Ignoring the operational limitation requirement (of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%), a capable public can make this determination; we do not need journalists doing it for us. I am uninterested in the journalistic value of these documents; I am interested in the public value of potentially knowing the content of those documents and how the government is surveilling us and/or abusing their authority.
>“The bottom line is that Snowden is facing charges under the Espionage Act. If he was ever to return to the US and face trial, the documents could be used against him.
Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. He believed he was acting in the best interests on the public and is it NOT the job of journalists to protect a known source entity; they are to protect unknown sources.
Release MORE of the files, your profits and/or biased concerns for the journalistic value of the information shared be dammed. There is WAY more at stake.
So, based on the article, we shouldn't be blindly trustful of the journalists' thoughts on this matter; they are clearly biased toward the information published as well as the value it brings their brand (individual or employer).
If Snowden himself had had to redact everything ahead of time, or study everything in fine detail beforehand to determine all the implications of publishing it, he wouldn't have been able to leak nearly as much material.
I wonder what motivated this story to be published.
The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.
The public is not just the bottom most or the average member. It's everyone. If "the public" is not capable of understanding this information neither are the members of "the public" normally producing and consuming this information.
However there are many organisations who can analyze different aspects from different perspectives and pull out consumable information from it.
By having the raw material available this then can be cross-ckecked. If it's kept secret you need complete trust.
It can’t be that hard.
Just to put the end of that sentence in context:
"Privacy International's 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year. Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being 'endemic surveillance societies'. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States."[0]
There are many, many reasons to criticize Russia - now more than ever - but those of us in the West should reflect on why we rate so poorly on this, too.
It very well could be. People with a background jnnsocial engineering know there are many small and seemingly innocuous pieces of information that could be useful to an attacker.
Sorry, was the point of these revelations to increase public interest (aka to make the newspapers money), or to bring accountability against the NSA? So far there has been nothing published that would give any individual standing to bring such a lawsuit. Is this because Snowden was naive, or because the journalists sacrificed real accountability for self-interest?
There were several lawsuits. Some activities were ruled illegal. More accountability would require prosecutions and political action. And there was enough evidence for them.
When MacAskill replied: “The main reason for only a small percentage [being published] was diminishing interest [from the public]...”
This is insane. They have 99% of the leak under lock and key and they say the reason is because no one wants to see it? My guess is its a gag order/request, if they publish they will lose other access or something but why would this Ewen MacAskill, @ewenmacaskill feel comfortable lying so directly?
To make money is the purpose of journalism as much as eating or breathing are the purpose of your life, i.e. they are not.
They're just the bare necessity that needs to be done to continue to exist so that you can do more 'important' things (see Maslow hierarchy).
I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collaborators in the private tech sector who seem to have been quite active participants in the program.
For example, one of the most revealing revelations was that NSA spied on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras - which is very hard to justify on national security grounds, and instead points to industrial espionage of the kind the NSA claims it doesn't engage in (as compared to China, etc.).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr...
I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general, not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relationships among foreign politicians, epidemics, boycott and antiboycott campaigns, etc., are matters of national security in the sense that they could eventually develop into things that would affect a society negatively, or that could tend to increase or decrease the power of a state.
In maintaining the idea of privacy, we have to also maintain that others have to accept surprises and uncertainty. I don't know my neighbors' religious views, I don't know what oatmilk will cost next week at the supermarket, I didn't know when my former coworkers started trying to organize a union, I don't know if anyone has a crush on me. But all that information exists somewhere in computer systems. I accept that I have no right to it, but it seems incredibly hard to get governments to think the same way.
When Glenn Greenwald first talked about how spying on Petrobras wasn't a matter of U.S. national security, I thought that was obviously right. Petrobras isn't going to attack the U.S., it doesn't have any means of attacking the U.S., and it doesn't have any obligation to sell or not sell oil to the U.S. or any other country at any particular price. But now I think that it's not just like "the NSA must plan to help the Texas oil industry" or "the NSA must plan to help the Saudi oil industry" or something; it's more like "they don't accept that they should have to contend with surprises and uncertainty".
To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. And I think disclosing that it happens is right, but it doesn't seem to have led to the kind of discussion or debate that Greenwald seemed to hope for.
Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181265 had a more concise take on this point.
> If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
(But in this context we're not just talking about risks of violent attacks, but really risks of anything disruptive.)
Edit 2: The U.S. in particular is powerful enough to enforce economic sanctions which are themselves justified on national security grounds, so then there's also the sanctions enforcement part like figuring out whether Petrobras is working with the Iranian oil industry or whatever. Most countries probably wouldn't even expect to be able to do anything about that, although they might want to exert diplomatic pressure like "please stop trading with our enemy, from whom we concretely fear a physical attack".
On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy from the USG?
Reason 1 to reject spying for this reason: literally any spying could be justified this way. Every butterfly's wing flap could theoretically contribute to a "national security risk". In line with that great quote that "If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified." There's no way to use this logic to ever argue that you shouldn't spy on someone.
Reason 2 to reject this: when we start broadening the scope of "national security risk" to include things like "economic disruption", then essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power. A technological breakthrough in battery tech has a big potential for "economic disruption"; is that a national security risk? What if it's invented in Iran? Would the U.S. sabotage the (hypothetical) "Iranian national energy laboratory" if it were on the cusp of a revolutionary technology that could weaken the U.S.'s economic position?
Reason 3 to reject this: we get it wrong. If the CIA's "terrorist detector" says Joe Schmoe has a 99% chance of becoming an active terrorist, based on his religion, political views, age, recent Google searches, facial hair, income, and gait, what is the actual probability of him becoming an active terrorist? The standard "Bayesian false-positive" puzzle applies here: the base-rate of humans committing actual terrorist acts is extremely low. Even if the CIA's terrorist-detector model is 10x better than OpenAI's wet dreams, there's no way it's more than 99% accurate. With a base rate of something like 10^-6, we're looking at a roughly 0.01% chance that Joe is actually a terrorist, given a very accurate model giving a 99% positive result. Do we think the person making the decision about whether to make Joe disappear is aware of these subtle nuances in Bayesian statistics? Even if he did, he also knows that if Joe did go on to bomb an office building, there might be a headline soon that "the CIA's own model said Joe Schmoe had a 99% chance of being a terrorist and DID NOTHING!!" So of course Joe disappears forever, based on a futurecrime, because he Googled the wrong thing at the wrong time in his life with the wrong skin color and facial hair.
Put all these reasons together and you can get some really questionable behavior from these agencies, and that's even assuming it's all done with the legitimate good intention of protecting the U.S.
sorry to break it to you, but the answer was too succumb to a full blow 60s style coup which remove the president who autored the Reuters article above.
she was ousted by the senate, the right wing vice who was there for "governability" signed rights to new oil reserves to texaco on his first week in power and then brazil got an election that was free for all (main candidate jailed on bogus claims, candidate working with steve banon leading, etc)
It's kind of odd that neither of these oil giants have put pressure on the U.S. government as a result. They are about the only "victims" big enough to pursue the case legally.
I suspect a Supreme Court case is just about the only thing that can bring some of the remaining documents to light. Anyone with access today is almost certainly under some gag order.
I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.
NYT is not only pro-war, they're very conservative.
The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state with top-notch intelligence services can only do so much to prevent attacks. I think that adding more and more surveillance has diminishing returns in preventing attacks, meanwhile its existence is a threat to free society both directly, in that it could theoretically be used against political dissidents, and indirectly, in that it encourages a culture of self-censorship that is antithetical to political freedom.
If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
You are saying that because if anyone attacks us with conventional forces we will nuke them/invade them then we have no nation security interest concerning anything in classified documents compiled by our espionage services?
Is this a correct interpretation and if so do you stand by it? If not can you please clarify what you meant?
Your comfort is one thing. Noted. But do you know enough about the NYT, what would their job be exactly?
They don't have a stellar track record. Iraq-War, Judith Miller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reporter-judith-...
It's actually the opposite
National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others.
The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stupidity or malice.
So we should actually be publishing almost everything from US/Russia/China because they often ruin millions of lives, but in practice ofcourse we do the opposite.
"Truth" and "lies" mean something different than "things that emotionally resonate with me based on my a-priori beliefs" and "things that make me angry". It's weird that it's so easy for us humans to forget that. Or perhaps it's "things the correct people say" vs. "things those other people say"? Not sure which definitions you're using here.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/the-intercept-the-first-online-p...
The point is that these documents have interesting content, but it would not sell newspapers so they don't want to invest time working on that... it's nothing related to the publics interest.
What a sham. The NYT has openly said many times that it allows the US Government to determine what is "fit to print". How did it come to this?
I strongly believe there was some level of collusion between Greenwald & the USG. How else did he get to have a successful media career in the West, while fellow publisher/journalist Assange rots in prison?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/government-censor...
About NYT withholding documents: well, that's just another nail in the coffin of the paper's credibility, along with yet another betrayal of the trust they got from WL...
Because leaks can have consequences and it's not clear to the NYT exactly what those might be?
It's a tough situation because the government may not be a trusted partner, but I understand asking / trying to avoid collateral damage.
With this, the NYT has decided that they want to be a government propaganda organ instead of a journalistic organ.
As to Greenwald's media career? He seems to have gone really fringe the last few years, but maybe I'm saying this because I believe the mainstream Russia and Trump 2016 story, and he seems convinced about US mainstream media incompetence/deference, but he just sounds angry all the time...
