omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

i think he's surprised to find out that the united states has the pull that it does

Massive irony in dude leaking proof of US omniscience taken by surprise by scope and reach of US power.

"Yeah, I knew they were recording and spying on countless phone calls and stuff, but who would have guessed they'd have so much away with their treaty-bound diplomatic allies?"

Schumer is still under the illusion that the US has as much power in the world as it had in the Sixties. He's living in the past, mahnnn.

― Le Bateau Ivre

josh i look forward to your guide on evading us hegemony after leaking top secret documents

whenever you make the time

when the dn changes to Josh in Bolivia, you will know he made the time

Snowden reminds me a lot of guys you would see at hacker conventions in the early 90s - the corporate cyberpunks who talked a big game about how one day they were going take on the system and defeat Big Brother like it was a James Bond story. I think Snowden thought that the reveal itself would give him don't-kill-the-messenger immunity but he badly underestimated just how ruthless this type of Power operates - you would think the house in Hawaii, the high-paying job, and the dancing exhibitionist girlfriend would be a tip off. It works in organized crime.

i mean i cant read the guys mind who knows but i think yeah there's a decent chance he thought this would be like the end of a movie where he spills the beans and the corrupt gov't can no longer touch him because all its avatars are being prosecuted or hounded from office or whatever. and therefore underestimated not just US ruthlessness but the extent to which people care, or want to know, the revelations. (or OTOH the extent to which people *already knew* what his documents revealed

)

Awful lot of mind reading here!

yeah I'm thinking he anticipated some of this could happen

"We cannot offer you asylum because we just found out that the Americans have bugged our entire government. Your case means nothing to us."

neway i found this about as infuriating as any of the stuff that snowden revealed, the pathetic way euro countries treated evo morales and his plane http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/snowden.html?hp

certainly Obama's remark – not sending fighter jets after a hacker – makes sense. He had other means of persuasion.

josh i look forward to your guide on evading us hegemony after leaking top secret documents

Like I said, the first step, retroactively, was to evade US hegemony before leaking docs.

I suppose the catch is finding asylum without it looking like some quid pro quo secrets-for-safe-haven trade. There's asylum, and then there's ... defection? But wtf does this guy care? He's not coming back here on his own. I don't know if that makes him brave or a coward that he's not willing to go full-martyr, but he's burned his bridges already.

Anyway, watch this: fly to Mexico on a vacation, fly to Cuba. Stay there. US hegemony: evaded! But at this point, post-leak, hornet nest -shaking, he's pretty screwed if he wants to live out the rest of his life in anything close to comfort. But he claims to have thought of that, per his initial comments, so who cares.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5917093

huh that's interesting

I'm not a big fan of Big Brother government, but if there's anything a gov seems to be justified in going to the ends of the earth to achieve, it's catching a former employee who not only has leaked ample state secrets, threatened to leak more, fled the country in search of sanctuary and thumbed his nose at the US the whole time. Is it it any wonder no one wants this particular hot potato?

justified in their eyes, yeah.

That's just silly. You can disagree with it, but there's really no way to defend it as unjustified. It'd be like if a guy robs a bank and flees the country and boasts about it and you being all, that's cool, well played. It's not like the US is sending out the drones to blow up Snowden family weddings.

Yet.

but dude robbed a bank to treat his sick aunt...who is president of that very bank!

the USG is a morally unjustifiable entity, but i'm not saying more with them watching, y'know

saying more would be a bit like pissing into the ocean at this point, no?

prism consists of google, facebook, apple, twitter and ilx

Obama has access to ALL your posts even the ones in 77

Aybe-May ecan-may alk-tay in ode-cay?

but dude robbed a bank to treat his sick aunt...who is president of that very bank!

― Sufjan Grafton, Wednesday, July 3, 2013 11:48 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is that a movie?

it's a mountain dew commercial. his aunt is 'sick' in the sense that she does indy nosebones

lol

It'd be like if a guy robs a bank and flees the country and boasts about it and you being all, that's cool, well played

i mean i get what you're saying, even if i disagree, but this is sort of a poor analogy

I'll concede that.

Obama has access to ALL your posts even the ones in 77

― iatee, Wednesday, July 3, 2013 3:52 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aw hell

lol we couldn't even keep 77 posts from leaking to BCO, of course the government has them

haha that was a joke ftr?

they've had access to 77 from the start, el tomboto was like the first person invited

crut how could you do this to us

Evo Morales is, with a stopover in Gran Canaria, now on the way home. But the involuntary stopover in Vienna Bolivian President leaves considerable repercussions. And questions, the answers are hidden in the false bottoms possibly that are standard in the diplomatic interiors.

i really enjoy google translate sometimes

‏@MartinxHodgson
Obama "not scrambling jets" to find #Snowden. Merely closing down European airspace and detaining a president!

Morales said Bolivia had not received a formal application for asylum from Snowden yet, but hinted it would consider any request favourably.

"If there were a request, of course we would be willing to debate and consider the idea," Morales told RT Actualidad, the Spanish-language service of Russian broadcaster RT.

"I know that the empires have an espionage network and are against the so-called developing countries. And in particular, against those which are rich in natural resources," he added.

His comments were echoed by favourable noises from Venezuela, another possible exit route for the former NSA contractor. President Nicolás Maduro said Caracas was also ready to consider Snowden's asylum should he ask for it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden-bolivia-plane-vienna

Not scrambling jets, just searching the jet of another country's president

Amid a growing diplomatic storm, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, has been allowed to fly out of Vienna, but only after a 12-hour interruption during which his plane was stopped and searched for the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

tho obv i'm in the free eddie camp there's a part of me that's coming around to the notion that turning himself in would be the fastest way to make this story about spying again instead of about the spy

wondering how many liberals in '71 were rushing to compare dan ellsberg to a bank robber

get him away from the people who want to use him at WL to keep gasping at relevance, away from the politicians that want to make him an accidental anti-imperialist mascot...but then, the alternative is how many years of solitary before a trial that would see him dismantled xp

It's not like the US is sending out the drones to blow up Snowden family weddings.

Yet.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, July 3, 2013 3:43 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah they'd never kill an american who said some treasonous shit that aided the enemy and maybe his family for being in the wrong place at the wrong time amirite

idk if this matters but my understanding of the pentagon papers was that, while classified, they didn't contain anything the public didn't already know from various news sources about what had happened in vietnam -- what the PP showed was that the pentagon itself knew how useless and hopeless the situation was, and had known for years (right?)

also when ellsberg leaked them he didn't have a bradley manning figure being put in solitary w/o charge for months previously...

oddly, i remember my journalism professor in college saying basically the same thing -- that the PP were no big deal and nixon (being nixon) just went beserk for no reason. but according to wiki:

The Papers revealed that the U.S. had expanded its war with bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by media in the US. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions. For example, the John F. Kennedy administration had planned to overthrow South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem before his death in a November 1963 coup. President Johnson had decided to expand the war while promising "we seek no wider war" during his 1964 presidential campaign, including plans to bomb North Vietnam well before the 1964 Election. President Johnson had been outspoken against doing so during the election and claimed that his opponent Barry Goldwater was the one that wanted to bomb North Vietnam.

mind you i don't think snowden = ellsberg or that the situations are exactly the same but all the same it's good to keep in mind that there was a time when ellsberg was not a beloved elder statesman of free speech et al, and that his actions were being denounced as treasonous. (also IIRC the PP were even more highly classified than what manning leaked, if not what snowden leaked.)

how many liberals in '71 were rushing to compare dan ellsberg to a bank robber

well, back then Obama Democrats woulda been right of Rockefeller Republicans

I think it's important to keep in mind this guy has spent the past 5+ years working with high level US secret intelligence across the world. Keep that in mind next time you read someone saying "This guy is stupid why didn't he do _this_ instead?" Clearly dude was privy to info the vast majority of us don't have, and undoubtedly that has informed his globe-trotting post-leak actions.

The truth prob lies somewhere between 'what a dolt' and 'he's super-informed and playing n-dimensional chess'.

bush jr was privy to all kinds of information but still thought invading iraq was a good idea, which i think indicates that access to intelligence doesn't necessarily replace personal intelligence.