Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
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As the Snowden documents continue to be sifted through, commenters are weighing in on whether new revelations will finally stick in the public consciousness. While some are skeptical, pointing out that past disclosures were met with initial outrage but ultimately forgotten, others are celebrating the persistence of online archives and the hidden gems they contain. A fascinating tangent emerged, with commenters sharing historical tidbits about sophisticated surveillance techniques, such as the Soviets' alleged bugging of American embassy typewriters. The discussion highlights the ongoing tension between the desire for transparency and the ease with which the public's attention can be diverted.
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You won"t.
"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 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 ...
Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
What this 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 technique for legitimate investigations.
Yes it does.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
The NSA 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 started 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? :-)
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 the above secret legal interpretations decided in favor of the spies 99.97% of the time, in ex-parte secret trials? Because that's what was in Snowden's docs.
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.
"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
> 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...
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.
> "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.
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?)
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/
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.
Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.
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 after my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite the immense capabilities.
Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_are_touching_on_this_watchlist.jpg
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/layoffs-the-intercept.p...
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'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
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.
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.
>Merlin's holly wand
The More You Know™ [0]
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
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.
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!!)
https://www.thiemeworks.com
>>"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...
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 Stephenson's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became really popular. A ficticious global 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 Stephenson'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 bad human actor(s)).
Really exciting storytelling, and I foresee many more of its future non-predictions becoming foreseeable future.
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)
There's clearly something here.
Nothing jaw dropping but he surprised on what get through
It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiracies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracies
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) 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.
Surreal.
There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility
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 ...
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
We also have Tor onion site: http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...
And I2P: http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
Yeah.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad
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