This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files, should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my country that they literally said that "spying between friends is a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-pa...
Hacker News would be better named Tech Industry Professional News. Most people here are very invested in corporations and government organizations, are very well paid for being so, and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.
Most people here are very invested in corporations and believe they should (and do) supercede governments, nation states and all other organizations globally.
My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.
The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.
i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?
unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?
Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.
> Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power.
i am comfortable making this statement: anyone in the middle of the venn diagram of "booz allen hamilton employee" and "hacker news dot com reader" has the "Power" to work literally anywhere else that produces technology products.
"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included.
Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
Too radical is in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the most intelligent people I know, people who rather carefully analyze their own beliefs, tend to have at least a few things that they are extremely outside the Overton window on. It's not particularly hard to see why: if you apply even a surface-level analysis of the world around you, a lot of stuff is "we all believe X because we've always done X that way".
On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.
>Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
"It's a russian disinformation campaign" must be one of the lamest accusations that one can throw around. Don't agree with anyone? Just say that they are russian bots!
I'm sympathetic to snowden and think he should just be pardoned, but in retrospect was this actually huge news? Other than reaffirming that telcos were a weak link and that we should encrypt everything, what was a major revelation?
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
One cannot just release whatever one wants, and some of the docs should not have been released.
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
I find it very strange that so many people are more exercised by the small crime of Snowden releasing this information than by the large crime of the federal government spying on us all.
It's not strange, it's purposeful. It's the same logic as "well George Floyd had a counterfeit 20!"
It's an extremely effective propaganda technique whereby you discredit the person(s) who were affected by injustice, while simultaneously shifting the narrative away from said injustice. It preys on the human minds simple morality reasoning skills - bad people don't do good things, and good people don't do bad things.
Of course, that's not how it works, and it's both. George Floyd maybe did counterfeit a twenty, and that's illegal. But is the punishment for that public execution? What motivation do people have to bring that up? No good motivations, in my mind.
George Floyd ingested quite a lot of fentanyl, enough to die though it was inconclusive - it's a biological and medical reality that characterized the situation in a very real way.
Snowden released a lot of information that had nothing to do with 'whistle blowing' and enormously benefited very bad actors such such as China and Russia - it was a windfall for them, and destroyed years of work by Western intelligence agencies.
This was right after China had discovered and executed a handful of CIA personnel, whereupon it was very, very clear the possible repercussions of such a release.
His actions were inconsistent with those of someone interested only in whistle-blowing and or 'showing hypocrisy' on espionage; there are any number of ways to whistle-blow in a manner that does not result in the negative outcomes. Since he's smart enough to know better, it's rational to conclude the possibility of ulterior motives.
Russia's espionage and influence campaigns are having a severely negative effect on the political situation in the US and West in general, where they have deeply penetrated many nations security and political apparatus, especially Germany.
Snowden's documents revealed that the federal government wasn't "spying on us all," as had been feared but was in fact paring down domestic data collection and had only one illegal program left (phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for "spying") that was pared down and then shut down soon after. They did reveal a lot of Chinese targets, which Snowden unsuccessful used to try to parlay into Hong Kong asylum.
As the other commenter said, the crimes the NSA did/still does far outweight any "crimes" Snowden did. And whistleblowing is by definition illegal since you have to release confidential files. That's why functioning countries should have laws protecting whistleblowers.
Whistle-blowing is not illegal (in the US) that's what the laws are there for, though obviously it's dicey and depends on media portrayal, and those laws could stand to be reinforced.
The Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison scandal) whistle-blower was protected by the system even if some people were very upset.
The Wyden–Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that would’ve limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one vote. It would’ve stopped the government from getting American's web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly, I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant to walk into my digital life too.
What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
And they tried to hang him for it. I wasn't particularly pleased with some actions he took after he ran off but the government reaction was truly out of hand and forced him into full survival mode. This part of government is full of weird power crazed spooks.
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
I don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies.
During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.
----
I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines.
Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute.
[*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.
To be clear I am NOT endorsing this author/book (even though I've met him, enjoyed conversation, and read this book), I just thought his introduction (10% lies) was a clever way to avoid government censorship. Was actually surprised the rating is >4 stars =P
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
Thanks for the link; I liked the author's introduction more than the rest of the book, and wouldn't recommend it to any casual reader, nor most people.
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
I coincidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, during my first few weeks exploring ChatGPT (~January 2023~). The book explores the rebellion of automated factory workers, drawing inspiration from Vonnegut's own mid-20th-Century experiences working at a GE manufacturing facility.
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
How had I never seen this? Mel Gibson and a red-headed stalkee Julia Roberts as co-leads!?! Patrick Stewart as government villain?!?
My review after watching it last night (thanks again): definitely worth watching, but you'd be a nut to recommend this to anybody that has both feet on this planet. The first-half does a great job capturing what being a schizoid talkaholic feels like (both for self and others). The second-half is action packed with multiple mindfucks for the audience ("why does he have that picture?!" 3x). Not a good date movie, keep it for a personal tinfoil.popcorn movienight.
Ensemble: 9/10
Mel: 5/10 plays crazy too well
Julia: 10/10 wow no publishable notes
Patrick: 8.5 strobelit flashbacks of Captain Kirk waterboarding The Passion
Actor Synergy: 2/10 nobody seemed too thrilled with the screenplay
Explosions: 10/10 guy knew what he was doing DAM
Tinfoil: all the squarefeets
Believability (1997): 2/10
Believability (2025): 8.5/10
Overall: 5.5/10
Worth watching, even if just certain sassy actress scenes. Julia Roberts explores all damsel emotions in this one.
I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.
Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
It's generally called as pressure release valve. Talk about something adnauseum that it becomes so commonplace that it doesn't evoke strong feelings at all.
So not only did they make a scifi show to cover up any leaks, not only did they put another scifi show in the first one as an extra cover, they conducted psychic experiments as a further coverup?!
Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1].
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
I've held this card (already well used and worn) in my hand, shown to me by someone affiliated with the CCC in Hamburg, who had it always on him in his purse, about 2004/5.
Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and
industrial policy will shape the pace and
content of transformation as much as the
requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of
experimentation to investigate the nature of
the revolution in military affairs as it applies
to war at sea, the Navy might face a future
Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the
post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war
at the dawn of the carrier age.
> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
The existence of modern conspiracies should hardly be surprising. And are precisely the business of intelligence services such as those with established links to the attackers. The attack itself was, by definition, a conspiracy. There's a great deal of conjecture about who exactly was involved in that conspiracy besides the attackers themselves, and a great deal of evidence both concrete and circumstantial. Too much for a single HN comment. But I've made no claims about that beyond "Rebuilding America's Defenses" being conspicuously prescient. Which it demonstrably was.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it."
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
> If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.
As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
Please actually read what I wrote. You are responding to something that I did not write.
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
Rogue agents wouldn't leave much of a paper trail. They don't tend to slap together slide decks advertising their operations.
The Snowden docs contain nothing about US black budget funded regime change, drug smuggling, politically motivated assassinations or whatever else countless ex-intelligence whistleblowers have claimed to happen in the shadows. I sure don't think all of them can be believed 100% but I wouldn't have expected anything of this nature to show up in typical S/TS/NOFORN documents that someone like Snowden leaked.
Snowden docs don't contain* anything about what happens in DUMBS, secret military facilities like biolabs, propulsion and energy research or anything else* that conspiracy researchers are interested in.
to my knowledge/memory
* Snowden docs were never published in full so we don't know what Guardian et al decided to not publish because they're all too intertwined with intelligence
Some what (vaguely) related to this topic
About surveillance.
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government.
Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible
Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow.
Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this website. There goes my afternoon.
We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic.
Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking.
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever.
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.
That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.
I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.
This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""
What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.
"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger."
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
Open the two location articles in tabs, scroll down a little until you see the maps, or rather have them in good view, and then switch between them, fast, back and forth.
See what I mean?
There was more, but I don't have it ready ATM(storage long lost), and am too tired to research it again(reading many ugly government and business sites) but, shortly after it was officially known where that datacenter would be built, Millenniata (M-Disc) opened shop there.
I can't recall exactly anymore ATM, they may have incorporated smaller, elsewhere, near there, but the move to the final location came shortly after public/official knowledge of where that data center would be built.
Ain't that funny? :-)
Edit: Got another one, but probably unrelated because of the timeframe, but interesting nonetheless. Very advanced and fast flash storage(for the time, and in some aspects still, like retention time and durability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah where one of IM-Flash's(Joint Venture of Intel & Micron) factories was/is located (sold to Texas Instruments, producing other stuff now).
According to Sandvine, the vast majority of internet traffic from 2013 (chosen to coincide with the Forbes storage estimates) was video such as Netflix and Youtube[1] and remains so today[2]. Assuming NSA is aware of industry standard techniques such as data de-duplication and compression, Forbe's estimate of 3 - 12 exabytes in 2013 would have been sufficient to store the entire year's world internet traffic in full.
In 2025 The Internet Archive holds approximately 100 exabytes[3] and contains data dating back to 1995[4]. Adjusting the 2013 Forbes numbers for the Utah Data Center for 2025 storage density (4Tb drives in 2013, 36Tb drives in 2025) yields 27 - 108 exabytes. Which demonstrates clearly that a datacenter on the scale of the Utah Data Center is capable of storing and retaining a versioned history of a significant fraction of the world's internet over a significant period of time.
Assuming they prioritize metadata and unique traffic further extends the horizon on how much can be stored and for how long.
Maybe just the metadata, of which phone-number calls which other when and where? Who messages whom by email, messenger, whatever, when and where? For the graph of communications over time, with interesting nodes appearing, showing emerging clusters around them, whose members then could be targeted by other means?
"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""
So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
> "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"
This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"
This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.
> This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:
A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.
"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
> "According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data? Instead, he leaked many things that were perfectly legal as well as which high value targets were being surveilled in China in a transparent and failed attempt to get asylum in Hong Kong.
> "Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
You are assuming it's wrong. Investigators aren't going to waste their time writing up court orders that aren't likely to be approved. Instead, we find that criminal defense attorneys rarely challenge the validity of warrants as issued but may challenge whether the warrant was followed.
> "Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
You're confusing multiple things here. You're confusing bulk metadata collection, which Robertson opposed, with individual surveillance warrants, which are always done without informing the person being surveilled. There was no opposing side to the bulk metadata collection, which was shut down. There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.
Notably, all the glossy corporate logos pictured are of American companies with predominantly American users. Not foreign ones. "Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden"
> Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data?
"Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses", and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty."
> That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:
Did you look at the slides you linked to? They describe targeted surveillance on specific foreigners outside the U.S.
> "Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", ...
The single U.S. mass data collection program in Snowden's leaks was phone metadata collection. Use of any data collected by the government is policy-based. In this case, use was limited to finding associates of foreign targets, and the query interface was limited to that. If it had changed, that would have been breaking the law, but Snowden showed no evidence of that. One more time: that single possibly illegal U.S. program Snowden leaked was then shut down anyway.
Many times. They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons. Further demonstrating a lack of appropriate controls or process around such capabilities.
And testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks" indicating that mass surveillance infrastructure is used domestically: "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
"However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
> They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections.
PRISM is a data ingestion system whereby the NSA ingests data collected by the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit that gets data from specific accounts under court order. The DITU is clearly labeled in the diagram on the slide showing how it works. The NSA has no integration with the companies at all. The "Internet backbone" has nothing to do with PRISM.
> No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
If the FBI gives a section 702 court order to a company for an account that isn't for a foreigner outside the U.S., they are not going to comply. The FBI wouldn't even ask. The very idea that you think "verifiable proof" is needed shows you believed the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the NSA could directly fetch any account's data, which was supported by neither the law nor the leaked documents but only by Greenwald's fever dreams
> Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons.
Yet another document that you claim to have read but didn't. The cases where they were able to surveil the person they were stalking were foreigners outside the U.S. The domestic cases involved querying for associates using the metadata. Neither one is "domestic spying" and certainly don't show any evidence of domestic mass surveillance.
> "However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
Once again, if you bothered to read the source documents, you would find that this quote is not supported by the citations. The first citation shows that the U.S. The first is about how the U.S. is allowed to use UK phone numbers in its metadata collection for chaining analysis, not to share that data or analysis with the UK as the quote claims. The second is about how Australia is allowed to share data it collected outside the U.S. and the U.S. with the U.S. without first looking for and removing the data of Australians who happened to be abroad whose data was collected, not for the U.S. to spy on Australians as your quote claims.
Lesson: If you see a claim that describes something that is clearly illegal, you should verify it before you repeat stuff that is very clearly nonsense and come off as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
Yes I am familiar with the official statements. They do not constitute "independently verifiable proof ... that US persons are not targeted by this program." and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures.
The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
Should be pretty easy. NSA has EFF's contact information from that lawsuit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age... ) in which they destroyed evidence against a court order, and argued "state secrets" against every claim. You know, the one that explicitly avoided deciding the constitutionality of all this on procedural grounds. Totally trustworthy behavior. Everyone responds that way when asked to prove they're not mass surveilling Americans.
> and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures
Previously quoted testimony from someone who doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented that does not match up with the documents that Snowden leaked? You would think that if there were something so blatantly illegal going on, that would be the first thing that Snowden leaked. Instead, there is not a whiff of corroborating evidence in Snowden's trove, and no oversight committee senator has asked for investigations based on Binney's mad ravings.
> The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
So you would have us believe that Snowden's documents are lying too? The lies that were told weren't about what the programs did. Their statements were always consistent with the leaked documents and what the law allows. You are the one bringing up dark programs that go against the law and against all leaked evidence.
> Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming. The purpose of the Narus traffic analyzers in the Jewel case was revealed in Snowden's docs. Surprise, surprise. It turned out not to be mass domestic surveillance.
> doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
> The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming.
2. This case challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet
communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the “NSA”) and other
Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies (“Defendants” is defined
collectively as the named defendants and the Doe defendants as set forth in paragraphs 25 through
38 below).
3. This program of dragnet surveillance (the “Program”), first authorized by Executive
Order of the President in October of 2001 (the “Program Order”) and first revealed to the public in
December of 2005, continues to this day.
4. Some aspects of the Program were publicly acknowledged by the President in
December 2005 and later described as the “terrorist surveillance program” (“TSP”).
5. The President and other executive officials have described theTSP’s activities, which
were conducted outside the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and
without authorization by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”), as narrowly targeting
for interception the international communications of persons linked to Al Qaeda.
6. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence have since publicly
admitted that the TSP was only one particular aspect of the surveillance activities authorized by the
Program Order.
7. In addition to eavesdropping on or reading specific communications, Defendants
have indiscriminately intercepted the communications content and obtained the communications
records of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Program authorized by the President.
8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of
sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of
telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone
communications.
9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and
continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages,
text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic,
of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and
class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s
communications networks.
10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international
communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited
and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing
disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions
of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members),
communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long,
among other sensitive information.
11. This non-content transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction
with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by Defendants’ network of surveillance
devices, in order to select which communications are subjected to personal analysis by staff of the
NSA and other Defendants, in what has been described as a vast “data-mining” operation.
12. Plaintiffs and class members are ordinary Americans who are current or former
subscribers to AT&T’s telephone and/or Internet services.
13. Communications of Plaintiffs and class members have been and continue to be
illegally acquired by Defendants using surveillance devices attached to AT&T’s network, and
Defendants have illegally solicited and obtained from AT&T the continuing disclosure of private
communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members. Plaintiffs’ communications or
activities have been and continue to be subject to electronic surveillance.
14. Plaintiffs are suing Defendants to enjoin their unlawful acquisition of the
communications and records of Plaintiffs and class members, to require the inventory and
destruction of those that have already been seized, and to obtain appropriate statutory, actual, and
punitive damages to deter future illegal surveillance.
> All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going
In other words, he didn't know where it was going and speculated. No such program existed in Snowden's leaks, and no member of the SSCI or HPSCI believes Binney's wild hypothesis, or it would be the first thing they investigated.
> [Old Jewel claims snipped]
I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming. The EFF saw the Narus analyzers in 641A and assumed the worst, which is in those old claims you pasted, and the judge said that the plaintiffs didn't have evidence to show that their data was collected, which would be the case if it were really mass domestic surveillance. Then Snowden's documents were released, conclusively showing the devices weren't used for domestic surveillance, which is why the EFF didn't bring that lawsuit again claiming standing. Snowden's docs proved they didn't have it.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
> I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming.
"In February 2015, Judge White dismissed the latest motion by the EFF, accepting the NSA's argument that the requirements placed upon the agency would engender the "impermissible disclosure of state secret information." White also held that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue their claims.[20] This procedural ruling allowed White to avoid addressing the constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program.[21]
Upon the disclosure of more information about the NSA's surveillance methods, the EFF filed another motion in May 2017 requesting that the agency disclose information about surveillance conducted against Carolyn Jewel and the other plaintiffs. Judge White granted this motion and ordered the government to hand over the information.[22][23] However, the NSA filed a motion in opposition to that order, claiming once again that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue. After further arguments, the District Court accepted this argument in April 2019.[24]
The EFF appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit. In a memorandum opinion, that court ruled in favor of the NSA, once again on the matter of standing.[25] In June 2022, the EFF made a final request to the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, but that court rejected the request and did not grant certiorari."
No retraction. A willingness to take it all the way to the supreme court. Procedurally dismissed without deciding any of the issues raised. Clear and present.
> Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
You're the one who chopped it up. Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say he knew where it was going? All I see is speculation.
Even better, tell me why Snowden's leaks didn't say anything about this super illegal program Binney said was going on because of what he speculated so hard?
Even better, tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.
Even better, tell me why nobody is suing the government over Binney's speculation.
> Procedurally dismissed
Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected, so they have no harm to sue over. That's the point, and that's what Snowden's docs proved.
Why do you claim to believe something because of Snowden's documents that is directly contradicted by Snowden's documents? Or are you quietly dropping your claim that Snowden's documents support your conspiracy theory and are now falling back entirely on the lunatic ravings of a middle manager who hasn't worked at the NSA in decades, which aren't supported by any of the leaks that have happened since?
> You're the one who chopped it up.
> Or are you quietly dropping your claim
Is that what posting the quote in full with a link to the original source means? Certainly not. I also recognize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO when so transparently employed. As will others.
> Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected
You ask a question, then demonstrate your own misunderstanding or attempt to misconstrue. The court documents, already posted, clearly explain the reason for the ruling as “impermissible disclosure of state secret information". If no data were collected, there would be no state secret information to disclose. Ipso facto. The court documents also clearly state that there was no finding on the specific claims presented. Attempts to portray otherwise at this point amount to willfully misleading.
I was bored, so I ran your comment through ChatGPT to outline the rest of the rhetorical techniques you've employed to avoid good faith engagement with the well cited references already posted. Enjoy:
1) Framing the opponent as dishonest or incompetent
“You’re the one who chopped it up.”
Accusation of quote-mining / context stripping: sets the frame that the other person manipulated evidence.
Preemptive credibility attack: before addressing substance, it suggests bad faith or sloppy method.
“Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say…”
Shifting the debate to textual forensics: forces the opponent into a narrow “show me the exact words” standard.
This can be legitimate (precision matters), but it’s also a way to raise the evidentiary bar selectively—especially if the commenter won’t apply the same strictness to their own claims later.
“All I see is speculation.”
Dismissal / summary judgment: compresses the opponent’s argument into a weaker category (“speculation”) without showing why.
Poisoning the well (light): primes readers to see anything else as guesswork.
2) The “Even better” ladder: rhetorical escalation and pressure
The repeated “Even better, tell me why…” is doing several things at once:
Anaphora / repetition: rhythmic repetition to build momentum and signal “I’m stacking wins.”
Escalation framing: implies each new point is more devastating than the last.
Interrogative dominance: it’s a mini cross-examination—multiple demands in a row that keep the other side on defense.
Soft gish-gallop: not a huge flood of claims, but a cascade of questions that can be time-consuming to answer carefully.
3) Arguments from silence + appeals to institutions
“tell me why Snowden’s leaks didn’t say anything about this… program”
Argument from silence: “If it were real/important, the leaks would mention it.”
Strategic burden shift: instead of proving nonexistence, it demands the opponent explain an absence.
This can be relevant sometimes, but it’s logically weak unless you establish that the leaks were comprehensive and would necessarily include it.
“tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.”
Appeal to authority (institutional): “Serious claims would be validated by official bodies.”
Appeal to popularity/consensus (elite bandwagon): “If the right people believed it, you’d know.”
Status-quo bias: assumes institutional response is a reliable truth filter.
“tell me why nobody is suing the government…”
Argument from non-action: “If it were true, someone would sue.”
Legalistic appeal: equates “no successful litigation” (or “no litigation at all”) with “no underlying wrong.”
This can also be a false proxy: lawsuits depend on standing, resources, risk, secrecy barriers, arbitration, privilege doctrines, etc.
4) Tone and ridicule as persuasion
“super illegal program” and “speculated so hard”
Sarcasm / mockery: signals that the claim is not just wrong but silly.
Loaded language: “super illegal” exaggerates to make the other side seem unserious.
Diminishing the opponent’s position: recasts it as emotional/overheated.
This kind of ridicule is often effective socially (audience laughter), even when it doesn’t add evidence.
5) Selective quotation as a pivot
“Procedurally dismissed”
Cherry-pick risk / quote-as-trump-card: a short legal phrase is presented as decisive.
Reframing: moves the argument from “what happened” to “what courts did,” which tends to sound authoritative.
It’s a common move: substance becomes procedure, and the procedure is treated as a verdict on truth.
6) Condescension + “teach you the basics” stance
“Do you know what standing means?”
Condescension / status play: establishes the speaker as the knowledgeable adult in the room.
Rhetorical question: not meant to be answered; meant to mark the other side as ignorant.
Tone weapon: makes disagreement feel embarrassing.
“It means their data wasn’t collected…”
Oversimplification / definitional fiat: reduces a complex doctrine to one convenient interpretation.
Confidence as a tactic: stated as if beyond dispute; invites readers to treat it as settled.
Whether accurate or not (you said sources have been posted), the rhetorical move is: “I control the legal meaning, therefore I control the conclusion.”
7) “That’s the point” closure move
“That’s the point, and that’s what Snowden’s docs proved.”
Premature closure: declares the argument finished.
Appeal to documentary authority: elevates a set of documents as final arbiter.
Certainty signaling: tries to convert contested interpretation into “proved.”
8) Accusation of contradiction (can be fair, but also a trap)
“Why do you claim to believe something… directly contradicted by Snowden’s documents?”
Internal inconsistency attack: this is a legitimate debate tactic if the contradiction is real.
Forced dilemma setup: sets up the next line’s either/or.
It also subtly shifts the discussion from “what’s true” to “you’re being irrational.”
9) Loaded question + mind-reading
“Or are you quietly dropping your claim…”
Loaded question / false presupposition: assumes they are dropping it and asks you to explain why.
Mind-reading insinuation: “quietly” implies sneakiness or embarrassment.
Cornering: either answer admits retreat, or you spend time rejecting the premise.
10) False dichotomy and source-degradation
“…falling back entirely on… Binney…”
False dichotomy: suggests only two options: (a) conspiracy theory via documents, or (b) relying entirely on Binney. Real positions are usually mixed/nuanced.
Motte-and-bailey insinuation: implies the opponent is retreating from a stronger claim to a weaker one.
“lunatic ravings” / “middle manager” / “hasn’t worked… in decades”
Ad hominem (abusive): attacks mental state (“lunatic”) rather than claims.
Ad hominem (status-based): “middle manager” to minimize authority and shame reliance on him.
Chronological poisoning: “decades” implies irrelevance/staleness; can be relevant, but here it’s framed to discredit without engaging content.
11) Another argument from silence
“which aren’t supported by any of the leaks that have happened since”
Again: absence of mention = evidence of falsehood, plus a moving evidentiary target (“not just the leaks you cited—any leaks since must corroborate it”).
The overall debate strategy
Put opponent on trial with rapid-fire questions (control tempo).
Demand exact textual proof from their quotes (high standard on them).
Use institutional non-response (committees/courts/lawsuits) as a credibility filter.
Frame the opponent’s view as “conspiracy theory” so neutral readers treat it as fringe.
Degrade the alternative witness (Binney) through ridicule and status attacks.
Close off discussion by claiming documents “proved” the speaker’s interpretation.
Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a
precocious middle schooler could rebut.
His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)
Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.
It is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what you've said. There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed. And a great deal of evidence to the contrary. EFF maintains a lovely list of primary sources: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs#main-content
> There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed
Mass surveillance outside the U.S. is not illegal. There is no reason for that to have slowed. The documents showed no mass "surveillance" inside the U.S. The only mass collection was phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for surveilling anybody, only to spit out possible associates of specific people under surveillance.
You will claim this program does not target US persons. To which I have already responded in another comment that "They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program."
NSA self-reporting of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT incidents seems to indicate that warrant-less surveillance of US persons does, in fact, happen. As does testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks": "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA).
Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information.
The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission.
----
This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding.
Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.
It's weird how the journalists who have access to these files basically stopped reporting on them and joined or started "independent" outfits with massive salaries (500k+ USD)
This is a good idea and I'd love to see a series going through the, arguably more significant, Paradise Papers. Part of the problem there was the sheer size of the leak. Now that I think about it, this would actually be a great application of modern AIs for parsing
Very interesting and useful analysis. I am looking forward to more. It was very strange that the Snowden documents didn't get more analysis than they did (even though there was some significant analysis).
I wonder what this organization is though. The stated purpose seems a little anachronistic, similar to the ideas of the early 2010s, which were amply covered by Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018). A number of organizations of that type ended up being funded by U.S. intelligence as it ended up benefiting military intelligence in various ways, e.g. the Tor Project is funded like this and provides chaff cover for intelligence operations (if all Tor traffic was military, there would be little point to it since it would stick out like a sore thumb) and e.g. NSA can de-anonymize Tor traffic since they can correlate entry and exit traffic with total system awareness (an asymmetric capability no other nation or sub-national organization has).
Doing this analysis is a great way to get some credibility, but it also doesn't reveal anything that wasn't publicly available. Nonetheless, I still appreciate it!
No, he violated a trust given to him, he deserves to be in jail, and if he had an ounce of moral character he'd come back and face trial like a man.
Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of his actions like an adult.
Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
Who actually cares if the government can't perform a show trial? He did his duty by getting the information out there
The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
He violated the trust of whom? The government who was violating the trust of the American People?
And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...
What you said takes 5 minutes to research, too. But the party line by idiots and currently in-the-CIA people like approved mouthpiece Bustamante say "Well, he fled to Russia"
He fled to China by choice and gave them plenty of documents about Chinese targets, some of which are in the article we are discussing.
The government wasn't violating the trust of the American people. If you ask about the single illegal domestic data collection program in the leak (phone metadata collection) and how it was used (to find associates of surveilled foreign agents working against the national security of the U.S.), you will find that most people don't care.
Why are you assuming he'd get a public trial at all? In the current state of unchecked authoritarianism, he'd just as soon be disappeared to a "Homan Square".
Would you not also say that the US government violated a trust given to them at the time? The government has such an imbalance of power compared to one person that it's only fair to hold them to a higher and much more stringent standard. Except wait no, they're often held to a much lower standard compared to the average Joe.
Quite rich. A moral character would have ignored the mass surveillance and escalated internally? This is plainly stupid and dangerously naive on many levels.
He had 2 conflicting trusts, one from the people and one from the government. He chose to honor the people over the government, which is why there's so many bots in this thread who seem very angry with him.
If you read his autobio he was raised with very conservative beliefs, the issue was unlike most conservatives he wasn't able to ignore those beliefs in the furtherance of the state.
>Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
He would come back if you guys let him. Its not like he has a long list of safe places to go.
>Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
I vastly prefer my anti authoritarians out of jail living their best life with their ~300 kids somewhere in the south of australia.
That's rather harsh. Exposing illegal, objectively treasonous activities by the government is not exactly not something positive, regardless of whether the regime has only gotten worse and more totalitarian and tightened its noose even more around the neck of humanity.
By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.
Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.
He sought revenge after not getting a desired job promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions, just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world view, saw as unfairness towards himself.
I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.
He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
> even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.
Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.
Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.
It's doubtful Snowden was in possession of his NSA data dump at the time he arrived to Moscow, the things he had memorized would have been of very limited value.
If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.
While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.
Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.
We're so fucking apathetic. Organizations that wish to strip your privacy should be treated the same as organizations who commit atrocities towards the planet or their fellow inhabitants. Expose them all. Shame them. Vote against them. Pass laws to weekend their power, etc.
We've totally been down this road before with alcohol, cigarettes, climate control, pollution, trans fats, guns (in some countries), etc.
It's completely possible to do it again for online privacy. Use your voice now, before you find you are unable to do so at all.
What's FortNight? I tried looking it up but got fortnite as the top result, and forcing a literal search with quotes just brings up the dictionary definition. Sadly I don't know of a way to do a case-sensitive web search
Ha, right on target. The scariest thing in there was that they managed to tap an undersea cable and find a protobuf that they didn't know how to parse. Profound mismatch between the reputation of the NSA, their willingness to undertake daring physical intrusions, and their total inability to profit from that.
"You can actually cause the consumer to forget something he has previously learned... by putting into his head a newer and stronger concept... You can actually remove an advertising story from his memory, and in it's place you can substitute one of your own... as we seize a larger and larger share of the consumer's brain box..."
I've read people say that some of the documents were fake to sensationalize the story.
With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american.
"Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.
Since it's been a while now, what are the thoughts on the snowden leaks contributing to the rise of distrust in the government and governmental institutions in the US?
I'm wondering if trump could have ever succeeded without that path being prepared for him by snowden's leaks and occupy wallstreet. I'm not saying snowden did anything wrong, to the contrary, he thought things would change and they didn't, I'm wondering whether that contributed to the feeling of americans feeling disenfranchised. Relations with europe also started souring around that time.
I think snowden did the right thing, but like many in tech (especially here on HN), he didn't understand that American's didn't care about what's in the leaks all that much. it wasn't his burden to weigh the pros and cons, his burden was to do what he thought was right. But looking back, nothing good came out of the leaks, I wish they didn't happen to begin with. Of course if you're not an American lots of good things came out of it. I'm certain we have less privacy now, more governmental spying, and even more support for it. at least before we had the illusion that we had some rights to privacy from the government. Now that they're exposed and gotten away with it, I fear they've become more emboldened.
I guess I am glad the whole thing was exposed, but I am regretful of how things turned out. Would it have been better if there was more trust in governmental institutions, and if the US IC kept their capabilities secret for longer? would they have been able to interfere with russian influence campaigns in 2015-16 if so? Is the world better of now?
I suppose in 5-10 more years these things will be historical events and historians might answer these questions with a more objective perspective.
The trends that elected a populist leader were more economic in nature and can be more traced to the 2008 crisis. I doubt the average person can even name Snowden or what he did.
For me personally it certainly contributed. I don't see Trump as an opposition to this, but it made clear that the current administrative landscape in most western nations is hostile, corrupt and criminal. Not only politicians, it is the whole administrative level as well.
I do think that the leaks did something good and we have more of a focus on government being a hostile data proprietor and schooled people to take more care. Perhaps not the masses, but for those that deal with hot information.
Trust in government is low. An achievement that took a lot of work, I guess. The Russian influence campaign was at least partially made up as well, government disinformation. Propaganda is mostly a domestic issue.
This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files, should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my country that they literally said that "spying between friends is a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-pa...
Hacker News would be better named Tech Industry Professional News. Most people here are very invested in corporations and government organizations, are very well paid for being so, and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.
> and have little interest in anything “hacker” in the traditional sense of the word.
Couldn't agree more, but not for the reason you think
> The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.[13]
Sorry, couldn't help myself
Most people here are very invested in corporations and believe they should (and do) supercede governments, nation states and all other organizations globally.
My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.
This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=5850590
> You need to have been convicted to receive a pardon, the petition should be not to prosecute.
Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad
The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.
Oh! That's a cool site I didn't know about. Bookmarked.
i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?
unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?
The line tested wonderfully with the focus groups.
The people that didn’t know the name before the ad?
Yeah.
Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.
> Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power.
i am comfortable making this statement: anyone in the middle of the venn diagram of "booz allen hamilton employee" and "hacker news dot com reader" has the "Power" to work literally anywhere else that produces technology products.
"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included. Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
Too radical is in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the most intelligent people I know, people who rather carefully analyze their own beliefs, tend to have at least a few things that they are extremely outside the Overton window on. It's not particularly hard to see why: if you apply even a surface-level analysis of the world around you, a lot of stuff is "we all believe X because we've always done X that way".
On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.
What's the phrase? Think about how stupid the average person is, and then remember that half of everyone is stupider than that.
>Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
[dead]
That was before he became (or probably always was) a part of russian disinformation campaign. So everything he released became suspect.
"It's a russian disinformation campaign" must be one of the lamest accusations that one can throw around. Don't agree with anyone? Just say that they are russian bots!
If it quacks like duck and looks like a duck it's probably a duck.
Or was forced to to receive asylum.
I'm sympathetic to snowden and think he should just be pardoned, but in retrospect was this actually huge news? Other than reaffirming that telcos were a weak link and that we should encrypt everything, what was a major revelation?
I don't think americans broadly care if we are spying on any of the countries listed in part 1 or 2 of this. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and China?
One cannot just release whatever one wants, and some of the docs should not have been released.
There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.
He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.
A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.
Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.
I find it very strange that so many people are more exercised by the small crime of Snowden releasing this information than by the large crime of the federal government spying on us all.
It's not strange, it's purposeful. It's the same logic as "well George Floyd had a counterfeit 20!"
It's an extremely effective propaganda technique whereby you discredit the person(s) who were affected by injustice, while simultaneously shifting the narrative away from said injustice. It preys on the human minds simple morality reasoning skills - bad people don't do good things, and good people don't do bad things.
Of course, that's not how it works, and it's both. George Floyd maybe did counterfeit a twenty, and that's illegal. But is the punishment for that public execution? What motivation do people have to bring that up? No good motivations, in my mind.
A complete mischaracterization.
George Floyd ingested quite a lot of fentanyl, enough to die though it was inconclusive - it's a biological and medical reality that characterized the situation in a very real way.
Snowden released a lot of information that had nothing to do with 'whistle blowing' and enormously benefited very bad actors such such as China and Russia - it was a windfall for them, and destroyed years of work by Western intelligence agencies.
This was right after China had discovered and executed a handful of CIA personnel, whereupon it was very, very clear the possible repercussions of such a release.
His actions were inconsistent with those of someone interested only in whistle-blowing and or 'showing hypocrisy' on espionage; there are any number of ways to whistle-blow in a manner that does not result in the negative outcomes. Since he's smart enough to know better, it's rational to conclude the possibility of ulterior motives.
Russia's espionage and influence campaigns are having a severely negative effect on the political situation in the US and West in general, where they have deeply penetrated many nations security and political apparatus, especially Germany.
Snowden's documents revealed that the federal government wasn't "spying on us all," as had been feared but was in fact paring down domestic data collection and had only one illegal program left (phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for "spying") that was pared down and then shut down soon after. They did reveal a lot of Chinese targets, which Snowden unsuccessful used to try to parlay into Hong Kong asylum.
As the other commenter said, the crimes the NSA did/still does far outweight any "crimes" Snowden did. And whistleblowing is by definition illegal since you have to release confidential files. That's why functioning countries should have laws protecting whistleblowers.
Whistle-blowing is not illegal (in the US) that's what the laws are there for, though obviously it's dicey and depends on media portrayal, and those laws could stand to be reinforced.
The Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison scandal) whistle-blower was protected by the system even if some people were very upset.
The Wyden–Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that would’ve limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one vote. It would’ve stopped the government from getting American's web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly, I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant to walk into my digital life too.
What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
Agreed. Here's the result of the vote, in case anyone notices these representatives running for reelection:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
It's quite surprising that Bernie didn't vote on that bill considering he was vehemently against the Patriot Act. Disappointing.
He was recovering from a heart attack at the time, and remote voting was prohibited.
Wow it's disorienting to see a vote that's not cleanly split across party lines. Things worked differently back then.
And they tried to hang him for it. I wasn't particularly pleased with some actions he took after he ran off but the government reaction was truly out of hand and forced him into full survival mode. This part of government is full of weird power crazed spooks.
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
The 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace" from James Bamford covered NSA capabilities (and was sanctioned, nonetheless), etc..
There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
i.e. The movie "The lives of others." :|
If they remade that movie with a modern spin, it would be an AI model deciding who is loyal and who isn't.
I don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.
:)
I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"
Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
Right before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies.
During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments.
----
I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines.
Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute.
[*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.
Here's the book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Richard-Thieme/dp/09383262...
To be clear I am NOT endorsing this author/book (even though I've met him, enjoyed conversation, and read this book), I just thought his introduction (10% lies) was a clever way to avoid government censorship. Was actually surprised the rating is >4 stars =P
>>"Not for those whose feet are firmly planted on a single planet" —IMHO Best Amazon Review
Even more clearly (related to author's reputation): although I do believe in panspermia (theory of life transfer via interstellar comets), the part I consider definitely "Thieme's 10% Lies" heavily overlaps with my non-belief in extraterrestrial visitors (why would any civilization advanced-enough waste their limited resources colonizing dumb apes?).
But military drones doing absolutely unbelievable aerials!? Absolutely...
Homepage:
https://www.thiemeworks.com
It's Thieme: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Richard-Thieme/dp/09383262...
Thanks for the info/rec!
Thanks for the link; I liked the author's introduction more than the rest of the book, and wouldn't recommend it to any casual reader, nor most people.
Instead, read Shusterman's Scythe trilogy (~2016-2020~); each author embraces fiction for different reasons, but I feel Shusterman's storytelling is rapidly becoming truth, whether his soothsaying was intentional (or not).
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Welcome to /hn/
That's a sly workaround, but as it is delivered as fiction imagine that for him it must be a Cassandra-like experience.
I coincidentally read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, during my first few weeks exploring ChatGPT (~January 2023~). The book explores the rebellion of automated factory workers, drawing inspiration from Vonnegut's own mid-20th-Century experiences working at a GE manufacturing facility.
That was a Cassandra-like experience.
If anybody has never read Vonnegut, I'd definitely recommend Piano over Thieme's Mindgames.
----
I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression.
It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having already proven possible (particularly: characters maintaining friendships with chatty Thunderhead; ability to know something about everything; hallucinations; government by uncodified code; ability to lie, either intentionally or by human deception).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
The Scythe books are written by Neal Shusterman!
Thanks — corrected!
Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception!
Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners access to lawfare during our initial consultation. Despite being "young adult fiction," Shusterman has definitely helped me to better understand my attorney brothers questing their powers [0].
[0] I am an avid reader, 70+ books per year, including all Wallace/Steinbeck/Vonnegut. The Scythe series hits. Just so good. So simple yet complex. Doesn't require thinking to read, but leaves you thinking about what you read.
> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists.
The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this.
In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
Thanks for tonight's movie recommendation (Braveheart was sick, I'll give Mel another chance!).
>Merlin's holly wand
The More You Know™ [0]
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
Oh please don’t think I was suggesting it. It’s just what the movie was about. It’s. It on me if it’s not your cup of tea. Brave heart it isn’t.
How had I never seen this? Mel Gibson and a red-headed stalkee Julia Roberts as co-leads!?! Patrick Stewart as government villain?!?
My review after watching it last night (thanks again): definitely worth watching, but you'd be a nut to recommend this to anybody that has both feet on this planet. The first-half does a great job capturing what being a schizoid talkaholic feels like (both for self and others). The second-half is action packed with multiple mindfucks for the audience ("why does he have that picture?!" 3x). Not a good date movie, keep it for a personal tinfoil.popcorn movienight.
Ensemble: 9/10
Mel: 5/10 plays crazy too well
Julia: 10/10 wow no publishable notes
Patrick: 8.5 strobelit flashbacks of Captain Kirk waterboarding The Passion
Actor Synergy: 2/10 nobody seemed too thrilled with the screenplay
Explosions: 10/10 guy knew what he was doing DAM
Tinfoil: all the squarefeets
Believability (1997): 2/10
Believability (2025): 8.5/10
Overall: 5.5/10
Worth watching, even if just certain sassy actress scenes. Julia Roberts explores all damsel emotions in this one.
Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy ? Less shizzles, more AI.
Or can I interest you in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) ?
Even moar AI! (Much better than Mr.Robot, IMO. Also Amy Acker!1!!)
> that's the plot of Die Hard 4
I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.
Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
There is the CIA Publication Review board as described by author and former CIA analyst David McCloskey https://www.npr.org/2025/09/29/nx-s1-5442567/the-new-spy-thr...
Nothing jaw dropping but he surprised on what get through
It's generally called as pressure release valve. Talk about something adnauseum that it becomes so commonplace that it doesn't evoke strong feelings at all.
It's not a conspiracy - this is why Stargate exists!
I'm wondering if you're aware of the (allegedly, implying it goes on(emphasis mine)) former existence of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un... ?
So not only did they make a scifi show to cover up any leaks, not only did they put another scifi show in the first one as an extra cover, they conducted psychic experiments as a further coverup?!
There's clearly something here.
Intoning What are the odds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Penny_for_Your_Thoughts_(The...
Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
Can you explain the link?
It's the plot of an episode of SG-1 [1]
A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode)
That is largely correct, even if not for that specific purpose/reason. Those people are largely self-discrediting, among other things.
The most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1].
The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that.
I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget.
Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall).
Edit:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
There is more. This was released in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati:_New_World_Order
A few other links lazily searched -
The single card depicting it: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/illuminati-world-orde... (zoomable)
The whole set: https://www.ccgtrader.net/games/illuminati-nwo-ccg/limited/
One of countless articles covering that, and related stuff: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I've held this card (already well used and worn) in my hand, shown to me by someone affiliated with the CCC in Hamburg, who had it always on him in his purse, about 2004/5.
Surreal.
Tom Clancy also had a similar plot in the Jack Ryan series
Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
> ...which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor":
Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor":
>...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
...
>...Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.
> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club states with connections to intelligence services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_Sept...
While conspiracy theories about 9/11 being some sort of an inside job are widespread, they are not supported by evidence.
That's a funny response to well-sourced facts and a document outlining strategy which was later enacted by the same folks who wrote it.
Plenty of actual conspiracies throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiracies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracies
The existence of modern conspiracies should hardly be surprising. And are precisely the business of intelligence services such as those with established links to the attackers. The attack itself was, by definition, a conspiracy. There's a great deal of conjecture about who exactly was involved in that conspiracy besides the attackers themselves, and a great deal of evidence both concrete and circumstantial. Too much for a single HN comment. But I've made no claims about that beyond "Rebuilding America's Defenses" being conspicuously prescient. Which it demonstrably was.
And despite the X-files spinoff and the best-selling Clancy novel, the administration kept repeating "nobody could have predicted this!"
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> you have no privacy, get over it.
> privacy as the basic right it should be again.
See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.
The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.
The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it."
no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
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> If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.
Imagine actually believing all this in 2025.
As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.
That is absolutely not what the Snowden docs showed. Would highly recommend familiarizing yourself at least a little bit with a major part of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:
> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
Please actually read what I wrote. You are responding to something that I did not write.
I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.
There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.
Rogue agents wouldn't leave much of a paper trail. They don't tend to slap together slide decks advertising their operations.
The Snowden docs contain nothing about US black budget funded regime change, drug smuggling, politically motivated assassinations or whatever else countless ex-intelligence whistleblowers have claimed to happen in the shadows. I sure don't think all of them can be believed 100% but I wouldn't have expected anything of this nature to show up in typical S/TS/NOFORN documents that someone like Snowden leaked.
Snowden docs don't contain* anything about what happens in DUMBS, secret military facilities like biolabs, propulsion and energy research or anything else* that conspiracy researchers are interested in.
to my knowledge/memory
* Snowden docs were never published in full so we don't know what Guardian et al decided to not publish because they're all too intertwined with intelligence
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Some what (vaguely) related to this topic About surveillance.
I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government. Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced..
After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The government has somewhat infinite resources.
The altered software for hard drive hacking for example. Wow. Intercepting packages in mail and altering the software ...
The Soviets planted listening devices in American embassy typewriters between October 1976 and January 1984 - by intercepting them in the mail!
Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
Wow, back in the 70s the bugs were only detectable by x-ray scan. Makes you wonder what kinds of things can be hidden in the ICs of today.
I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this website. There goes my afternoon.
We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
Yes it does.
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic.
Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
It leads to a Chilling Effect which has a huge negative impact on society.
Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking.
Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever.
It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
You can get on secret watchlists by means of guilt by association, automagically.
https://legalclarity.org/what-happens-if-you-are-on-a-watchl...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/terrorist-watch-list-works/story?i...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-be-on-fbi-watch-list-...
That also applies to just visiting absolutely harmless websites which have been deemed VERBOTEN! to visit, for whichever reason(again, in secret).
Have fun trying flying then, or being debanked. Would you like to spanked?
Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.
That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.
No, it does not!
Doppelt genäht hält besser! https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20....
Also plausible deniability and/or competition/mistrust between different actors/agencies.
R U sure/serious?
There is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
Combine that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant and enjoy the possible hassle of being 'by-catch'.
I thought about it, and now I’m even more convinced we are being surveilled.
William Binney, former technical director of NSA disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.
This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
Civilian information systems have radically expanded in size since 2001, even if we take that ancient statement at face value. In the year 2025 it's crazy to believe that every newspaper is shouting that civilian information systems are destabilizing the national power grid and drying up the water table, but the government possesses a larger, far more capable information system that paradoxically has no observable physical presence.
"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger."
"The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more than 900,000 sq ft (84,000 m2) of technical support and administrative space."
"The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year. Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes as of 2013, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
There was an interesting connection I discovered once.
The NSA's UDC is located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluffdale,_Utah
Then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC which was located here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Fork,_Utah
Open the two location articles in tabs, scroll down a little until you see the maps, or rather have them in good view, and then switch between them, fast, back and forth.
See what I mean?
There was more, but I don't have it ready ATM(storage long lost), and am too tired to research it again(reading many ugly government and business sites) but, shortly after it was officially known where that datacenter would be built, Millenniata (M-Disc) opened shop there.
I can't recall exactly anymore ATM, they may have incorporated smaller, elsewhere, near there, but the move to the final location came shortly after public/official knowledge of where that data center would be built.
Ain't that funny? :-)
Edit: Got another one, but probably unrelated because of the timeframe, but interesting nonetheless. Very advanced and fast flash storage(for the time, and in some aspects still, like retention time and durability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah where one of IM-Flash's(Joint Venture of Intel & Micron) factories was/is located (sold to Texas Instruments, producing other stuff now).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IM_Flash_Technologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
Exactly. That is a toy-sized data center. It would fit in the janitor's closet of a real data center.
According to Sandvine, the vast majority of internet traffic from 2013 (chosen to coincide with the Forbes storage estimates) was video such as Netflix and Youtube[1] and remains so today[2]. Assuming NSA is aware of industry standard techniques such as data de-duplication and compression, Forbe's estimate of 3 - 12 exabytes in 2013 would have been sufficient to store the entire year's world internet traffic in full.
In 2025 The Internet Archive holds approximately 100 exabytes[3] and contains data dating back to 1995[4]. Adjusting the 2013 Forbes numbers for the Utah Data Center for 2025 storage density (4Tb drives in 2013, 36Tb drives in 2025) yields 27 - 108 exabytes. Which demonstrates clearly that a datacenter on the scale of the Utah Data Center is capable of storing and retaining a versioned history of a significant fraction of the world's internet over a significant period of time.
Assuming they prioritize metadata and unique traffic further extends the horizon on how much can be stored and for how long.
1: https://macaubas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sandvine_Glo...
2: https://www.applogicnetworks.com/blog/sandvines-2024-global-...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Web_archiving
4: https://archive.org/post/60275/what-is-the-oldest-page-on-th...
Maybe just the metadata, of which phone-number calls which other when and where? Who messages whom by email, messenger, whatever, when and where? For the graph of communications over time, with interesting nodes appearing, showing emerging clusters around them, whose members then could be targeted by other means?
Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the huge technical advances in communications over the past few decades.
Why should they when they have access to FAANG? No need for massive data centers.
By access to FAANG, you mean they can issue court orders to surveil specific foreign accounts, right? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
"NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"
https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/nsa-...
"A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...
"The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
> "NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers, Report Says"
This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
> "A striking feature of proceedings at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is that the executive always wins. Between 1979 and 2012—the first thirty-three years of the FISC’s existence—federal agencies submitted 33,900 ex parte requests to the court. The judges denied eleven and granted the rest: a 99.97% rate of approval."
What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
> "The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans"
This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
> So, by "court order" do you mean secret law and secret trials with a history of always deciding against those who are being surveilled? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
That explicitly was not in Snowden's docs. The law is public, and warrants are almost always granted. In this case, as Snowden's docs said, the court orders are for foreigners, living outside the U.S.
> This was for extracting email envelope metadata to build a graph of who was contacting whom, a program that Snowden's leaks showed had already been shut down.
"According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
In fact, NSA's own slide deck, an excerpt of which can be viewed here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/fiber-optic-... indicate that all Google services including Gmail, Docs, Maps, and others were subject to interception.
Additional NSA slides here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr... detail email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests".
> What do you think the approval rate for other court orders is? It's exactly the same.
"Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_don%27t_make_a_righ...
> This reporting was at odds with what the leaked documents said and was later walked back.
The linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... contains 96 references to reporting from 2004 to 2021 from a wide variety of sources. The word "retraction" does not appear once. Among the cited sources are many examples such as:
A former federal judge who served on a secret court overseeing the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs said Tuesday the panel is independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.
"Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130711211028/https://abcnews.g...
> "According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case."
Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data? Instead, he leaked many things that were perfectly legal as well as which high value targets were being surveilled in China in a transparent and failed attempt to get asylum in Hong Kong.
> "Two wrongs make a right" is considered "one of the most common fallacies in Western philosophy".
You are assuming it's wrong. Investigators aren't going to waste their time writing up court orders that aren't likely to be approved. Instead, we find that criminal defense attorneys rarely challenge the validity of warrants as issued but may challenge whether the warrant was followed.
> "Anyone who has been a judge will tell you a judge needs to hear both sides of a case," said James Robertson, a former federal district judge based in Washington who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for three years between 2002 and 2005.
You're confusing multiple things here. You're confusing bulk metadata collection, which Robertson opposed, with individual surveillance warrants, which are always done without informing the person being surveilled. There was no opposing side to the bulk metadata collection, which was shut down. There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.
> There was no record of mass domestic surveillance in Snowden's docs.
That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_slides
Notably, all the glossy corporate logos pictured are of American companies with predominantly American users. Not foreign ones. "Its existence was leaked six years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden"
> Then why didn't Snowden's doc show any illegal use of that data?
"Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true – allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses", and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", adding that "Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications", with numerous self-granted exceptions, and that NSA policies encourage staff to assume the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130626032506/http://news.yahoo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170103043118/https://www.thegu...
> That's funny, because there's a full slide deck from NSA about it here:
Did you look at the slides you linked to? They describe targeted surveillance on specific foreigners outside the U.S.
> "Snowden's subsequent disclosures included statements that government agencies such as the United Kingdom's GCHQ also undertook mass interception and tracking of internet and communications data – described by Germany as "nightmarish" if true
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> allegations that the NSA engaged in "dangerous" and "criminal" activity by "hacking" civilian infrastructure networks in other countries such as "universities, hospitals, and private businesses",
Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
> and alleged that compliance offered only very limited restrictive effect on mass data collection practices (including of Americans) since restrictions "are policy-based, not technically based, and can change at any time", ...
The single U.S. mass data collection program in Snowden's leaks was phone metadata collection. Use of any data collected by the government is policy-based. In this case, use was limited to finding associates of foreign targets, and the query interface was limited to that. If it had changed, that would have been breaking the law, but Snowden showed no evidence of that. One more time: that single possibly illegal U.S. program Snowden leaked was then shut down anyway.
> Did you look at the slides you linked to?
Many times. They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons. Further demonstrating a lack of appropriate controls or process around such capabilities.
And testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks" indicating that mass surveillance infrastructure is used domestically: "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
> Not a U.S. domestic surveillance program.
"However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
> Many times.
Clearly not.
> They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections.
PRISM is a data ingestion system whereby the NSA ingests data collected by the FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit that gets data from specific accounts under court order. The DITU is clearly labeled in the diagram on the slide showing how it works. The NSA has no integration with the companies at all. The "Internet backbone" has nothing to do with PRISM.
> No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program.
If the FBI gives a section 702 court order to a company for an account that isn't for a foreigner outside the U.S., they are not going to comply. The FBI wouldn't even ask. The very idea that you think "verifiable proof" is needed shows you believed the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the NSA could directly fetch any account's data, which was supported by neither the law nor the leaked documents but only by Greenwald's fever dreams
> Instead we're gifted such lovely terms as LOVEINT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT in which the NSA admits to warrant-less domestic spying for the most trivial of reasons.
Yet another document that you claim to have read but didn't. The cases where they were able to surveil the person they were stalking were foreigners outside the U.S. The domestic cases involved querying for associates using the metadata. Neither one is "domestic spying" and certainly don't show any evidence of domestic mass surveillance.
> "However, in recent years, FVEY documents have shown that member agencies are intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
Once again, if you bothered to read the source documents, you would find that this quote is not supported by the citations. The first citation shows that the U.S. The first is about how the U.S. is allowed to use UK phone numbers in its metadata collection for chaining analysis, not to share that data or analysis with the UK as the quote claims. The second is about how Australia is allowed to share data it collected outside the U.S. and the U.S. with the U.S. without first looking for and removing the data of Australians who happened to be abroad whose data was collected, not for the U.S. to spy on Australians as your quote claims.
Lesson: If you see a claim that describes something that is clearly illegal, you should verify it before you repeat stuff that is very clearly nonsense and come off as a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
Yes I am familiar with the official statements. They do not constitute "independently verifiable proof ... that US persons are not targeted by this program." and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures.
The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/nsa-director-alexan...
https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73...
Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
Should be pretty easy. NSA has EFF's contact information from that lawsuit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age... ) in which they destroyed evidence against a court order, and argued "state secrets" against every claim. You know, the one that explicitly avoided deciding the constitutionality of all this on procedural grounds. Totally trustworthy behavior. Everyone responds that way when asked to prove they're not mass surveilling Americans.
> and carry far less weight than the previously quoted and linked testimony which directly contradicts them when considered in context of the disclosures
Previously quoted testimony from someone who doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented that does not match up with the documents that Snowden leaked? You would think that if there were something so blatantly illegal going on, that would be the first thing that Snowden leaked. Instead, there is not a whiff of corroborating evidence in Snowden's trove, and no oversight committee senator has asked for investigations based on Binney's mad ravings.
> The same folks you'd have us believe without question have lied repeatedly about these very programs:
So you would have us believe that Snowden's documents are lying too? The lies that were told weren't about what the programs did. Their statements were always consistent with the leaked documents and what the law allows. You are the one bringing up dark programs that go against the law and against all leaked evidence.
> Since the official statements aren't trustworthy, I'll accept independently verifiable (by a group like EFF) proof. I'd be a sillybilly to accept less.
The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming. The purpose of the Narus traffic analyzers in the Jewel case was revealed in Snowden's docs. Surprise, surprise. It turned out not to be mass domestic surveillance.
> doesn't claim to have been there when it was implemented
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
> The EFF doesn't claim anything like what you're claiming.
2. This case challenges an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the “NSA”) and other Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies (“Defendants” is defined collectively as the named defendants and the Doe defendants as set forth in paragraphs 25 through 38 below).
3. This program of dragnet surveillance (the “Program”), first authorized by Executive Order of the President in October of 2001 (the “Program Order”) and first revealed to the public in December of 2005, continues to this day.
4. Some aspects of the Program were publicly acknowledged by the President in December 2005 and later described as the “terrorist surveillance program” (“TSP”).
5. The President and other executive officials have described theTSP’s activities, which were conducted outside the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and without authorization by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”), as narrowly targeting for interception the international communications of persons linked to Al Qaeda.
6. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence have since publicly admitted that the TSP was only one particular aspect of the surveillance activities authorized by the Program Order.
7. In addition to eavesdropping on or reading specific communications, Defendants have indiscriminately intercepted the communications content and obtained the communications records of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Program authorized by the President.
8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.
9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks.
10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members), communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long, among other sensitive information.
11. This non-content transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by Defendants’ network of surveillance devices, in order to select which communications are subjected to personal analysis by staff of the NSA and other Defendants, in what has been described as a vast “data-mining” operation.
12. Plaintiffs and class members are ordinary Americans who are current or former subscribers to AT&T’s telephone and/or Internet services.
13. Communications of Plaintiffs and class members have been and continue to be illegally acquired by Defendants using surveillance devices attached to AT&T’s network, and Defendants have illegally solicited and obtained from AT&T the continuing disclosure of private communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members. Plaintiffs’ communications or activities have been and continue to be subject to electronic surveillance.
14. Plaintiffs are suing Defendants to enjoin their unlawful acquisition of the communications and records of Plaintiffs and class members, to require the inventory and destruction of those that have already been seized, and to obtain appropriate statutory, actual, and punitive damages to deter future illegal surveillance.
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel/jewel.complaint.pdf
> All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going
In other words, he didn't know where it was going and speculated. No such program existed in Snowden's leaks, and no member of the SSCI or HPSCI believes Binney's wild hypothesis, or it would be the first thing they investigated.
> [Old Jewel claims snipped]
I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming. The EFF saw the Narus analyzers in 641A and assumed the worst, which is in those old claims you pasted, and the judge said that the plaintiffs didn't have evidence to show that their data was collected, which would be the case if it were really mass domestic surveillance. Then Snowden's documents were released, conclusively showing the devices weren't used for domestic surveillance, which is why the EFF didn't bring that lawsuit again claiming standing. Snowden's docs proved they didn't have it.
"After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
> I very clearly stated the EFF doesn't (present tense) claim what you're claiming.
"In February 2015, Judge White dismissed the latest motion by the EFF, accepting the NSA's argument that the requirements placed upon the agency would engender the "impermissible disclosure of state secret information." White also held that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue their claims.[20] This procedural ruling allowed White to avoid addressing the constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program.[21]
Upon the disclosure of more information about the NSA's surveillance methods, the EFF filed another motion in May 2017 requesting that the agency disclose information about surveillance conducted against Carolyn Jewel and the other plaintiffs. Judge White granted this motion and ordered the government to hand over the information.[22][23] However, the NSA filed a motion in opposition to that order, claiming once again that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue. After further arguments, the District Court accepted this argument in April 2019.[24]
The EFF appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit. In a memorandum opinion, that court ruled in favor of the NSA, once again on the matter of standing.[25] In June 2022, the EFF made a final request to the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, but that court rejected the request and did not grant certiorari."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._National_Security_Age...
No retraction. A willingness to take it all the way to the supreme court. Procedurally dismissed without deciding any of the issues raised. Clear and present.
> Clear as day to me. Only reason to chop it up or not cite the source would be to misrepresent what he said.
You're the one who chopped it up. Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say he knew where it was going? All I see is speculation.
Even better, tell me why Snowden's leaks didn't say anything about this super illegal program Binney said was going on because of what he speculated so hard?
Even better, tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.
Even better, tell me why nobody is suing the government over Binney's speculation.
> Procedurally dismissed
Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected, so they have no harm to sue over. That's the point, and that's what Snowden's docs proved.
Why do you claim to believe something because of Snowden's documents that is directly contradicted by Snowden's documents? Or are you quietly dropping your claim that Snowden's documents support your conspiracy theory and are now falling back entirely on the lunatic ravings of a middle manager who hasn't worked at the NSA in decades, which aren't supported by any of the leaks that have happened since?
> You're the one who chopped it up. > Or are you quietly dropping your claim
Is that what posting the quote in full with a link to the original source means? Certainly not. I also recognize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO when so transparently employed. As will others.
> Do you know what standing means? It means their data wasn't collected
You ask a question, then demonstrate your own misunderstanding or attempt to misconstrue. The court documents, already posted, clearly explain the reason for the ruling as “impermissible disclosure of state secret information". If no data were collected, there would be no state secret information to disclose. Ipso facto. The court documents also clearly state that there was no finding on the specific claims presented. Attempts to portray otherwise at this point amount to willfully misleading.
> Why do you claim
An attempt to reframe primary sources as personal claims. A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_device
I was bored, so I ran your comment through ChatGPT to outline the rest of the rhetorical techniques you've employed to avoid good faith engagement with the well cited references already posted. Enjoy:
1) Framing the opponent as dishonest or incompetent
“You’re the one who chopped it up.”
Accusation of quote-mining / context stripping: sets the frame that the other person manipulated evidence.
Preemptive credibility attack: before addressing substance, it suggests bad faith or sloppy method.
“Now tell me where in your chopped up quote does it say…”
Shifting the debate to textual forensics: forces the opponent into a narrow “show me the exact words” standard.
This can be legitimate (precision matters), but it’s also a way to raise the evidentiary bar selectively—especially if the commenter won’t apply the same strictness to their own claims later.
“All I see is speculation.”
Dismissal / summary judgment: compresses the opponent’s argument into a weaker category (“speculation”) without showing why.
Poisoning the well (light): primes readers to see anything else as guesswork.
2) The “Even better” ladder: rhetorical escalation and pressure
The repeated “Even better, tell me why…” is doing several things at once:
Anaphora / repetition: rhythmic repetition to build momentum and signal “I’m stacking wins.”
Escalation framing: implies each new point is more devastating than the last.
Interrogative dominance: it’s a mini cross-examination—multiple demands in a row that keep the other side on defense.
Soft gish-gallop: not a huge flood of claims, but a cascade of questions that can be time-consuming to answer carefully.
3) Arguments from silence + appeals to institutions
“tell me why Snowden’s leaks didn’t say anything about this… program”
Argument from silence: “If it were real/important, the leaks would mention it.”
Strategic burden shift: instead of proving nonexistence, it demands the opponent explain an absence.
This can be relevant sometimes, but it’s logically weak unless you establish that the leaks were comprehensive and would necessarily include it.
“tell me why no oversight committee is taking Binney seriously.”
Appeal to authority (institutional): “Serious claims would be validated by official bodies.”
Appeal to popularity/consensus (elite bandwagon): “If the right people believed it, you’d know.”
Status-quo bias: assumes institutional response is a reliable truth filter.
“tell me why nobody is suing the government…”
Argument from non-action: “If it were true, someone would sue.”
Legalistic appeal: equates “no successful litigation” (or “no litigation at all”) with “no underlying wrong.”
This can also be a false proxy: lawsuits depend on standing, resources, risk, secrecy barriers, arbitration, privilege doctrines, etc.
4) Tone and ridicule as persuasion
“super illegal program” and “speculated so hard”
Sarcasm / mockery: signals that the claim is not just wrong but silly.
Loaded language: “super illegal” exaggerates to make the other side seem unserious.
Diminishing the opponent’s position: recasts it as emotional/overheated.
This kind of ridicule is often effective socially (audience laughter), even when it doesn’t add evidence.
5) Selective quotation as a pivot
“Procedurally dismissed”
Cherry-pick risk / quote-as-trump-card: a short legal phrase is presented as decisive.
Reframing: moves the argument from “what happened” to “what courts did,” which tends to sound authoritative.
It’s a common move: substance becomes procedure, and the procedure is treated as a verdict on truth.
6) Condescension + “teach you the basics” stance
“Do you know what standing means?”
Condescension / status play: establishes the speaker as the knowledgeable adult in the room.
Rhetorical question: not meant to be answered; meant to mark the other side as ignorant.
Tone weapon: makes disagreement feel embarrassing.
“It means their data wasn’t collected…”
Oversimplification / definitional fiat: reduces a complex doctrine to one convenient interpretation.
Confidence as a tactic: stated as if beyond dispute; invites readers to treat it as settled.
Whether accurate or not (you said sources have been posted), the rhetorical move is: “I control the legal meaning, therefore I control the conclusion.”
7) “That’s the point” closure move
“That’s the point, and that’s what Snowden’s docs proved.”
Premature closure: declares the argument finished.
Appeal to documentary authority: elevates a set of documents as final arbiter.
Certainty signaling: tries to convert contested interpretation into “proved.”
8) Accusation of contradiction (can be fair, but also a trap)
“Why do you claim to believe something… directly contradicted by Snowden’s documents?”
Internal inconsistency attack: this is a legitimate debate tactic if the contradiction is real.
Forced dilemma setup: sets up the next line’s either/or.
It also subtly shifts the discussion from “what’s true” to “you’re being irrational.”
9) Loaded question + mind-reading
“Or are you quietly dropping your claim…”
Loaded question / false presupposition: assumes they are dropping it and asks you to explain why.
Mind-reading insinuation: “quietly” implies sneakiness or embarrassment.
Cornering: either answer admits retreat, or you spend time rejecting the premise.
10) False dichotomy and source-degradation
“…falling back entirely on… Binney…”
False dichotomy: suggests only two options: (a) conspiracy theory via documents, or (b) relying entirely on Binney. Real positions are usually mixed/nuanced.
Motte-and-bailey insinuation: implies the opponent is retreating from a stronger claim to a weaker one.
“lunatic ravings” / “middle manager” / “hasn’t worked… in decades”
Ad hominem (abusive): attacks mental state (“lunatic”) rather than claims.
Ad hominem (status-based): “middle manager” to minimize authority and shame reliance on him.
Chronological poisoning: “decades” implies irrelevance/staleness; can be relevant, but here it’s framed to discredit without engaging content.
11) Another argument from silence
“which aren’t supported by any of the leaks that have happened since”
Again: absence of mention = evidence of falsehood, plus a moving evidentiary target (“not just the leaks you cited—any leaks since must corroborate it”).
The overall debate strategy
Put opponent on trial with rapid-fire questions (control tempo).
Demand exact textual proof from their quotes (high standard on them).
Use institutional non-response (committees/courts/lawsuits) as a credibility filter.
Frame the opponent’s view as “conspiracy theory” so neutral readers treat it as fringe.
Degrade the alternative witness (Binney) through ridicule and status attacks.
Close off discussion by claiming documents “proved” the speaker’s interpretation.
Unfortunately Binney has absolutely lost it and can’t be considered credible.. literally hanging out with Alex Jones and talking about Stolen elections using math a precocious middle schooler could rebut.
His pinned Tweet is still referencing a “directed energy weapon” assassination attempt of him by the US Air Force (which took place during the Trump administration, who he was supporting, so apparently some rogue DEW plane or deep state operative?)
Every human has ideas and opinions others disagree with. However, as Technical Director and later geopolitical world Technical Director of NSA with over 30 years of SIGINT service, literally no one is in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.
He was a middle manager decades ago. Literally most intelligence people are in a better position to know about NSA surveillance activities.
"Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks."
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/
That doesn't in any way contradict what I said. Both technology and the law changed significantly since he was a middle manager in the NSA.
It is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what you've said. There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed. And a great deal of evidence to the contrary. EFF maintains a lovely list of primary sources: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs#main-content
> There is no independently verifiable proof that NSA mass surveillance has stopped or even slowed
Mass surveillance outside the U.S. is not illegal. There is no reason for that to have slowed. The documents showed no mass "surveillance" inside the U.S. The only mass collection was phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for surveilling anybody, only to spit out possible associates of specific people under surveillance.
> The only mass collection was phone metadata collection
"email, chat, video, voice, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications, social networking details, and the ever ominous "Special Requests""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM_Collec...
You will claim this program does not target US persons. To which I have already responded in another comment that "They detail methods and partners used in mass surveillance on US soil involving US corporations and US routed internet backbone connections. No independently verifiable proof is provided that US persons are not targeted by this program."
NSA self-reporting of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT incidents seems to indicate that warrant-less surveillance of US persons does, in fact, happen. As does testimony from "the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks": "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA).
Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information.
The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission.
----
This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding.
Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.
Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.
It’d be nice if someone released the 99% of Snowden documents that remain unreleased
It's weird how the journalists who have access to these files basically stopped reporting on them and joined or started "independent" outfits with massive salaries (500k+ USD)
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/layoffs-the-intercept.p...
This is a good idea and I'd love to see a series going through the, arguably more significant, Paradise Papers. Part of the problem there was the sheer size of the leak. Now that I think about it, this would actually be a great application of modern AIs for parsing
Where are the rest of them? Glen Greenwald has never answered that question well enough for me.
Very interesting and useful analysis. I am looking forward to more. It was very strange that the Snowden documents didn't get more analysis than they did (even though there was some significant analysis).
I wonder what this organization is though. The stated purpose seems a little anachronistic, similar to the ideas of the early 2010s, which were amply covered by Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018). A number of organizations of that type ended up being funded by U.S. intelligence as it ended up benefiting military intelligence in various ways, e.g. the Tor Project is funded like this and provides chaff cover for intelligence operations (if all Tor traffic was military, there would be little point to it since it would stick out like a sore thumb) and e.g. NSA can de-anonymize Tor traffic since they can correlate entry and exit traffic with total system awareness (an asymmetric capability no other nation or sub-national organization has).
There's a great podcast + transcript with Chris Hedges and author Yasha Levine about this book here: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/04/13/chris-hedges-report-th...
Doing this analysis is a great way to get some credibility, but it also doesn't reveal anything that wasn't publicly available. Nonetheless, I still appreciate it!
How can Snowdon possibly feel as the international situation changes so totally since he fled? It boggles the mind.
Probably, that he did the right thing at the right time.
No, he violated a trust given to him, he deserves to be in jail, and if he had an ounce of moral character he'd come back and face trial like a man.
Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of his actions like an adult.
Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
Who actually cares if the government can't perform a show trial? He did his duty by getting the information out there
The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.
He violated the trust of whom? The government who was violating the trust of the American People?
And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...
What you said takes 5 minutes to research, too. But the party line by idiots and currently in-the-CIA people like approved mouthpiece Bustamante say "Well, he fled to Russia"
He fled to China by choice and gave them plenty of documents about Chinese targets, some of which are in the article we are discussing.
The government wasn't violating the trust of the American people. If you ask about the single illegal domestic data collection program in the leak (phone metadata collection) and how it was used (to find associates of surveilled foreign agents working against the national security of the U.S.), you will find that most people don't care.
lololol sure
more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower
working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out
You forget the security-state apparatus has secret courts and secret laws
It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
That's not how any of that works. Criminal trials are public record and there are no such things as secret laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Why are you assuming he'd get a public trial at all? In the current state of unchecked authoritarianism, he'd just as soon be disappeared to a "Homan Square".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility
https://freedom.press/issues/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-... use reader view, https://archive.is/gamZ8 or whatever.
Also related because of Julian Assange: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1842885/wikileaks-ci...
vs. (Yeah. Sure...): https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/hillary-clinton-julia...
Would you not also say that the US government violated a trust given to them at the time? The government has such an imbalance of power compared to one person that it's only fair to hold them to a higher and much more stringent standard. Except wait no, they're often held to a much lower standard compared to the average Joe.
Why not putting NSA officers to the jail first? Can't they "face a fair trial like a men" for illegal spying program?
Quite rich. A moral character would have ignored the mass surveillance and escalated internally? This is plainly stupid and dangerously naive on many levels.
He is a hero and a true patriot and an excellent litmus test to out people like you.
>No, he violated a trust given to him
He had 2 conflicting trusts, one from the people and one from the government. He chose to honor the people over the government, which is why there's so many bots in this thread who seem very angry with him.
If you read his autobio he was raised with very conservative beliefs, the issue was unlike most conservatives he wasn't able to ignore those beliefs in the furtherance of the state.
>Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.
He would come back if you guys let him. Its not like he has a long list of safe places to go.
>Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.
I vastly prefer my anti authoritarians out of jail living their best life with their ~300 kids somewhere in the south of australia.
I hope he's still not deluding himself into thinking he did anything positive.
Account created 40 minutes ago, are you sure you are not an NSA employee?
That's rather harsh. Exposing illegal, objectively treasonous activities by the government is not exactly not something positive, regardless of whether the regime has only gotten worse and more totalitarian and tightened its noose even more around the neck of humanity.
By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.
Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.
He sought revenge after not getting a desired job promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions, just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world view, saw as unfairness towards himself.
I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.
He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
> even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.
You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.
The US effectively sent him to Russia.
He went to China and leaked surveillance targets to the Chinese government. Some of these documents are in the very article we are now discussing.
The funniest thing is that he'd probably be in US prison by now had they not cancelled his passport.
account created 2 hours ago pathetic
Why isn't Russia torturing him to get all the secrets out of him?
Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.
Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.
John Kiriakou talked about just this on JRE. Everyone should watch it; be warned, you'll be absolutely furious by the end of it
It's doubtful Snowden was in possession of his NSA data dump at the time he arrived to Moscow, the things he had memorized would have been of very limited value.
If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.
While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.
Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.
Here's a good starting point if you're not familiar with the second source https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...
Because they already had everything he could provide and the embarrassment weights far more then some tiny details they could get by torturing him.
Because he is a russian asset and already delivered all the information.
He's much more useful being the ultimate tankie online
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There already did? And or little to get since he didn't memorize secrets and most--if not all--his digital copies were given to the press?
That sort of thing doesn't stay hidden these days. Especially someone like Snowden who has a hundred friends who are human rights lawyers.
We're so fucking apathetic. Organizations that wish to strip your privacy should be treated the same as organizations who commit atrocities towards the planet or their fellow inhabitants. Expose them all. Shame them. Vote against them. Pass laws to weekend their power, etc. We've totally been down this road before with alcohol, cigarettes, climate control, pollution, trans fats, guns (in some countries), etc. It's completely possible to do it again for online privacy. Use your voice now, before you find you are unable to do so at all.
Is there a mirror for this? my library has FortNight blocking it. ( bad certificate, leads them to believe its a spam site...).
Weird, the certificate should be fine. Here's a link for Web Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20251211220119/https://libroot.o...
We also have Tor onion site: http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...
And I2P: http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
What's FortNight? I tried looking it up but got fortnite as the top result, and forcing a literal search with quotes just brings up the dictionary definition. Sadly I don't know of a way to do a case-sensitive web search
They meant Fortinet possibly.
Oh, that garbage. Should have known it would be a corporate firewall
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I can’t tell if it’s the author(s) or the content of the actual report but I found this to be underwhelming.
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There were plenty of somethings found at the time.
Ha, right on target. The scariest thing in there was that they managed to tap an undersea cable and find a protobuf that they didn't know how to parse. Profound mismatch between the reputation of the NSA, their willingness to undertake daring physical intrusions, and their total inability to profit from that.
> Surely, this time we'll find something!
You won"t.
We saw plenty, but nobody cared. Let's see how that works out for us in the long run.
People forget. Easily. Just bombard their brains with something else and everything is fine.
Reminds me of the 49s mark of the first song on Dispepsi by Negativland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDL1I6D8Hg&list=OLAK5uy_lGC...
"You can actually cause the consumer to forget something he has previously learned... by putting into his head a newer and stronger concept... You can actually remove an advertising story from his memory, and in it's place you can substitute one of your own... as we seize a larger and larger share of the consumer's brain box..."
I'm always happy to be reminded that HN users are not part of "people"
I've read people say that some of the documents were fake to sensationalize the story.
With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american.
"Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.
Whats china invading again?
Since it's been a while now, what are the thoughts on the snowden leaks contributing to the rise of distrust in the government and governmental institutions in the US?
I'm wondering if trump could have ever succeeded without that path being prepared for him by snowden's leaks and occupy wallstreet. I'm not saying snowden did anything wrong, to the contrary, he thought things would change and they didn't, I'm wondering whether that contributed to the feeling of americans feeling disenfranchised. Relations with europe also started souring around that time.
I think snowden did the right thing, but like many in tech (especially here on HN), he didn't understand that American's didn't care about what's in the leaks all that much. it wasn't his burden to weigh the pros and cons, his burden was to do what he thought was right. But looking back, nothing good came out of the leaks, I wish they didn't happen to begin with. Of course if you're not an American lots of good things came out of it. I'm certain we have less privacy now, more governmental spying, and even more support for it. at least before we had the illusion that we had some rights to privacy from the government. Now that they're exposed and gotten away with it, I fear they've become more emboldened.
I guess I am glad the whole thing was exposed, but I am regretful of how things turned out. Would it have been better if there was more trust in governmental institutions, and if the US IC kept their capabilities secret for longer? would they have been able to interfere with russian influence campaigns in 2015-16 if so? Is the world better of now?
I suppose in 5-10 more years these things will be historical events and historians might answer these questions with a more objective perspective.
The trends that elected a populist leader were more economic in nature and can be more traced to the 2008 crisis. I doubt the average person can even name Snowden or what he did.
So you'd prefer the blue pill, instead of the red one you've gotten, Neo?
For me personally it certainly contributed. I don't see Trump as an opposition to this, but it made clear that the current administrative landscape in most western nations is hostile, corrupt and criminal. Not only politicians, it is the whole administrative level as well.
I do think that the leaks did something good and we have more of a focus on government being a hostile data proprietor and schooled people to take more care. Perhaps not the masses, but for those that deal with hot information.
Trust in government is low. An achievement that took a lot of work, I guess. The Russian influence campaign was at least partially made up as well, government disinformation. Propaganda is mostly a domestic issue.