[Politics/Wonkish]Leakers!

[Maxus]

Snowden's a real charmer.

[Whipstitch]

Fuck that guy and fuck his metric bashing.

[Ed]

Snowden's a real charmer.

I knew him when he was on Ars. Tremendous bag of shit. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire.

(Which isn't to say I think those leaks were wrong, I think they were a decent idea. I just hope he falls into a thresher.)

[Maxus]

Snowden's a real charmer.

I knew him when he was on Ars. Tremendous bag of shit. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire.

(Which isn't to say I think those leaks were wrong, I think they were a decent idea. I just hope he gets his balls kicked off )

There's just about one rule of discourse on the Den: Don't wish death on other people.

We had someone who kept telling people to go die in a fire, and, well, FBMF got sick of it.

Anyways, carry on.

[erik]

It takes a special kind of stupid asshole to piss off the most powerful country in the world like he did. It would be improbable for other forms of stupidity and assholery to not also have expressed themselves in him as well.

If he was a well-balanced non-retard then he probably never would have leaked or been let into a position to leak. There are good people who would do such things on principle, but they tend to get filtered out more easily I reckon, reporting the minor stuff which is wrong and winnowing down their chances of getting to the huge wrongs.

[Kaelik]

There is no particular reason to believe threshers are always lethal.

So for example, "Go burn yourself very severely and suffer agonizing pain" is not against the rules.

[Ed]

There's just about one rule of discourse on the Den: Don't wish death on other people.

Oh my, my first faux pas.


I was thinking along the lines of a non-lethal, fairly agonizing thresher with an affinity for his crotchular region, if that helps.

[Username17]

You know, seeing Edward Snowden go into a rant about how racist the Swiss are and then immediately go into a racist rant about Muslims is the first thing I've seen that makes it look like Snowden isn't a foreign agent. The obvious conclusion when someone releases some heavily modified but possibly damning secret documents and then makes a long list of accusations some of which are demonstrably true, some of which are demonstrably false, and some of which are indeterminate, and then flees directly to the protection of a hostile foreign power or two is that the person is a foreign agent.

But seeing that the guy has been spouting bullheaded opinions and conspiracy theories for years makes this sort of erratic and obviously insane behavior seem more organic. I mean, it's still entirely possible that the tipping point for him to go rogue was getting a suitcase full of money from the Ministry of State Security. But seeing that he apparently thought it was a good idea to rant about how things worked better in the 19th century because we had no social safety net and used metal for barter exchange, I could see him going all in on an attack on his country just randomly.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

It takes a special kind of stupid asshole to piss off the most powerful country in the world like he did.

... wait... Snowden pissed off China now?

[Koumei]

It takes a special kind of stupid asshole to piss off the most powerful country in the world like he did.

... wait... Snowden pissed off China now?

[DSMatticus]

I just want to say called it. When I found out this college-educated, relatively well-off twenty-something was a Ron Paulite, I knew he would prove to be a gold mine of rationalized crazy. He did not disappoint.

[Maj]

Why didn't Snowden wait until he was someplace "safe" before releasing this shit? Or revealing his name to the world?

[Username17]

Why didn't Snowden wait until he was someplace "safe" before releasing this shit? Or revealing his name to the world?

Because he's an attention whore who has really poorly thought out opinions. And because he's an internet tough guy who dreams of punching hippies and overthrowing the state.

I mean, this is a guy who was tearing his hair out because it was some kind of betrayal that Leon Panetta was appointed head of the CIA. Because, get this, he was a politician. As opposed to being a general or a lawyer. Now, leaving aside the fact that Leon Panetta is in fact a lawyer, someone on that board immediately pointed out that President H. W. Bush was in fact director of central intelligence. That should have shut him up, but Snowden did not back down. He doubled down and said it didn't count because that was 25 years ago. Then he went about insulting people.

Hell, at the end of the Bush administration, he was literally calling for leakers who interfered with covert programs of the United States government to have their nuts shot off. That might seem like it's a 180 degree turn, but actually it's totally consistent. He has incredibly immature and poorly thought out opinions and has hyperbolic and violent fantasies about how they should be implemented.

You know his plan for dealing with the high unemployment of 2008 was that vulture capitalists should shut down all the distressed companies and the American people should go work for themselves like they did before 1900. Seriously. That was his actual plan. We all go become homesteaders and blacksmiths and stuff and then we stop trying to work for "money". Problem solved. If you happen to be a hot headed idiot. Like Edward Snowden.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

How the fuck does such an obvious attention-whoring asshole get access to classified data, anyway? That's the worst possible indictment of the system. It isn't what they did, it's that they let this guy into their clubhouse.


The most cohesive argument against large-scale data collection isn't that the government is evil and malignant, it's that some employees of the government are assholes with personal agendas who will abuse that information for their own pleasure. And Snowden is pretty much a poster child for that.

This is pretty much the same reason why we don't trust 4Chan with our detailed personal data.

[Ed]

How the fuck does such an obvious attention-whoring asshole get access to classified data, anyway?

Nobody pays a lot of attention to the IT grunts, especially not when they come in through a contractor (Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton).

[erik]

How the fuck does such an obvious attention-whoring asshole get access to classified data, anyway? That's the worst possible indictment of the system. It isn't what they did, it's that they let this guy into their clubhouse.

Following 9/11 the U.S. began using contractors because they had hugely expanded mission demands and not enough people.

It had been acknowledged years ago even by an Intelligence Director among others as a problem that we had been using way too many contractors, but like so many acknowledged problems nobody has the will to fix them.

Relevant reporting:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/secret-history ... d=19366914
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =200104716
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/500000_ ... ta_hoards/

I think I recalled hearing on the radio that finally the government is significantly scaling back on use of contractors for intelligence, something like planning to cut access back by 90% or near to that level. Couldn't find a link tho, and I don't know if I heard the whole segment or even recall it accurately.

[zugschef]

What is this discussion actually about?

[K]

Following 9/11 the U.S. began using contractors because they had hugely expanded mission demands and not enough people.

The government has been switching over to contractors since before Bush era because you don't have to pay pensions or decent wages to contractors and they don't have a union.

In fact, the federal government has had a "hiring freeze" for decades. Even senior staff in departments like Health and Human Services simply don't get replaced, and this means that the overall tactic has been to age out government workers and replace them with contractors.

I know all of this because I used to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the corporations that makes all of it's profit by providing contractors to the Fed. They provide everything from secretaries to high-level military intelligence to the government.

"Not enough people in the federal government" is a design. Instead of hiring qualified people into government, we've been hiring them into massive corporations that make a tidy profit from the government. Basically, it's a way for a small number of people to get rich off other people's service to the government by milking no-bid government contracts.

[Chamomile]

Every day you learn something new. These days the new thing seems to come with the suffix "and that's why Blade Runner is the future" more often than not.

[hyzmarca]

In La Femme Nikita, Section One's solution to their IT problems was to impregnate one of their Abeyance Operatives and raise the resulting child to be the ultimate IT guy with absolutely no life outside of the organization. It's a strategy that worked out pretty well for them and I don't see why the NSA couldn't implement something similar. They probably wouldn't want to impregnate one of their suicide operatives, but there are plenty of kids out their who could be adopted and brought into the organization at a oung age and conditioned for loyalty.

And the best part is you don't have to pay them outside the cost of basic room and board.

There are solutions, even with a hiring freeze.

[infected slut princess]

Your drunk and blind (why not) neighbor gets in his car. There is no victim unless he hits someone, but we do not call that a victimless crime because his actions are clearly dangerous and have the real possibility of ending in someone's harm or death. Victimless crimes are things like gambling, prostitution, or drug use - none of which pose a potential risk to other people's property or life. Forcing people around you to play russian roulette, whether through malice or neglligence, is not victimless even if in any particular round everyone happens to get lucky.

Being an imminent danger to someone does create a victim. So dangerously driving around in public streets while drunk and blind could very easily create "victims" even if the driver did not smash into someone or their property or wahtever.

Of course, we could imagine situations in which a drunk/blind guy could drive around without creating a victim. For example, someone with a big empty field might allow the drunk/blind guy to do donuts in it.

So here's a hypothetical for you: one of the informants Manning outed is murdered tomorrow and made an example of by the insurgents he outed. Is Manning culpable? If no, why not?

Manning would not be culpable. This is because the government should not have any secrets, and it is not his fault someone committed a murder because of something discovered when those secrets are revealed. Instead, it is the murderer's fault.

DSM, you are wasting your time.

That's what I tried to tell him. But he seems to be all agitated about the idea that anyone could oppose all government secrecy.

[K]

Here is a link to a NYT opinion where they link to data showing that contract worker for the government are generally underpaid.

There is even a link in there showing that hiring contractors is often more costly than hiring actual government workers.

[sabs]

Government contractors tend to be
a) Underpaid
b) Non-Union
c) Pressured to garner more billable hours, instead of doing a good job.
d) The high paid ones are ex-government/military wonks who are hired not to do work, but to keep the contract and to schmooze, and to talk to the current Government interface in a comfortable way.

Hiring contractors costs more than government workers, AND leads to a poorer working class. It's a win win situation.

There are spots where civilian employees/civilian contractors are cheaper. There are certain jobs that used to be done by military, but didn't really need military training to be done. Your average military just costs much more to train, that wasting them on paperpushing jobs is a bad plan. But in the civilian government it's bad. Add to that the problem that for a lot of government agencies, government workers have incentive to play ball with the contractors, because that's where they can get high paying jobs after they leave government service, and it's just a bad combo.

[Josh_Kablack]

I've got a pretty firm belief that we are living in an era with technological changes which are are continuously making secrets harder and harder to keep than they were in the past.

There are basically two rational governmental responses to that:

1. Try a whole lot harder to keep things secret.
this is the path we are currently on

OR

2. Be a lot more selective about which things need to be kept secret.
this is probably a more rational and cost-effective approach


I also believe that some of the collateral damage of my government's recent efforts to retain secrets has been severe enough that some degree of civil-disobedience lawbreaking is likely justifiable in efforts to effect change.

However, Manning and Snowden's disclosures don't really conform to the usual notions of civil disobedience -- or at least they wouldn't if our government wasn't being so heavy-handed with them. They should have just been criminals, but overzealous pursuit and prosecution has made them into criminals who are legitimate examples of how our government mistreats suspects when cases have political ramifications.

[K]

I think the thing that disturbs me most about the leaking has been the revelation of "parallel construction" where the NSA can spy on everyone and then give information to the DEA that the DEA could never get a warrant to find. The DEA then lies about where they got the information and so it can't ever be challenged in court or used to help defendants find evidence that helps them.

We have laws about lawful searches because of a long history of abuse and false convictions, and those laws have been rendered useless.