After leaving Hong Kong unimpeded, despite US extradition demands, it appears Snowden has successfully transited Moscow and may have boarded a flight to Cuba, on his way to ultimate asylum in Ecuador, apparently. He’s also reported to be carrying four laptops full of NSA spying bombshells. It’s like something out of a spy novel, really weird stuff. So why is the board oddly quiet on this? I did a search and there’s no new threads on Snowden since last week, as much as I can figure–certainly nothing on these new developments.
Whoops, I only read the headline. So Snowden wasn’t on board! Isn’t that intriguing? Or . . . not, I suppose.
I personally am not talking about it because I don’t feel informed enough to contribute anything salient.
It’s on my list of news I wish I knew more about but I’m not very efficient about addressing that list.
I don’t know that I can answer for the board as a whole, but as to why I’m not talking about it…I just don’t quite get it. He announced to the world that the US is doing what the US empowered themselves to do a decade ago. Okay…yawn. I used up my impotent rage when the law was passed, for all the good it did me. And now he’s got a bunch of laptops with classified info on them and he’s looking for a country to take him in? We’ve done this several times recently, and the leaking of classified government documents has dramatically changed my life in…not a single way that I can see*.
Maybe it’s a generational thing. My parents and husband (who is significantly older than I) lose their shit when issues of electronic privacy come up. They don’t want anyone to be able to find out that they had their car in the shop last week, much less medical records or their home address. I’m just happy if my inbox isn’t full of spam I have to wade through to find my real emails.
*Which is not the same as saying there’s been no impact. But no impact I can see means either there’s been no impact, or that damage control is working.
I voted “OTHER”, because… All in all, in the end, it is basically “same old, same old”.
In 1960, two employees of the NSA (William Martin and Vernon Mitchell) defected to the Soviet Union. During a press conference in Moscow they said that they felt compelled to defect because they saw that the NSA was intercepting and decrypting the communications of friendly countries and felt generally disenchanted by that.
Same old, same old. The NSA survived the revelations of these two guys (who were direct NSA employees and cryptographers). It will survive the revelations of Snowden, that is much smaller fry than these two guys were.
And the NSA will keep doing what it has, will change methods, and with time this affair will be forgotten (except by espionage buffs). I would be extremely surprised if the NSA didn’t have contingency plans for leaks of this nature.
I don’t envy the future life of Edward Snowden. He has thrown away everything, and he will have to start again, basically from zero, in a far-off country. As the years pile up, he will end up experiencing great nostalgia and the heartache of knowing that, most likely, he is never going to set foot again on his land of birth. He won’t see again the places where he grew up. His parents will die, and he will not be able to be there for the funeral. He will die, and perhaps he won’t even be buried in the place that saw him come into this world.
Or maybe he’ll be OK with this. I know I wouldn’t be OK with knowing that I was forever barred from going back to where I was born.
(Also – I am almost sure that Snowden has talked to the Chinese security apparatus, and possibly to the Russians as well. If he has ideas that other countries will want to use his skills… Well… William Martin, from the 1960 defection, “<…> expressed disappointment that the Russians did not trust him with important work.” And of course they wouldn’t: He had shown himself to be basically not reliable. I would be very surprised if the security apparatus of those other countries wouldn’t have judged Snowden to be not reliable as well).
The best thing we can do, we meaning everybody in the world, is not talk about this guy. He’s at the bottom of the scale as far as treason goes. He didn’t do it for money, he didn’t do it for a political cause, he didn’t even do it for love. He did it to be an internet star. When the rest of the world realizes he’s a useless lying nutbag they’ll send him back and we’ll toss him in jail.
Board members are wondering why you closed this poll before more than a few people could vote on it.
Board members are too busy recovering from weekend hangovers and other ailments to care about that whiny little snot Snowden anyway.
Did you have anything else to contribute to the “old” threads? Yeah, me neither.
And yeah, this has been going on forever and it’s still obnoxious bullshit for them to be doing it. I remember in the early (mid?) '90s, people seeding the signatures of their e-mails and Usenet posts with random Feds-bait word strings like “President spy bomb code fuck off hi CIA/FBI!”
cite?
It isn’t clear to me what specific secrets he managed to save to those laptops he is travelling with. If it’s as simple as a long list of P2P calls - so what. I’m not an intelligence analyst so perhaps I do not have a good enough understanding as to how that would be helpful in any way to anyone trying to mine US/NSA secrets.
I may change my thinking if more evidence comes to light about the nature of the information he actually has and how it can be used to undermine national security in any meaningful way. Until then, to me, he’s just some guy with a misplaced crisis of conscience who hatched an ill thought out plan to bring attention to something that was old news to just about everybody. If he did it for fame, well, he’s got all the notoriety he will ever need/want.
I got your cite right here.
Where are you getting this information?
“my post is the cite upon which I base my claim.”
Didn’t someone say something like that around these parts once?
God exists because the Bible says He exists.
The Bible is true because God exists
I think it’s a deeply cultural phenomenon.
I’ve hinted to this in some of my other ramblings about the society structure and persistence of established order over a period of time.
I think people are aware – at some metaphysical collective level – that part of why it is great to be an American is this history of events, more or less managed, that go unquestioned as they are understood to be just a little lapse in a course of American exceptionalism.
Maybe later when I figure out how to express it …
This is IMHO. It’s my opinion, i.e., I’m making it up. What’s the big deal?
Brave underdog uncovers abuse of power by towering giant and risks everything to expose said giant. Meh. Been done too many times to drag the average person away from “The Voice.” Not saying this is how I feel; just one possible theory for why this isn’t exploding around the water coolers.
I do think it is a hysterically funny slap in the face to US officials that so many countries are refusing to cooperate and, if not exactly sheltering Snowden, turning a very blind eye to his whereabouts.
So does this thread mean that the right wing has made up its mind and decided that Snowden is an evil liberal and not a heroic conservative? We were getting mixed signals.
Here’s some news: Did he troll a bunch of journalists into getting stuck on a 12-hour flight to Cuba with no alcoholic beverage service and then having to stay in Cuba for at least 3 days? Plus there’s no real evidence he even went to Moscow other than the word of a single passenger.
Spies spy. That’s their job. This is news? We sure as hell asked them why weren’t they spying the day after 9/11.