The way I read this story the NSA is really not rifling through ordinary people's email. They are specifically looking for a certain string. It is highly unlikely that ordinary people's emails contain this string.
> Using a Yahoo e-mail address and a different name, Kuok also allegedly contacted an Arizona company this year that had posted on eBay a KG-175 TACLANE — an NSA designed encryption device used to communicate with classified military computer networks, such as the Defense Department’s SIPRNet.
> Kuok repeatedly expressed fears that he might be dealing with an NSA, CIA or FBI agent, but continued to negotiate with the undercover officer, even cautioning him to avoid referencing the items by model number in e-mail, because “your country has this system to analyze” e-mail for keywords.
What if the string was something like "KG-175 TACLANE"? How many ordinary people would have this string in an e-mail? What is wrong with getting a warrant to read through e-mails containing such a string?
This news is definitely news to me. It is just not shocking or unexpected or contrary to what Barack Obama has been saying.
I do not think my opinion on this matter is deeply controversial, it is just that opponents of a Snowden pardon wisely keep their mouths shut.
I also think that my request for views opposing my current view shows my flexibility on this matter. If someone can show convincing arguments against my view, I am perfectly willing to adapt and concede.
You did not. You told me to go research the "facts", while you took your "facts" the same as I did mine: By researching sources on the internet. It is weak to say that someone with an opposing view must have this view because he/she is ill-informed.
The so-called 'ad hominem attacks' are likely the result of my poor mastery of the english language, combined with an assumption of bad faith on your part.
> "High-school diploma"? WTF? Have the courage to say what you mean or cut the cheap shots.
As someone with only a high-school diploma myself, I do not like others with only a high-school diploma, who blow the chances they've been given.
Should Snowden only have been glad someone took a chance on him and shut up? No. He did a brave thing.
Will it be harder in the future for someone with only a high-school diploma to get admin access at the NSA, as a result of Snowden's actions? Yes. NSA will start focussing on Ivy League students and family members of NSA employees.
> So you don't like Greenwald. That's lovely. Now please describe how the romantic connection indicates incompetence, and what exactly the bad result that said incompetence lead to.
I think Greenwald is an ok journalist. I think it is grave incompetence to use your romantic interest as a document mule. Journalists may be able to handle sensitive documents. The partners of those journalists... not so much. They are basically civilians.
The bad result is that his partner was caught by customs and detained. A bad result may have been that other agencies got to his partner before the UK did. Everyone around Greenwald became a target the moment he was in possession of the cache. That he actually gave the documents to his partner, shows that he was a valid target at that.
Do you honestly think Snowden thought it was a good idea that Greenwald let his partner handle these documents?
> So, being competent is a strike against Snowden, but being incompetent is a strike against Greenwald (who presumably doesn't have any training from GCHQ)?
I think you laid bare my mental split on this issue and for that I thank you. I will concede the point on Snowden being competent.
I said it because it felt (and still slightly feels) wrong to me: Like a kung-fu student hitting his master with a punch he was taught by that same master. Snowden used the trade craft he picked up at the NSA and CIA against these same organizations.
But he would have been foolish to ignore his own skills and I can't expect him to forget these and put his life in danger (more than he already has).
> That's why he gave them to a small group of well respected journalists
You can not vet encrypted documents. These documents were unencrypted and handled by journalists who could never stand the full attention of the world's intelligence agencies.
Laura Poitras was very qualified. Greenwald... not so much. He had to receive a crash-course on computer safety. He left unidentified USB-sticks in the laptop with the documents. He gave the documents to his non-journalist partner in an attempt to smuggle them through customs. Greenwald is a professional. He just did not get the gravity or technicalities of most of the documents he saw.
> those [standard-operating-procedure] documents aren't the ones being leaked by the journalists
They are not being leaked to the general public (with a few exceptions). But one has to assume they made it to the competitors of the US. And it points to indiscriminate leaking -- maybe Snowden did not even fully realize what he all had, as he took everything he could get his hands on: mailing lists, internal collaborative wiki's, technical details on ongoing missions.
> Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
I do not think Snowden went through the official internal channels. He may have tried to ring the alarm bell with some people internally. If you have anything to challenge this, I'd be interested.
> Lol wut. He was just a contractor, not a secret agent.
He was a former CIA operative. He took his job at BAH with the full intention of leaking everything he could get his hands on. His flight, undercover operation, and handling of the documents, was all very deliberate and possible due to his trade craft.
> [Snowden fled to Russia] So? You can't blame Snowden for that
Why not? Proponents almost make it sound he was chased to Russia, or that Wikileaks kidnapped him and released him there. He ended up in Russia. I think both destinations were chosen very deliberately, to avoid rendition, prosecution (or worse: assassination or torture).
> Doesn't matter how he got the documents in Britain
I think it does. From journalists we can expect them to maybe handle very sensitive documents. The partners of these journalists? Not so much... That is as close to civilian as you can get.
> He tried that and nobody took him seriously.
So he downloaded everything else, filled 4 laptops, and now we do take him seriously? Maybe I have missed something here? Did Snowden try to leak these important documents before he went to Poitras and Greenwald?
> Considering he only ever entered Russia after he had distributed the documents and none of them ever entered Russia this opinion is based on nothing other than emotion and isn't substantiated by any facts.
Sure, Russia and China won't come out and say that:
- we have the documents
- Snowden was one of our own
But to think these documents are not in the possession of every competent intelligence agency in the world may be a bit naive. I'd reckon these intelligence agencies knew of these documents the moment news agencies around the world starting working on them.
I thought both your "arguments" were petty and slightly offensive. To say basically: 'Just Google my rebuttal' is not worthy of a reply. You could have just skipped my sincere request for reasoning opposite to my own.
Without volunteering too much entropy: I myself have a high-school diploma and my sister is gay.
You are perfectly fine to read "partner" there, though that may not convey the fact that they were not married (which would arguably have made it slightly better).
Thank you for posting this great debate video. Although it did not change my opinion on the pardon, I now have a more nuanced view on this matter. I thought all the debaters in this video had good points, but I still agree with the opposition.
To pardon Snowden seems like a very popular opinion around here. Can anyone help me change my opinion on this matter?
The way I currently see it:
- Snowden indiscriminately hovered up so many documents, it was impossible to vet all of them.
- The vast majority of these documents do not constitute whistleblowing, but are standard operating procedure for the NSA. The US expects the NSA to do this.
- Leaking standard-operating-procedure documents damaged the NSA, and thus the security / defense of the US.
- Snowden did not attempt to go through internal channels.
- Snowden leaked / whistleblowed these documents in an operation using his secret agent skills.
- Snowden fled to Russia, a currently not-so-cold competitor of the US.
- Snowden's documents ended up in the hands of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies.
- Snowden's innocent leaks, such as the entire Intellipedia, damaged the intelligence community, causing them to "clam up", and place more mistrust on "outsiders", such as high-school diploma Snowden.
- Snowden gave the document cache to incompetent journalists. Greenwald send his boyfriend to smuggle documents through British customs.
If Snowden had given only the slides on the NSA spying on American citizens, and cooperating with US companies, that would have been whistleblowing. As it stands, to me, it feels like a Russian operation to inflict PR/diplomacy damage on the US.
I have a lot of respect for whistleblowers, and also for Snowden. What he did is nothing short of heroic. But I do not believe in a pardon for someone who misuses his admin privileges to download all the documents he could get his hands on, then flees to Russia. What's missing for me?
There is no strong theoretical foundation for very complex and/or deep models. There are ways to gauge results, but right now, the media is right in that there are risks.
The pneumonia project referenced in the article had Caruana voting against implementing the most accurate model: A neural net. Instead they went with a way less accurate logistic regression model, one they could safely implement in production, inspect, explain, and defend to the doctors.
Nobody does quite know why neural networks work so well. There is a Nobel Prize waiting there for someone or some team to solve this with mathematical (or physics) rigor.
Nodes in neural network layers can represent multiple features, or share feature representations. Do we know if a neural net (and which part) is targeting skin color, or acne? Do we know that credit risk models are targeting sex, even though we left out this feature (it may infer this from other features)?. Depending on the application, this is important to know for certain.
Reverse engineering sure does work, but can we fully find out the source code from a program, just by fuzzing inputs and looking at outputs? Or are we only looking at (perhaps a small part of) its behavior?
> You will run into trouble if you don't know what you're doing
Likewise: You will run into trouble, if you don't know for sure what your models are doing.
The trick to accurate interpretability is to decouple accuracy from explanations.
Just like an International Master commentator can explain most of the moves of a Super GM, so can an interpretable simple model explain the predictions of a very complex black box model.
The work by Caruana referenced in this article actually culminated in a method to get both very accurate models and still retain interpretability.
Yes, I feel strongly that they should be suspended. The damage done by public terrorist propaganda far outweighs the damage of not being able to easily analyze their social graph.
Mind you, there are other ways (not available to anyone with access to the Twitter API) to plot terrorist social graphs.
Those who share or are confronted with terrorist propaganda on social networks are not all terrorists. There is a lot of noise. Forcing the terrorists/propagandists underground, separates the wheat from the chaff. Terrorist propagandists know the value of social networks. They do not use them to plot attacks (at least the smarter ones), they solely use them to brainwash naive youth and recruit them for their cause. I feel Twitter is obligated to combat this. Having a lot of users is no excuse for manual and automatic suspension of people sharing dangerous materials.
I do agree that there is a slippery slope: Do we also suspend those who share information and videos from the war front in Syria? Or only those sharing infographics on poisons or glorification of the Paris attacks? Is blocking terrorist propaganda even censorship or just common sense (criminal negligence to keep it up)?
The constant bombardment of war front posts in your timeline is definitely riling up people to go fight a war that is not theirs. Can we solve this problem, while largely keeping free speech intact, or is free speech always a binary issue?
Also compare Twitter with the older ISP's. You'd have a hard time hosting your own site with terrorist propaganda, while nowadays these social networks give you an easy platform to reach many people.
This is actually a call for research from YC-funded OpenAI:
> Spam the Spammers
> Investigate the use of language models to remove the profit from spamming.
> Spammers generate a huge amount of undesirable traffic and attention. Their emails are merely annoying for most people, but a small fraction of users fall into their trap. Spammers receive responses from users extremely infrequently. Therefore, they manually reply to each email.
> The task is to build a bot that automatically replies to spam emails. Such a bot shouldn't be easy to detect, which could be achieved by use of a powerful language model.
Could be an extension from Graham's A Plan for Spam, which basically called for a DDoS on spam servers:
> As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers.
> So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.
It's a low effort meme-like post that adds nothing to the article or discussion. Those are frowned upon at HN.
It's not impossible to make joke-y replies to posts and receive upvotes, but it takes a lot of practice (or authority).
If a 100 people would post one-liner memes then the comment section would be no fun to read. It used to be a strength of HN to have an incredibly resourceful comment section with good debate. It was not uncommon for the author of a programming language to chime in on a discussion about said language.
> The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.
Edit: I see that your account was created 1499 days ago. This may make my reply seem silly (also coming from a newly created account). It was a sincere attempt at answering your downvoting concerns though.
A story like https://www.wired.com/2010/05/kuok/ is a relevant case here.
> Using a Yahoo e-mail address and a different name, Kuok also allegedly contacted an Arizona company this year that had posted on eBay a KG-175 TACLANE — an NSA designed encryption device used to communicate with classified military computer networks, such as the Defense Department’s SIPRNet.
> Kuok repeatedly expressed fears that he might be dealing with an NSA, CIA or FBI agent, but continued to negotiate with the undercover officer, even cautioning him to avoid referencing the items by model number in e-mail, because “your country has this system to analyze” e-mail for keywords.
What if the string was something like "KG-175 TACLANE"? How many ordinary people would have this string in an e-mail? What is wrong with getting a warrant to read through e-mails containing such a string?
This news is definitely news to me. It is just not shocking or unexpected or contrary to what Barack Obama has been saying.