Excellent, thanks. Even the professional reporting on PRISM seemed to evolve over time (or maybe my understanding evolved) -- I wonder if it's a similar reason that Snowden's statements changed? Anyway, I agree it's suspicious, and Greenwald is a bit slippery too.
I do have some objections off the top of my head, if somewhat superficial.
> by his own admission took the Booz Allen job specifically to gather information to leak ... instead of "I saw something wrong and I'm reporting it" it's instead "I'm determined to find something wrong and report it."
He'd already decided there was something wrong, though: "“Much of what I saw in Geneva [as a CIA spy around 2007],” he said, “really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world.”" and "Snowden has said he first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008." On a different altercation, "The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals." And he started stealing documents before Booz Allen Hamilton, according to the NSA: "It was that summer of 2012, Ledgett says, when Snowden made his first illegal downloads."[1]
Those claims about his formative experiences could of course be fabrication to help his credibility, or maybe semi-honest retroactive re-framing of genuine incidents to justify his current course in his own mind. I'll assume they're honest, for purposes of explaining why I don't find the Booz Allen job so damning.
So, he's made a decent case that taking the Booz Allen Hamilton job, while driven by admitted "ulterior" motive, wasn't merely "I'll have a peek at secret info and see who I can 'sell' it to later". He already had some ideas what was wrong and who he wanted to tell about it. Now, I will grant you that his perception of the documents he gathered to support his opinion was then biased, and that the collection of documents available biases what they can be used to claim. But that seems an unavoidable part of humans forming and expressing opinions. So long as his "opinion" wasn't formed based on what would "play well" in the media or something like that, I don't really see an issue here.
If I haven't beaten this to death, another way to say what I'm trying to say here: imagine he worked in the same place for 5 years, and then in the last 3 months decided to start actively gathering documents to support a thesis. Would you say that skewed his results the same way? Why or why not? Because arguably, he did work in the same environment for 5+ years, and I don't see why just switching to another defense contractor for access poisons any opinion-forming or research he does there. If it does, we have to distrust anybody who has ever acted on an opinion in order to persuade us of it, because that means anything they say is skewed and they are now trying to fit facts into their narrative instead of the other way around. (Which is probably a good way to lean toward, but not very helpful if you take it to an extreme and want to ever learn about things that happen outside of your immediate consciousness.)
> is he a disgruntled ex-employee trying to lash out at his former employer
But it only became his former employer by Snowden's own choice to leak, as far as I understand both Snowden and the government say. Are you saying he now regrets losing his cushy $122k/yr job with Booz Allen, so we can't trust him? That's a stretch IMO -- the documents were obtained before his employer became the ex-employer, so they can't inherently be tainted afterward. And at this point, it's probably mostly the journalists picking through the documents and potentially coming up with misleading excerpts and framing, but why would their reason to do so be to spite their source's ex-employer? Snowden might be a naive idealist, an attention seeker, a troll, a spy, or something else, but "disgruntled ex-employee" is not making any sense to me. Maybe I'm taking it differently than you meant.
> Are you saying he now regrets losing his cushy $122k/yr job with Booz Allen, so we can't trust him?
No, I'm saying that I wouldn't be surprised if something happened while he was in Hawaii that inspired him to leave with a bang. Apparently he left the CIA station in Geneva in 2009 because he received a derogatory performance report regarding his behavior and work ethic, and decided to leave prior to the CIA conducting a more thorough investigation.[1] He arrived in Hawaii in March 2012, so he had apparently only been there for a few months before he started stealing documents. He had spent around a year each working systems administration jobs under a contract Dell for the NSA in Japan and the CIA in Maryland prior.
I also don't doubt that he had planned to leak prior to switching over to Booz, since he initially contacted Greenwald about four months prior to taking the job, in addition to the government's claims that he began downloading them all in 2012. But I doubt that it was because he saw something and insisted that it must be brought to light. If that was the case, he wouldn't have walked out with so much data. He claimed to have "carefully evaluated every single document [he] disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest"[2], but he took out somewhere between 50 thousand and 1.7 million documents, depending on whose numbers you go by. This is a collection of documents that dozens of reporters, several dedicated solely to NSA reporting, haven't managed to go through over the course of two years, but somehow he himself carefully evaluated the potential damage and public interest value of every single document in less than eight months while simultaneously still working his 9-5 job. I don't buy it. If his intent was to blow the whistle on something, he would have just grabbed the few documents he needed and gone to press with them. The fact that he didn't leads me to believe that he had some other intent.
> "The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals."
What you left out from the paragraph that quote was pulled from was that it wasn't some shady intelligence operation that apparently convinced him to not work through proper channels, but that he claims was reprimanded for modifying his own performance report in a stunt to prove that there was an issue with the security in one of the systems used by human resources (there's slightly more information in this article: [3]) I don't know the details, but in every place I've worked bypassing security to modify your personnel files would be grounds for losing your job, regardless of what point you were trying to make.
And again, that's just his story - there's no evidence to back it up. Same thing for story about getting the banker drunk in Geneva to recruit him as a CIA asset; and distributing pornographic photos at NSA; and that the NSA took down all internet connectivity in Syria during their civil war; etc. Most importantly, that also goes for his claim that he voiced his concerns through internal channels. When NBC made a FOIA request to verify Snowden's claim that he had raised his concerns, the NSA responded that the only e-mail they could find was asking a generic question about legal authorities mentioned in a training program[4]. If Snowden wanted to maintain credibility at this point, he could have instantly produced the e-mails and said 'Look! The NSA is lying!' Instead, he just made a claim that they were lying without producing any evidence. I find it hard to believe that he walked out the door with thousands upon thousands of documents, but forgot to bring a copy of his own e-mails that would corroborate his story.
I'm sorry - I just think there's way too many aspects of his story that sound a bit too fishy. I could go on about other aspects regarding the NSA reporting, and Snowden's relationship with Glenn Greenwald/Laura Poitras, and questions about why he went to China and how he ended up in Russia, etc., but that diverges a bit from the subject of his grandstanding/credibility and I think that's probably enough for now
> I'm saying that I wouldn't be surprised if something happened while he was in Hawaii that inspired him to leave with a bang.
This is a fair point, especially in light of how his CIA stint ended. I started considering it myself, but didn't think much of it because it seems like the NSA & co. would be gleefully trumpeting such a thing if they knew it. For example, they said one of the first things he stole was a technical employment test with answers, and implied he used it to cheat (in my link from the last post.) Can you think of such an incident that the NSA wouldn't know about, or wouldn't reveal publicly?
And since you are arguing that he both a) leaked because he was disgruntled about something at work, and b) committed to leak months before changing jobs, the possible scenarios get even narrower, as they would have to carry over between jobs. Does he just hate the entire current US intelligence sector in general? Well, he's not keeping that a secret, so it shouldn't really be a mark against his credibility.
Now, just because I can't think of a reason he wanted to "leave with a bang" that we wouldn't know about, doesn't mean it can't be true, but it deflates that theory quite a bit IMO.
> If his intent was to blow the whistle on something, he would have just grabbed the few documents he needed and gone to press with them.
But his claim (or a popular simplification of it) is that the US is violating the rights of everyone, all the time, for any reason they feel like. He's not blowing the whistle on one office or something, it's a whole multi-billion dollar industry run by major branches of the US Government. If he just brought every document about PRISM, or just the Verizon metadata arrangement, or just personally hacking sysadmins at telecoms, or just tapping Google's private fiber lines, or just tapping Yahoo's private fiber lines, it would not be near as powerful as showing they are doing all of the above, and more! I don't know that he ever planned this, but there is also a practicality argument that it might be easier to "collect it all" first, flee, and sift through it for a few weeks full-time from the comfort of Hong Kong.
> What you left out from the paragraph that quote was pulled from
OK, and you left out where I introduced that quote with "On a different altercation, ... " Yes, I probably took too much license editing it, but it was meant as a quick allusion to his claims to have raised concerns through the "proper channels" at NSA and been ignored. In the full, more accurate context, it shows that on that occasion, he went to some lengths to work within the system to raise a concern (reading between the lines, it sounds like his boss eventually helped him to inject some Javascript tags into Snowden's personnel file, as a proof-of-concept for the vulnerability), and got nothing but trouble for trying to help in the way that was supposedly approved ("His immediate supervisor signed off on it" from your link).
> getting the banker drunk in Geneva to recruit him as a CIA asset
Yes, I am shocked the CIA didn't jump in and confirm or deny that this happened.</sarcasm> What proof would you expect? Granted, if it's not (dis)provable it's of little worth to us, but it's not really meant to be something we're persuaded to believe, just an anecdote about a formative experience. I don't know, is it inherently disingenuous to tell a story you can't prove, with the purpose of explaining your worldview?
> I find it hard to believe that he walked out the door with thousands upon thousands of documents, but forgot to bring a copy of his own e-mails that would corroborate his story.
First, that article says NBC sent a FOIA, but the single email shown was not received from FOIA. I'm not sure it matters, though.
How would anyone but the NSA and Snowden know with some certainty that any emails he did produce were legitimate? Would they admit to us if they were legitimate? (Tip: commit hashes of your proof to the Bitcoin blockchain early, so you can at least prove you were thinking about something before a certain date.) Hmm, I guess this goes for all the documents' authenticity, but I can imagine it's easier to confirm those than emails. Maybe he didn't really care about corroborating his story, or wasn't planning "a story" that far in advance. It's kind of funny that this is such a point of contention. Is anyone really saying the NSA would have stopped if they knew some sysadmin named Ed Snowden didn't like it? I guess alone it's pretty small, but it's another of several doubts about his credibility, that's why it's so hotly contested.
I agree that his claim about evaluating every document is suspect, and several of the other items you mentioned.
> it seems like the NSA & co. would be gleefully trumpeting such a thing if they knew it.
I don't think so for two reasons:
1) they don't talk much about anything unless they absolutely have to for classification and vetting reasons (this gets into topics like overclassification and whether or not things are really necessary for national security - but that's a different debate). For example, the op-ed that Michael Hayden wrote[1] in the USA Today in response to the 'NSA audit reveals thousands of violations' articles was apparently originally going to be written by the NSA itself, but the declassification and vetting process prevented a timely, point-by-point response[2]. I'm surprised that the e-mail was released so quickly. Overall, the NSA's response has been bumbling, and I think that has a lot to do with existing public relations policy that doesn't fit well with a fast-moving media.
2) There's a pending court case, and it's usually good policy to stay mum about anything regarding any pending cases until afterwards. I don't know that it's necessarily good policy now, as Snowden is probably never going to come back and face trial, but he is still indicted.
> Does he just hate the entire current US intelligence sector in general? Well, he's not keeping that a secret, so it shouldn't really be a mark against his credibility.
No, it's an indication that we should treat the leaks may have a skewed perspective, and we should keep that in mind when evaluating them. The credibility issue comes into place when he gets on national television and tells the American people “I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’"[3] The e-mail he sent did in fact ask a question about legal authorities, but nothing like what he described to the public; there were no concerns raised at all. Even his description of the response was a lie: instead of 'you should stop asking questions' the guy said 'Please give me a call if you'd like to discuss further'. On top of that, the e-mail was sent months after he first contacted Greenwald and Poitras - he was almost on his way out the door to Hong Kong at that point. That's the kind of stuff that speaks to his credibility. When you know that he hates the NSA and will make bald-faced lies on television should raise some flags when evaluating the leaks.
This is getting away from the Snowden credibility issue and more to issues with the reporting, but ...
> If he just brought every document about PRISM,
... for which all of the reporting turned out to be wrong. They blew a massive intelligence source over perceived mass civil liberties violations when the truth ended up being 'We can get content on specific accounts from Google/Yahoo/etc. when we present them with a court order.'
> or just the Verizon metadata arrangement,
... I probably wouldn't have had so much of a problem if he released that one and stopped there. Even so, the details from initial story still didn't match reality. On top of that, the program has debated at length in public and in Congress since it was initially disclosed back in 2005[4].
> or just personally hacking sysadmins at telecoms,
1) I don't care that GCHQ hacked Belgacom - it does not affect me at all; 2) we still lack a lot of context behind this - Why did GCHQ break in? What information did they obtain? Where they using this access to spy on legitimate intelligence targets, or something we would object to? The story was presented simply as 'they hacked a Belgian telecommunications company - be outraged!'
> or just tapping Google's private fiber lines, or just tapping Yahoo's private fiber lines,
I'm pretty sure Google and Yahoo didn't lay their own transcontinental undersea fiber optic lines. That's the nature of the internet - at some point your communications pass over lines owned by someone else. I'm a lot more angry at Google for not bothering to encrypt their transnational data than I am at GCHQ for intercepting it - that means the intelligence services of EVERY country their traffic passed through had access to it.
> it would not be near as powerful as showing they are doing all of the above, and more!
Regarding NSA staying quiet for classification and legal reasons: I presented an instance of them releasing info when it served their ends, as a counterpoint to this, but I suppose ultimately we can't count on them announcing anything like that.
I am a bit bothered by the general response, "They would win this argument if they allowed themselves to tell you everything" that is often given in support of the spies. To outsiders, it's indistinguishable from "We know we'd be shut down if we admitted what's going on, but we feel the ends justify the means, or we like the money, etc." It feels unfair and underhanded, but I guess it is unavoidable and legitimate too.
That's a great point about the timing of that email. Also about "he hates the NSA and will make bald-faced lies" synergistically combining to discredit him (though I am not so convinced Snowden is the one lying.)
> the program has debated at length in public and in Congress since it was initially disclosed back in 2005
Yes, it wasn't really new, but if releasing new documents spurred greater public debate and nearly caused the House of Reps to vote to defund the program[1], is it not an effective activism tactic? I mean, you can call it traitorous, but you seem to be saying it was totally unnecessary, when its release caused a law to be drafted and voted on that probably wouldn't have otherwise.
> The story was presented simply as 'they hacked a Belgian telecommunications company - be outraged!'
And people wouldn't be outraged if there was no merit to it. Around here, we're all wondering if we will be personally hacked because of one user (or potential users) on a system we have authority over, and what consequences that could have on our personal life and reputation, employment, and our company's reputation. Yeah, it feels sort of silly to think NSA could bother me, but the targets of that hack would have said the same, until they learned the truth (or whatever filtered version the journalists fed them.)
Yeah, I was oversimplifying about the nature of those fiber lines, and you're right that it was irresponsible of them. Well, I guess you can thank Snowden for forcing companies like Google and Yahoo to clean up their act. If there's one legacy he'll have, it's that more engineers will think of the NSA bogeyman (justified or not, illegal or not, accurately portrayed or not) whenever they design things. Maybe Snowden's ulterior motive is to scare people into better security, by lying if he must? ;)
P.S. What do you think of William Binney? He basically supports Snowden and says some of the same things, but maybe doesn't have as bad of credibility issues.
> I am a bit bothered by the general response, "They would win this argument if they allowed themselves to tell you everything" that is often given in support of the spies.
I don't think they're winning the argument here, at least not as far as public approval. It's completely anecdotal, but I've noticed something interesting about the kinds of responses people have on the subject: people who don't follow the issue at all tend to completely disapprove of Snowden, call him a traitor, cite terrorism, etc.; people who are somewhat passionate and read all of on the subject tend to have the polar opposite opinion; and people who go into extreme depth on the subject (reading all of the leaked documents, reading the laws, watching the debates and the congressional hearings, etc.) tend have much more nuanced opinions. It's hard to have debates on the subject because of both the amount of secrecy involved and the amount of misinformation floating around. I think the NSA needs a big adjustment to how it handles interactions with the media if it's going to gain any traction with the public. At the same, the American public needs to come to grips with the fact we employ people for the purpose of spying, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
> I mean, you can call it traitorous, but you seem to be saying it was totally unnecessary, when its release caused a law to be drafted and voted on that probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Actually if Snowden had stopped at the domestic phone records collection program, I don't think many people would really have much issue with him. It's everything that came afterwards that bugs me. The 215 program was and continues to be very controversial. What doesn't help the debate is the amount of misinformation about the program. The PCLOB laid the entire program out in one of their reports[1], and several officials have summarized exactly how they are using the data and what they're allowed to use it for (see [2] for example), but it continues to draw arguments citing things like this[3] where they include several types of metadata that the NSA isn't permitted to get like location data, names, message content. I'd love to see someone to do a research paper where pull the exact types of data collected under this program from 100 or so phones and say 'this is the actual information we were able to obtain from it'. I've done it myself on a very small sample of phones (3 phones over about two months) and made some interesting conclusions, but nothing like some of the detractors have made.
I'm not saying that legitimate violations of the law shouldn't be reported, but we haven't seen that. What we have seen a lot of is 'look at this tool/program that NSA is using', then an insinuation that it could be used against anyone without actually showing who it has been used against or why. The giant revelation that Glenn Greenwald promised showing actual Americans who were targeted by the NSA ended up instead showing 5 Americans that the FBI through FISA warrants. If something bad is going on, I want to see actual wrongdoing, not potential for wrongdoing. The police have the technical capability to indiscriminately gun down every person they see, but no one is arguing that we should disarm them based on something they could do.
> Around here, we're all wondering if we will be personally hacked because of one user (or potential users) on a system we have authority over, and what consequences that could have on our personal life and reputation, employment, and our company's reputation.
I think one of the biggest problems that has arisen from the Snowden revelations is that it's completely upended people's perceptions of the threat model. Telecommunications providers shouldn't be surprised that they're a target, because they would be a prime target for hackers even if there weren't any intelligence services. They sit in a very privileged position on the internet. For the most part, I'd say the people that have to worry about being targeted by the NSA or any other intelligence service already knew ahead of time that they were potential targets. If you don't deal with anything pertaining to national security issues or provide means to gain access to national security information, your primary concern should not be the NSA (or GCHQ/Mossad/FSB/BnD/etc.)
This leads to lots of bad security practices as people try to secure themselves from the NSA but leave themselves more vulnerable to more plausible threats. Tor is a primary example - it might hide you from someone trying to target you specifically, but will make you significantly more vulnerable to someone who doesn't care who they're attacking (i.e. just about every criminal). Articles like this[4] made me cringe: battered women were seeking some means to escape from their abusive boyfriends/spouses, and the Tor Project managed to convince them that they would be safer from them by browsing the web using Tor.
With regards to William Binney, he hasn't worked in the agency for nearly 15 years, so I don't put much credence into anything he says after 2001. His description of ThinThread, which he advocates, sounds terrifying: instead of trying to filter out and discard as much domestic communication as possible, ThinThread apparently takes in all of the communications and encrypts the domestic traffic for later use if they obtain a warrant. It's hard to definitely evaluate it without a more detailed technical description, though.
Your first paragraph reeks of confirmation bias. It's a truism (and/or a pat on your own back) for you to say "and people who go into extreme depth on the subject [...] tend have much more nuanced opinions." Such thinking makes it all too easy to discard countervailing opinions. Of course my opinion is nuanced and correct! Those other people simply haven't read enough, otherwise they would come to the same conclusions that I have!
I don't have much to add to the discussion other than to say that people have spent miles of text, sweating this thread out, yet no one has budged a bit on either side of this discussion. Some generosity and good faith "shoe-switching" might go a long way in seeing the middle ground between "the government is completely in the clear to keep on trucking" and "the NSA should be abolished."
As an aside, I wish HN would give you notifications when someone responds to your comment - I didn't see this for two days and I'm not sure if you're ever going to see this, but anyway...
I wasn't trying to imply that my opinion was the correct one - of course, I am naturally a bit biased on the matter. :) I was trying to say that the whole "the NSA is 100% evil" argument is just as ignorant as the "the terrorists will win if the NSA doesn't read your e-mail" argument. Based on your 2nd paragraph, I think we're in agreement on that front.
I've watched debates like [1] where you put the NSA and ACLU in the same room and civil discussion ensues. I'd like to see more debate on those lines.
I do have some objections off the top of my head, if somewhat superficial.
> by his own admission took the Booz Allen job specifically to gather information to leak ... instead of "I saw something wrong and I'm reporting it" it's instead "I'm determined to find something wrong and report it."
He'd already decided there was something wrong, though: "“Much of what I saw in Geneva [as a CIA spy around 2007],” he said, “really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world.”" and "Snowden has said he first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008." On a different altercation, "The incident convinced him, Snowden says, that trying to work through the system would lead only to reprisals." And he started stealing documents before Booz Allen Hamilton, according to the NSA: "It was that summer of 2012, Ledgett says, when Snowden made his first illegal downloads."[1]
Those claims about his formative experiences could of course be fabrication to help his credibility, or maybe semi-honest retroactive re-framing of genuine incidents to justify his current course in his own mind. I'll assume they're honest, for purposes of explaining why I don't find the Booz Allen job so damning.
So, he's made a decent case that taking the Booz Allen Hamilton job, while driven by admitted "ulterior" motive, wasn't merely "I'll have a peek at secret info and see who I can 'sell' it to later". He already had some ideas what was wrong and who he wanted to tell about it. Now, I will grant you that his perception of the documents he gathered to support his opinion was then biased, and that the collection of documents available biases what they can be used to claim. But that seems an unavoidable part of humans forming and expressing opinions. So long as his "opinion" wasn't formed based on what would "play well" in the media or something like that, I don't really see an issue here.
If I haven't beaten this to death, another way to say what I'm trying to say here: imagine he worked in the same place for 5 years, and then in the last 3 months decided to start actively gathering documents to support a thesis. Would you say that skewed his results the same way? Why or why not? Because arguably, he did work in the same environment for 5+ years, and I don't see why just switching to another defense contractor for access poisons any opinion-forming or research he does there. If it does, we have to distrust anybody who has ever acted on an opinion in order to persuade us of it, because that means anything they say is skewed and they are now trying to fit facts into their narrative instead of the other way around. (Which is probably a good way to lean toward, but not very helpful if you take it to an extreme and want to ever learn about things that happen outside of your immediate consciousness.)
> is he a disgruntled ex-employee trying to lash out at his former employer
But it only became his former employer by Snowden's own choice to leak, as far as I understand both Snowden and the government say. Are you saying he now regrets losing his cushy $122k/yr job with Booz Allen, so we can't trust him? That's a stretch IMO -- the documents were obtained before his employer became the ex-employer, so they can't inherently be tainted afterward. And at this point, it's probably mostly the journalists picking through the documents and potentially coming up with misleading excerpts and framing, but why would their reason to do so be to spite their source's ex-employer? Snowden might be a naive idealist, an attention seeker, a troll, a spy, or something else, but "disgruntled ex-employee" is not making any sense to me. Maybe I'm taking it differently than you meant.
[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/05/edward-snowd...