this is an exception - cowards!
(although of late my surprise is decreasing).
tweaks the peaks on his tin-foil hat
The big question is whether Snowden's original thesis - that these newsagencies would find the right balance - was correct. In some ways, I hope there is a complete leak of the archive in decades' time when the relative risk is minimised so that the public can, in turn, evaluate the press of the day as to their ability to do this assessment. It may inform future similar whistleblowers whether Snowden made the right choice.
Example being the gross irresponsibility of Wikileaks releasing unredacted documents that detailed source identities (although all I know about this is anecdata).
Real content in the files has caused serious trouble to the moron formerly known as "Prince Andrew" and to Peter Mandelson. This content wasn't some massive pedo consipracy but more common or garden finance sleaze - providing govt. inside info that could be used for trading profits.
Seems Epstein was a more commonplace sleazy creep into young prostitutes getting him into age of consent trouble in some states but not others. This more than some cia/mossad front of blackmailing the powerful with horrific acts done to children.
But absolutely all of it should be dug through, read, understood and prosecuted on the basis of actual evidence of any and all crime. What's there seems less good for selling clickbait-y podcasts or using as an emotional cudgel in politics. Hysteria rarely works out in a positive way.
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.
FTFY. Almost one and the same here but gives more context.
Age of consent is eleven in which states?
It’s almost better for the people involved if the public keeps focusing on the most outrageous aspects of the story. (And it is quite outrageous, and terrible, to be fair.)
As I understand it, the victims weren't prostitutes, but were just kids groomed into doing this.
IDK, the CIA/mossad pedophile part seems significant.
I don't think ordinary people upset at young girls being exploited for the purpose of blackmailing people are being 'naive' or something. Sure, it all pales in comparison to genocide X foreign land but people getting riled by that stuff too.
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.
I think that everyone read the headlines, internalized it into their worldview, and moved on. Nobody was particularly interested in the sordid details of how the government backdoored everything, they just noted it as fact and moved on. And the world since then has been marked by it. Trump's claim that the DNC spied on him would have been entirely toothless if people weren't primed to believe in such things way back in 2013. In a lot of ways, I think that the Snowden revelations were part of what split the more-or-less unified liberal western world, the Barack Obama "hope & change" "hopecore" Fukuyamian thought, into opposing "leftist" and "trumpian" camps.
Is war of the scale of WWI and WWII a cleansing of, and temporary innoculation against, the natural tribalist fracturing of human psychology that occurs in times of peace? ("Peace is war" and all that goes along with that).
Does the insanity just continue until some traumatic event shocks (what remains of) the world population into a relatively normalised, shared worldview? Until enough time has passed that the cracks start to reappear.
Feels to me like a pattern in nature. 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.
>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.
I'm not entirely (ie. at all) comfortable with the fact that that the frontier AIs are completely under the umbrella of US tech-broligarchy.
Diversity has become a divisive topic (probably always was), but some diversity in the leadership of the AI arena would be sorely welcome. The current crop are essentially clones of each other with some minor variance that's probably carefully curated 'points of difference' for the tribalists to attach to.
Musk and Altman may hate each other, but I get the feeling their motivations and vision for the future overlap almost 100% (it's just the throne that they're fighting over, or what to rename the Gulf of Mexico).
Buy stocks in paper-shredder companies.
> On June 22, 2013, 18 days after the publication of Snowden's NSA documents began, officials revoked his US passport.[205] On June 23, Snowden boarded a commercial Aeroflot flight, SU213, to Moscow, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, with an intended final destination of Ecuador arranged in an Ecuadorian emergency travel document that Snowden had acquired. However, Snowden became initially stranded in Russia upon his landing in Moscow when his US passport was revoked[0]
It's the US' fault that he ended up in Russia. That's the irony.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the...
Also, at some point they were just done reporting on what was there.
Remember that Snowden got three journalists involved so they could make a decision on what to release, so they didn't expose details of people undercover etc and put real lives in danger. It was not meant to go to the public in its entirety.
I mean, Bashar al-Assad is. If he can escape thousands of highly-motivated revenge campaigns to see him strung up like Gadaffi, I can believe in Snowden sipping tea from his dacha.
If that's not enough proof that he's a government plant, I don't know what else to tell you.
No matter how many internals are being leaked about five eyes, it's important to realize that there is always someone who benefits from the turmoil and the loss of faith into democratically-supervised institutions.
With technical agencies I'd guess that at least they promoted people based on technical merit and not by how much land ownership their families had 500 yrs ago.
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?
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
[citation needed]
Historically, at least initially, their primary purpose was to allow tribes to organize themselves in a way that would support labor-intensive farming practices. Large-scale early grain farming was not possible without an organized state.
As technological complexity grew, states grew as well. I’d argue that the closest thing to a primary “purpose” for states (not that there is one, states evolved organically) is to maintain the organization of industrial supply chains that perpetuate modern life. Defense is secondary; still important, but this comes after ensuring that resources are available to sustain life.
States are currently the primary perpetuators of violence, and they are presently faltering at their job of maintaining global resource flows, thanks to all the violence. If they fail completely, we all lose.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
868 worldwide cultures studied btw. For the majority, grain farming emerges with state formation—the two are inextricably linked. And for most of the others the fledgling state quickly adopts grain farming to feed itself, which forms the basis for the organization of the state.
It’s true that the seed of the state is a group of armed people threatening the rest into paying them a tribute. But without organized farming, groups like this quickly degenerate into roving bandit gangs. It’s not the core of the system, the organizing principle.
A canonical example is the Chinese Xia period, generally considered to be the initial period of state formation in China. Chinese state formation accompanied large scale projects to dam rivers, which controlled floods while providing irrigation for intensive agriculture. Complex organization and resource allocation was required to navigate this process. Before this period, there were warlords and armies, but no known organized states.
On the topic of violence—states can dish out violence on a scale far surpassing that of individuals or small groups. Industrial militaries and nuclear weapons multiply this potential. All of the largest slaughters in history were wrought by states. Ignoring this is willful blindness. States are not these wonderful things that prevent violence, they just redirect and reshape the violence. Humans are violent, with or without states.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/512315/updates-foreign-a...
> GCSB 'failed to respect' minister's control of agency According to the report, the decision to sign the memorandum of understanding regarding the signals intelligence system and host the capability was not put to the minister responsible for the GCSB. Nor was it put to any other minister. "This inquiry found no record of any ministerial briefing or decision, nor any reference to any having occurred. It found no record of the minister having been informed of the matter at all," the report said.
Surely you mean oligarch-supervised institutions.
Our institutions are supervised by representatives elected on the dime of corporate and billionaire benefactors. They pull the strings.
It became a banana republic when money became speech.
He made it real easy for himself to be written off as a Russian asset.