Mr. Snowden said his decision to leak N.S.A. documents developed
gradually, dating back at least to his time working as a technician in
the Geneva station of the C.I.A. His experiences there, Mr. Snowden
said, fed his doubts about the intelligence community, while also
convincing him that working through the chain of command would only
lead to retribution…He disputed an account in The New York Times last
week reporting that a derogatory comment placed in his personnel
evaluation while he was in Geneva was a result of suspicions that he
was trying to break in to classified files to which he was not
authorized to have access. (The C.I.A. later took issue with the
description of why he had been reprimanded.) Mr. Snowden said the
comment was placed in his file by a senior manager seeking to punish
him for trying to warn the C.I.A. about a computer vulnerability.
Of course it doesn’t. Snowden is essentially saying he found the NSA incapable of self-policing, and that was an important step toward his ultimate decision to leak information, which makes sense to me.
But you said right from the start that Snowden should not have gone to the public, but should have found a sympathetic senator or someone. Which was in part because his release wasn’t really important, an assessment I think the reaction it has prompted shows was entirely unfair. Since then you seem to have decided to give him less benefit of the doubt, questioning whether there was any principle behind the leaks and faulting him for saying anything.
So then, it’s only natural that you don’t think this helps justify his release to the media; it really seems like you decided long ago that nothing would.
He was responding to the reports put out by the government. It more or less amounted to him explaining what happened, and then going on to explain that it was one of the first times he realized how utterly fucked he would be if he ever tried to change anything from within. It wasn’t the reason he leaked. He leaked because the government was conducting mass domestic spying, among other things. I thought that that was pretty fucking clear.
The reason why we are talking about this is because the government is utterly fucked when it comes to dealing with Snowden. They can’t fight the message, so they are trying their damndest to shoot the messenger in the hopes that people forget the message. What makes this all the more hilarious is that the messenger practically walks on water. He gave up what 95% of the US population would kill to have (house in Hawaii, hot girl friend, a large salary) to live a life on the run from the worlds largest and most deadly spy agency that spies on all communications and has the ability to force down airplanes of the president of sovereign nations. He literally could not have picked anyone worse to fuck with, and he did it KNOWING what the NSA was capable of before the rest of America did.
The best and most hilariously embarrassing (for the government) part of all of this is that the only sane explanation and all of the evidence points to his motives as being simple; that man is a fucking patriot willing to risk everything to defend the constitution and the ideals of this nation. The government would like any other reason to be true other than “because he is a fucking patriot of epic proportions”. Unfortunately for the government, the facts are pretty clear. The best they can do is spew innuendo. In this case, they are trying to imply that maybe the reason why he pissed off the largest spy agency in the world is because his feelings were hurt over a bad mark in his employment record years ago. Hilarious.
Finally, he doesn’t need any support other than the truth that the government was conducting mass domestic spying, weakening public encryption, and in general shitty all over the constitution. Snowden could be in it to murder puppies, instead of because he is an epic bad ass patriot willing to sacrifice a life of comfort and ease, and it would still be utterly irrelevant to the fundamental truth of the message; the NSA and the executive branch hate the constitution and are trying their damndest to rip it up.
Edit: If you want to speak about innuendo, let me toss this one out to you champ. Do you work for the government or in defense industry? You sure do write a lot about how much you hate the messenger and conveniently forget the message.
Perhaps guilty as charged. I still feel that the release was less significant than it has been made out to be, that the media frenzy has been much more about the leaker than the contents of the leak (which to me tends to reinforce the first), and that if he felt he had to go outside the management chain (which seems to be his problem more than “chain of command”) there were more appropriate ways to do it.
Knowing that he had problems with a particular managment chain – whether justified or not – doesn’t seem to me to justify bypassing the entire management chain. At least, if it does, you really should be actively working to find employment somewhere else, because that belief (true or not) is a recipe for ongoing career disaster.
And yet, he was good enough, or was qualified enough, for the private contractor’s position after the CIA. So then that speaks highly of his abilities, or, once again, poorly about how the government is protecting information. Take your choice, or vote all of the above.
That speaks to his ability to perform the job he was being paid for. Doesn’t speak to his judgement on anything else.
You’re right, I should take my own advice and ignore the items about him. I’ve just got a sort of train-wreck fascination with trying to understand why he has gotten as much play as he has. Which, I suppose, is exactly what keeps him in the public eye, so apparently I’m part of the problem.
This is missing the point. It seems experience with a poor command chain helped convince Snowden the NSA was not effective at fixing problems internally, but by his own words he released information because he thought it was critical for the public to know. Talking about looking for employment elsewhere, as if this were only an office dispute, is neglecting that important point.
This seems to be the center of your take, in fact. It’s really hard for me to understand, because there have been so many revelations based on Snowden’s releases. A number have appeared on BoingBoing, but if you want some at a glance, Al Jazeera has a timeline with some selections - and many of these have had still further consequences.
To claim that the media overplayed the significance of these and decided to ignore their contents in favor of the leaker makes no sense. To look at them all and somehow decide there just wasn’t much there, nothing to surprise anyone, is an incomprehensible attitude to me. The world has found Snowden’s releases important, plain and simple.
Possibly he could have found a better way to make those releases - but if you admit that they were important, is it really so obvious how he could have done so, and a moral failing that he should have considered it less important to try than to ensure the public was informed about what was being done? I don’t understand why you would think so.
I would add that the press is making it about Snowden for a variety of reasons including, but limited to, government sources consistently trying to kill (figuratively, but maybe literally as well) the messenger. A lot of mainstream media, including the NYT, has been chummy with the government and is willing to put that info out to the public, probably as a wink and a nod for some unnamed sourced government statement on a future story. Since the government continually tosses out what harm, or maybe harm, Snowden has perpetrated, and also in an attempt to wag the dog, it is paramount for news organizations to ask Snowden what his motivations were. And why wouldn’t they, since the government likes to imply that he was a spy for China or for Russia, or that he went into the field looking to steal documents in the first place? Further, since his releases weren’t dumped en masse without redactions to the public in general, like Wikileaks, most news organizations didn’t receive info directly from Snowden, although Greenwald did disseminate some of it, and the news organizations are looking for some way to make their story fresh.
So you would have been happy if no one ever found out about the magnitude of the spying?
Are you okay with the fact that another country is receiving un-redacted information about you or other citizens? I don’t understand what you see as faulty judgment on Snowden’s part.
I think his description of the situation was more nuanced than that,
he said that people were kept in line through “fear and a false image
of patriotism,” which he described as “obedience to authority.”
Now, you can look at him as a jerky insubordinate, which he may have been, to an extent, but I have no doubt that what he is saying is true about the culture.
Further, the story about the insubordination came from Snowden. The other story that was leaked insinuated that he was trying to get his hands on classified information as far back as the CIA, and he described what he did and how he found flaws in the system. He wasn’t written up for having attempted to take classified documents as was asserted. Even the CIA back stepped on that notion.
Fair enough, I just think the issue around this one incident is being blown way out proportion.
Today when you go to work, go do someone else’s job. Do a job that you are specifically not authorized to do. When a senior manager intervenes, explain all the reasons why you really need to be doing it, After being told “no”, then go get a lower level managers approval. --not a good example of “going through channels”.
Have fun filling out that unemployment application.
Well, the reason he brought the whole thing up was because he was being accused of something else, much more sinister, entirely. Now, okay, you should work up the chain of command if you don’t want to piss people off. But by the same token, when you see gaping holes in a system for a secret agency and someone lower on the totem pole brings it up, should you just disregard them because you think they are a peon? It’s not that he shouldn’t have been written up for taking that initiative, perhaps, but to then ignore some genuine problems with your system, really demonstrates too much reverence for authority, leaving things as originally commanded, without trying to remedy the situation.
I think he gets as much play as he does because be busted open a mass domestic spying ring, allowed constitutional challenges against the abomination of a warrantless spy state we have setup for the first time, exposed the government poisoning public encryption, revealed that the NSA was literally and blatantly lying to congress under oath, and so on and so forth.
I don’t understand what you find so fucking hard to understand about this.
He blasted this all out into the open, and now the government tries, through really pathetic and transparent means to find fucking anything to pin on him in an attempt to confuse the messenger for the message. We occasionally have these posts when the government, which has been proven to blatantly lie on multiple occasions, gets enough public press. Without fail, we find Snowden’s reasons, not that they fucking matter, are exactly what they appear to be. He is a bad ass patriot who exposed some of the worst crime against the constitution in US history, and he knowingly and deliberately surrendered an “American dream” life to do it.
I’m sorry that seeing a patriotic and principled hero giving it all up makes you feel bad your life choices, which I am willing to bet my bottom dollar involve a government agency or (more likely) working in the defense industry. Yes, you are a worse and vastly less brave person than he is. Get over it.
Oh, and if anyone is reading this from a computer where you can’t have classified material on it. I’ll just leave this here because fuck you:
here’s you about david chappelle being frustrated with rudeness.
I think it is a more “it is known to people that might care”. I didn’t know it until this. I also know probably won’t ever buy a ticket to see one of his shows because I would feel like a real sucker if I drop a pile of money for tickets to see a guy who might walk off if there are annoying drunks in the crowd… you know… because there will definitely be annoying drunks in the crowd. I think I’ll just stick to recordings.
bit early in a show for drunks… maybe not.
Since Snowden has leaked, point to one thing Snowden has lied about. Right. You have nothing to point to.
ok, for you… i was pointing to the snowden identity. you obviously believe it, with no proof. all the documents could be 100% and he could be the fiction.
This. Too early to name him Saint Snowden. I like that he chose to take and release this information. I have little idea who he is, or what he believes in aside from the narrow issue. Saying that it wouldn’t matter if he killed and dismembered puppies is just bizarre in the extreme.
Fail. Snowden attempted to point out a flaw in, and increase the security of, a CIA web portal that has direct access to CIA employee information. Apparently you are a petty middle manager or at least play one on the BB boards because you see his honest effort as a “dick move”.
That was denied by the CIA. It was also denied by Snowden. Both denials were in the article that you above accused me of not reading. Please stop embarrassing yourself.
Whoa. That is the clearest case of projection I’ve seen in a LONG time. Congrats!
It actually doesn’t. What really matters is the content of the documents he leaked. Unfortunately many people don’t understand the “slime the messenger” technique and are swayed by the tactic. Thus Snowden gave this interview to counter at least some of the slanders he has received from the NSA and their cheerleaders over the past few months. I don’t recall if you were one of the ranters whining about how its obvious. OBVIOUS! that all the documents are in the hands of the Russians and Chinese!! OMG!! …and anyone who thinks otherwise is a naive fool. Oops. Failed again.
The thing is you, and people with similar leanings, have failed. The people of the US and the world know exactly what the NSA is doing, and they hate it. Nothing anyone says now will change that. Snowden is arguably the most influential and important whistleblower in the history of the world. The documents he liberated finish the work of other NSA whistleblowers who have been screaming about this stuff for years only to face persecution, prosecution and silence from the media because they didn’t have proof. Snowden masterfully obtained documentation, patiently over several years it seems, skipped out with it, had them published to near-universal worldwide approbation, and has evaded the grasping arm of the corrupt, decadent US security state. The man is a hero to all who wish to stand up to authoritarian state control and violence. I predict many more Snowdens. Many, many more.
