But that "harm" was caused by the City failing to secure the data - not this one person who said "the city failed to secure the data - anyone can get it".
Here’s an example from my own life: I created books3, an AI training dataset of almost 200k books. This was thanks to The Eye, who hosted a copy of Bibliotik, a popular shadow library. But everyone is suing the AI companies themselves for using the training data, even though the original harm was caused by The Eye and Bibliotik.
> not this one person who said "the city failed to secure the data - anyone can get it".
If he simply said that, there wouldn’t have been a problem. He sent actual data related to ongoing criminal investigations, and was on the record saying he might set up a website to more widely disseminate information about that data — which could include names of witnesses in those investigations.
Snowden was, according to all available evidence, not trying to expose abuses. He was trying to commit espionage against the US, and it's extremely clear to anyone who has passing experience with the leaks and a shred of intellectual honesty, because the vast majority of the files were completely unrelated to domestic surveillance programs, and instead concerned foreign surveillance programs.
Stop bringing up Snowden; all of the evidence indicates that he was lying about his motive.
> I don't think it is as surprising that he took more files than he should have.
It's extremely surprising if he claims to have been acting in the public's interest by uncovering domestic spying programs and then over 90 percent of the files he took were completely unrelated to that stated goal. That's a very strong indicator of dishonesty.
"Narcisstic tendencies" is a very common smear / throwaway labelling we hear a lot -- about bosses, exes, manipulative relatives and what not. In some cases it's valid, but in most it's simply not. Unless you can point to specifics, we'll have to include this labelling of Snowden in that category as well.
But even if it did apply -- it would also be perfectly consistent with the possibly that he simply considers himself a fearless do-gooder. I don't rule out your alternatives, but Occam's Razor (combined with the fact that there's no visible evidence of him having profited in any way; and his general bearing and demeanor do not correspond to those of the publicity whore type) does favor the former.
(Not to say that he is or is not a fearless do-gooder; just that it's not at all unlikely that that's what he considers himself to be).
Just the pugnacious way you choose to phrase this ("It's sooo obvious, and if you don't simply full-on agree you must be clueless and/or a lying scumbag yourself") makes me doubt this version of events. That, plus the fact that (even after all this time) no one has come forward with any actual dispositive evidence for such a narrative.
It's all just speculation.
> because the vast majority of the files were completely unrelated to domestic surveillance programs, and instead concerned foreign surveillance programs.
It is exactly because the common response to the evidence is this kind of deceptiveness that I have to point it out.
> That, plus the fact that (even after all this time) no one has come forward with any actual dispositive evidence for such a narrative.
> It's all just speculation.
I described the evidence, provided by Snowden himself and publicly available for anyone to check, which directly disproves your claim that "it's all just speculative". The actual evidence significantly favors the theory that it was espionage over the theory that it was whistleblowing.
Before I offer anything else -- you are welcome to provide quotes and sources for the respective items of evidence described above.
If you don't want to provide a constructive response to what was asked, that's your prerogative of course.
It's also a blatant lie to claim that "no one has time" to spend 10 seconds on a Google search to find the files and 5-10 minutes to sample them and see how many are related to domestic collection.
Your response clearly indicates that you have neither read the files nor have the intellectual honesty to admit that you haven't read them and don't want to because it'll refute your existing beliefs.
Future HN readers: notice how this user is unwilling to read documents that are the first page on a Google search for "Snowden files", and uses any excuse necessary to avoid doing so and deflect when called out. This is an excellent confirmation of my claim that the majority of the documents are unrelated to domestic collection.
second result on ddg for "Snowden files", wasn't hard to find...
And either way -- this whole discussion is plainly moot.
For starters, the initial argument made in [0] was just not coherent to begin with. There's no way to interpret "commit espionage against the US" other than to mean in the service of some adversary (as others have indeed accused Snowden of doing, with similar vehemence and invariably lacking hard evidence). The commenter withdrew that assertion, which is okay I guess, but that made for an awfully sloppy start.
And even so, the basic logic of what was left in their post (that it was "extremely clear" that Snowden was on some kind of nihilistic rampage against the government, rather than out to expose abuses) just doesn't hold up. Okay, so the guy was sloppy and scattershot in his choice of what to leak. But that by itself doesn't establish destructive nihilism or even vindictiveness toward his former employer as the primary motive.
When this was pointed out in [1], the commenter's followup led off with, not a substantive retort -- but a straight-up character smear. Another huge red flag.
To the extent that they did attempt to address the critique -- still, their logic just didn't add up. Even if 90 percent of the files were related to foreign rather than domestic programs -- that doesn't mean Snowden was simply out to cause as much damage as he possibly could. The simplest and far more plausible explanation is that he thought he could stop (or at least warn people about) abuses in foreign countries as well.
So with that, and the plainly obnoxious, browbeating tone they adopted from the get-go (at the readers of HN, not even at me specifically) I came to a point where I had had enough. As a last resort I was hoping someone could point to something resembling a coherent analysis from some trusted external source (as obviously no one has time sit down and dig through those PDFs, and no one not deeply immersed in this field can honestly say that they can quickly come to conclusions about anything after just a quick sampling). But their response to that was hand-wavy and combative, as well.
So that's it for me. I'm not vested in this topic, and have no particular sympathies for or against Snowden. But I don't pretend to know what his "true" motives were, either.
All I know is that I definitely don't trust what the commenter of [0] has to say about anything in regard to this topic. Not because they're right or wrong. But just from how they choose to communicate, and especially their attitude toward those who don't immediately buy into their (at best, sketchy) interpretations of the narrative record.
This is not relevant. You have the ability to read through the data, sample it, and see how many documents are related to domestic vs foreign surveillance - you just are refusing to do so.
The claim that you need a "trusted source" to evaluate data that you can literally look at yourself is also an appeal to authority.
You're also moving the goalposts (even worse - goalposts that you never set up in the first place) from "there's no evidence" to "there's no analysis of the evidence". You also moved the goalposts that you set up from "you are welcome to provide quotes and sources for the respective items of evidence described above" to "you provided sources, but you didn't provide an analysis of the sources".
> There's no way to interpret "commit espionage against the US" other than to mean in the service of some adversary
This is flatly untrue. "Espionage", according to many dictionary definitions, as well as the way that the US government defines it, does not have to involve working for a particular adversary, but can merely mean the illegal/illicit collection of controlled information. "the act of obtaining secret or confidential information" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage
> Okay, so the guy was sloppy and scattershot in his choice of what to leak. But that by itself doesn't establish destructive nihilism or even vindictiveness toward his former employer as the primary motive.
This is a strawman argument. I never claimed that it established that conclusively - only that it's evidence that does point to destructiveness/vindictiveness, and there's virtually no evidence against that - which is true.
> The simplest and far more plausible explanation is that he thought he could stop (or at least warn people about) abuses in foreign countries as well.
...so he wanted to commit espionage against the US, and was not trying to "expose abuses" in the US, like the original commentator implied.
> As a last resort I was hoping someone could point to something resembling a coherent analysis from some trusted external source
More deflection and appeal to authority. "Trusted external sources" are irrelevant when you can examine the data yourself, and when it's as easy to evaluate as it is here.
> obviously no one has time sit down and dig through those PDFs
Which is an extreme exaggeration to the point of being a lie. The vast majority of people in the US (let alone HN users) have more than the requisite hour or so to spend digging through a small sample of the data.
In particular, given the significant amount of time that you've spent trying to explain why you shouldn't have to look at the data, you in particular certainly have the time for it. Your refusal is out of unwillingness to change your mind, not inability to do so.
> I don't pretend to know what his "true" motives were, either.
This is a strawman fallacy. I never claimed that I did - I just claimed that the available evidence indicated that he was lying.
> All I know is that I definitely don't trust what the commenter of [0] has to say about anything in regard to this topic.
...and then you say things like this. There's no "trust" involved here - the data is available, and you are refusing to look at it. You are throwing "trust" in as a red herring because you want to deflect from the fact that you are unwilling to observe the world with your eyes.
Given your repeated refusals to actually examine the evidence, goalpost moving, strawman fallacies, appeals to authority, incorrect definition of an important English word, and disingenuous claims that "nobody has time to look at the evidence", it's clear that you are not arguing in good faith - you are yet another person who cannot defend Snowden based on facts, but instead resorts to what they want to believe.
Is showing some reporters some sample data to show that the data exists malicious? Because I believe that's all he's been accused of doing.
> was on the record saying he might set up a website to more widely disseminate information about that data
As to whether the website he would make one day would contain the information on investigations: this is disputed. To me, it seems the city misconstrues his quotes about letting people determine if names were contained in the entire dataset.