Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Snowden didn’t just expose national wiretapping. He also exposed international spying capabilities that endangered our people and our allies. If he had not crossed that second line, he’d just be a legitimate whistleblower, but he decided to actively harm the U.S. intelligence community and they will never allow a pardon.

I’d lay odds if he ever steps foot in an unprotected setting, a slip on a banana peel and a fatal head injury wouldn’t shock me.

He’s a traitor. I’m as liberal as it gets and even I think he went too far.

View on HN

International spying on your allies, including corporate espionage against countries like Germany. That angered your allies much more than it endangered them. Whistleblowers like Snowden are the mechanism that keeps that spying from happening in the first place.

Edit -- And yes, this harmed America by undermining the trust that those countries had in it. But to be clear, it wasn't Snowden's disclosure that broke that trust, it was the spying. It's hubris to think that if not for Snowden it would never have been discovered, and the longer it went on, the more harm that would have been done between America and its allies when it eventually got found out. So by revealing it early, Snowden really minimized the damage, rather than causing it.

I feel like people forget that leading up to the Iraq war, France and Germany were aligned with Russia and very much against US interests. They were a frenemy at best.

I'm not saying it's right - we were in the wrong on Iraq and that was obvious before it started. But just like the US has had a HARD turn towards fascism, there's nothing stopping that from occurring to our allies as well. I'd argue it's dereliction of duty if you aren't spying on your allies, they're spying on us.

What you DO with the information gathered, in my opinion, is what determines whether you're violating your ally's trust.

I'm curious about what interpretation of events leads you to the conclusion that, say, France was aligned against US interests? What about Canada?

Edit: And it's one thing (not necessarily a great thing) if you and your allies are knowingly and willingly exchanging intelligence about suspicious activities you pick up in each other's countries to tip off law enforcement. Exfiltrating corporate industrial and technological secrets is a different matter and there's no way an allied government would be OK with that happening, even as an under-the-table arrangement.

I literally just said that France and Germany were against the war. Assuming you were old enough to be an adult leading up the war literally EVERYTHING leads me to that conclusion. Their populations protested, they were very vocal and it was obvious to anyone watching international news broadcasts.

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

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

But it wasn't just our allies. Snowden revealed details about NSA spying on Syria during their civil war. That is the exact type of thing that our spy agencies should be doing. If you object to that, you object to the entire nature of intelligence gathering. That is a perfectly acceptable stance to have, but it obviously isn't one that is held by the US's or most nation's government and therefore they wouldn't want to tacitly endorse it by issuing a pardon.

If you actually believe it was news that the NSA is intercepting signals from and in Syria, I may have a bridge for sale you'd be interested in.

Are you arguing that you should only get in trouble for leaking if the information you leaked is surprising?

How about a list of compromised Chinese telecommunications systems? It's not surprising that the NSA would infiltrate those systems in order to complete some of its objectives, but the list of which systems were compromised when is sensitive information that Snowden leaked right after revealing he was in Hong Kong in a misguided attempt to gain asylum there.

Maybe if the US had proper protections for whistleblowers, they wouldn't need to seek asylum or take such sensitive information with them as insurance.

> International spying on your allies, including corporate espionage against countries like Germany.

I expect the US to be spying on ALL nations, not just enemy-of-the-week or communist ones.

Expect, as in - you want them to spy? Or just accept it as an inevitable fact of life?

It's both because it's good policy. I "want" insofar as I would expect any government to maximize our position via basic game theory. It's inevitable because those who maximize their position are going to be the dominant player over time.

(I posted a similar comment elsewhere but it's short, and relevant here too).

That's not what game theory says. Defecting against everyone you meet is a losing strategy in an iterated multi-actor prisoner's dilemma. Tit-for-tat does much better. Establishing and maintaining mutual trust, to cooperate with those who are willing to cooperate with you, is in a nation's interests.

> Defecting against everyone you meet is a losing strategy

You are changing the topic, subtly and importantly.

Maintaining an operative network to support an information network and flexible operations (either to help or hinder a nation-state) is THE winning strategy.

> Tit-for-tat does much better.

That is incorrect, in context.

> "And yes, this harmed America by undermining the trust that those countries had in it"

That seems unlikely. At the international level, it's well understood that alliances aren't permanent as de Gaulle's famous quote "[Nations have] no friends, only interests." illustrates. For example, Russia, Japan, and the US were allies during the First World War but were on opposing sides in the Second.

Defecting against everyone you meet is a losing strategy in an iterated multi-actor prisoner's dilemma. Establishing and maintaining mutual trust, to cooperate with those who are willing to cooperate with you, is in a nation's interests.

> "...everyone you meet..."

As the old joke goes "Don't anthropomorphize countries; they hate it when you do that." There is no guarantee of continuity in leadership or national policy because of periodic leadership turnover (elections, etc.) so exactly what would a country be extending trust to?

This seems like a fairly accurate model of North Korea's approach to international relations, but not most others. Would you say that they've found the optimum strategy?

There's even less of a guarantee when a nation's unsupervised services have a century of experience replacing uncooperative foreign leadership with "more friendly" puppets. Unfortunately such regime change doesn't seem to ever benefit the people of either the interfered or interfering nations...

> I’m as liberal as it gets and even I think he went too far.

Apparently you're not because I couldn't disagree more.

I was just going to say the same thing.

Didn’t he give the information to journalists to make the decision about what needs to be redacted? Can you provide a source for the information that he endangered peoples lives?

Nah. He's a hero.

He couldn't expose one without the other could he?

I remember him specifically saying he thought spying on allies was wrong, and even a key component of his decision. Whether you agree this is the deciding point for crime / not crime, it is certainly a division between blowing whistle on domestic spying and everything else.

I think that from a purely technical point of view there isn't a division here: if the NSA has gained access to basically everything (mobile networks, ISPs, landlines, OSs etc) and they're using the access to hoover up all the private data of citizens then logically our allies and enemies know they are also being targeted don't they? Why would the NSA be using God Mode domestically but restricting itself abroad?

So Snowden even revealed everything or nothing. He couldn't only spill half the beans!

Why not? 99% of the things Greenwald et al published from his leaks were perfectly legal, and that was just a small subset of the total documents Snowden leaked. Why not just expose the illegal phone metadata program? If he had done that, he would easily qualify as a whistleblower.

Exposing the phone meta data program would expose it both domestically and internationally. That exposure would limit the US ability to keep doing it internationally and open him to exactly the critism made above.

The issue here is that none of these programs care about national boundaries (or citizenship etc). So exposing domestic surveillance exposed it internationally as well. There was no way to avoid that. So criticism of it seems unfair to me...

Also, 99% of the programs he exposed were Illegal. Some have been legalised after the fact, others semi legalised.

SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it, so the ultimate compatibility with the constitution remains unclear...

> Also, 99% of the programs he exposed were Illegal.

The only US program he leaked that was illegal was the phone metadata collection. The vast majority of programs he leaked involved surveillance on foreign targets outside the US.

> SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it

None of it has made it to SCOTUS due to the vast majority being completely legal, so SCOTUS hasn't even had a chance to refuse to rule on any of it. The only program that could have gone to SCOTUS was phone metadata collection, but the government already shut that down, so they aren't going to waste time challenging its legality.

>He also exposed international spying capabilities that endangered our people and our allies.

Really, like what?

There is a part of the leaks that talks about how the US was spying on a new terrorist group... which made it more difficult to spy on them and ended up becoming what became ISIS.

Snowden didn't expose it but the newspaper he coordinated with (the guardian) ended up not correctly redacting that portion.

I don't have an opinion on whether this is a bad thing or a good thing.

Opinions differ on this. We should have a very public trial and put all of the evidence out there for a jury to evaluate. We have a duty to history.

> but he decided to actively harm the U.S. intelligence community and they will never allow a pardon

This notion of 'harm' is bandied about all the time. If anything, he improved their capabilities, since now they are bolstered against insider threats going forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com