He had my support until he signed himself over to Russia. It may have been his only choice, but what he says doesn’t matter one way or the other in my book.
Imo its understandable since he’s going to have to live in russia for the rest of his life if he doesn’t want to live in a US prison for the rest of his life.
I suppose I don’t understand the alternative, doesn’t the United States ask immigrants to do a similar type of pledge? I kinda expect most countries do. Seems logical. I could be wrong about that, maybe immigrants don’t have to pledge loyalty to the US for citizenship? I’ll have to look it up.
I guess to me it seems disingenuous to judge someone for making arrangements to live in a country he cannot leave. He is forced to stay there by the United States, it wasn’t a choice.
Anyway I could definitely be missing something here but I can’t think of what he could have done differently, what would you have done in his situation?
As an aside, I have a lot of respect for Snowden because he showed us how little respect the United States has for obeying its own laws. The laws which are based on our supposed virtues. The US violated every principle it proclaimed that American citizens had. We never had them. Turns out we’re just as crooked as the countries we judge. I value that knowledge, Snowden is a patriot who risked everything so the American people would know the truth about our government and he did it with utmost care. He’ll go down in history as such. He’s the reason we can even discuss this topic. I thank him for that gift, despite the contents being disgusting.
At this point it’s less about trusting Snowden and more about not trusting Russia. I wouldn’t put it past Russia to find a way to speak on his behalf and say what they want with his voice, power, and reach. That’s tantalizing. AI, Photoshop, social media posts, whatever. He’s under their control willingly or otherwise.
As far as Snowden’s words, I look at the content of what he says, and I have yet to notice any straying from the original message. The message being, “The United States does not follow its own laws or ideals, and not only intends to violate these rights with regards to terrorists but with regard to everyone.” If I were to notice straying from the message, or propaganda (coerced or otherwise) I would of course react accordingly. Every interview I have seen, and I haven’t seen them all, his views have been measured, thoughtful, terrifying, and enlightening. Not to mention, backed by substantial evidence.
As far as LLMs (AI doesn’t exist), it’s far too nascient to be undetected. Like ad-blockers and advertisers, there is a permanent war between LLM output and LLM detectors. In this battle, the detectors have, by far, the upper hand. In five years, who knows. But I work Iin tech and dabble in my own models. The LLM tech of today is extremely primitive.
It sucks but what else was he supposed to do? He had no passport and if he got extradited to the USA then he’d spend years of a life sentence in solitary confinement at a CMU prison or worse. Take one look at how the US government treats those they consider terrorists and you’ll understand his decision.
True. He’s probably telling the truth about a lot of things, but notice what he doesn’t say. He’s a smart guy and is not saying certain things to stay on Putin’s good side.
He’s been in Russia 10 years now. He would probably be out of jail if he had surrendered. Chelsea Manning is already out:
She was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest in May 2010.
Yeah. He’s 100% compromised. People don’t have to hate him or what he did, but once you put yourself totally within a power like Putin, you’re effectively dead.
I think For All Mankind also did a great job showing that dilemma in later seasons.
The US government doesn’t openly torture, murder, kill to expand their borders, put people in jail for blank signs, or many other terrible things the Kremlin does. The US government is easily, hands down better than the Russian government.
Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.
Guantanamo Bay seemed like pretty open torture to me.
American imperialism, while different than European imperialism, is imperialism nonetheless. And damn, Native Americans would like a word with you about this point I should think…
It is no longer safe to organize a protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas. Blank signs or otherwise. This is just as of* a couple of days ago, even, dang.
Guantanamo certainly wasn’t open torture, it was hidden and very controversial. My comment was about the current US government vs the current Kremlin, seems like you’re intentionally misconstruing it to make a point.
No longer safe is a biased way of interpreting the law which allows organizers to be held financially responsible for problems caused by their protest.
Elizabeth Goitein’s claims are not correct as the amendment is more narrowly defined than she has claimed. But the amendment is still overly broad and an inappropriate overreach of government surveillance.
For those who refuse to read a little bit. The bill says what Goitein has posted. However it also includes a number of exclusions to those conditions.
Those exceptions being:
a public accommodation facility
a dwelling, as that term is defined in section 802 of the Fair Housing Act
a community facility, as that term is defined in section 315 of the Defense Housing and Community Facilities and Services Act of 1951
a food service establishment, as that term is defined in section 281 of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 (7 U.S.C. 1638)
So, this excludes places people live, community provided facilities to access the internet, and any other publicly provided internet point of access, and places that serve food, like starbuck’s wifi.
It is still overly broad, to say the least. Personally I am of the opinion that organizations like the NSA already operate in such a manner without impunity as it is and we are just slowly bringing the law up to speed.
My immediate reaction was the same. I don’t trust the NSA at all, but I’m certainly not going to trust anything this site says when it’s shilling the article as an NFT.
It means you get a little certificate.
That says you own the article.
But you can’t edit it.
But you can show it to your friends.
But not if the site is down.
But the resale is gonna be like, whoa~
Maybe $50 less than you paid for it.
But the sentimentality is worth it.
You should definitely get two.
I don’t think anything about NFTs inherently guarantees their payload is unique. As I understand it, that part is enforced by the exchange, if at all. And there’s nothing stopping you from putting the same payload up on a different exchange. The token itself would be unique, at least within the same chain, but who actually cares about that? :P
I might be nitpicking, but IMHO it is perfectly reasonable to read this as questioning whether the token itself is unique, which is how I read it. The idea of non-unique NFTs then made me write a short quip about it, that’s all.
ACLU Statement on Congress Passing Bill that Massively Expands the Government’s Power to Spy on Americans Without a Warrant
This bill would reauthorize Section 702 surveillance for two more years without any of the necessary reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill today that will reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, expand the federal government’s power to secretly spy on Americans without a warrant, and create a new form of “extreme vetting” of people traveling to the United States.
When the government wants to obtain Americans’ private information, the Fourth Amendment requires it to go to court and obtain a warrant. The government has claimed that the purpose of Section 702 is to allow the government to warrantlessly surveil non-U.S. citizens abroad for foreign intelligence purposes, even as Americans’ communications are routinely swept up. In recent years, the law has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool, with FBI agents using Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications — including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress — without a warrant.
“Despite what some members would like the public to believe, Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By expanding the government’s surveillance powers without adding a warrant requirement that would protect Americans, the House has voted to allow the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights and liberties of Americans for years to come. The Senate must add a warrant requirement and rein in this out-of-control government spying.”
In the last year alone, the FBI conducted over 200,000 warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications. The standard for conducting these backdoor searches is so low that, without any clear connection to national security or foreign intelligence, an FBI agent can type in an American’s name, email address, or phone number, and pull up whatever communications the FBI’s Section 702 surveillance has collected over the past five years.
The House passed all the amendments to expand this invasive surveillance that were pushed by leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the committee closest to the intelligence agencies asking for this power. The bipartisan amendment that would have required the government to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for Americans’ communications failed 212-212.
Because the Kremlin would protect him and help him broadcast his message. It harms the US government, so the Kremlin sees providing Snowden with protection and a platform as an absolute win.
Most other countries that are remotely aligned with the US might be pressured to keep Snowden quiet.
Once this bill passes, there is absolutely nothing stopping the NSA from doing an IP lookup on this comment/my account, and putting me into a “potential domestic terrorist - watch closer” list. A list that will eventually be used later, for some reason or another, so let’s just hope we never get an authoritarian in the White House with stacked courts! That could never happen here, could it?
P.S. If you live in the US, just part of your connection going to another country (be it a CDN or server hosted in Canada, or US server gets overwhelmed and switches to Canada) - full content logs for you.
Cointelegraph is (was at least?) a reputable source for national security news. It’s mainly for OSINT and national security interested folks who know better than to do the majority of their research on a smartphone, so it may not be great on mobile, I don’t know.
Snowden chose Russia because the other option was life as a political prisoner without a chance at a fair trial. Egotist, sure, but at least we know what we know now. Can you imagine how fucked we’d be if he never leaked them?
And regardless of the source, (site or person quoted), what he’s saying is absolutely true. The NSA is about to be able to gather ALL mass communications and look at them whenever,without a warrant which was the only safeguard before.
I’m legitimately about to throw my tech into a fucking dumpster and get a dumbphone and a smartphone with all hardware removed besides what’s required by Briar.
Most will read this and think I’m being overly paranoid. When I talked about the FVEY (now 14EYES) surveillance dragnet before the Snowdon leaks, everyone thought the same.
Thanks for the info. A couple big assumptions in there without backing, but I think I understand why you’re making them.
An uncomfortable perspective I’ve developed over the past few years is that some of these privacy sacrifices might allow the US government to more effectively counter malicious efforts from governments like the CCP and Kremlin who have no such restrictions. That said, I have no doubt they’ll also be abused.
Judgement Day has already happened, I see it as the day when we created AI tools that could create photorealistic images based on a simple text prompt, it happened when we created AI tools that could not only talk like a human, but a very specific human, and fake it’s voice.
Judgement Day was never about a conflict between man and machine, it is about sowing distrust and breaking up friends and family, the tools to call your mom or dad and use your own voice to scam them exists now, the tools to send your mom and dad any kind of photo of you for verification exists today.
Judgement has allready been passed down, another agency messing about with AI now is not the catalyst.
I was curious and looked it up and apparently it was way longer than nine minutes (more like two and half years), if this is what you're referencing. Crazy.
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