He asked a general question regarding authorities to OGC. What's the bar of "availing" himself to a channel? If he sent an email to OGC asking how their weekend was, he would have technically "consulted with OGC", would he not?
As it stands, there is zero evidence (from either side) that Snowden complained to the proper channels.
And why would he when his plan was to leave the country with 1.5 million classified documents?
> If he was under duress he probably didn't have time to filter through the documents. Even if he had a bit of time, it's difficult to know what would be relevant as events unfolded after the release.
The dude planned this for years, he said it himself. He had plenty of time to simply take evidence of what he was going to blow the whistle on. I don't understand your argument.
> impossible to expose the information in any other way
Except for the many oversight channels that exists which there has yet to be any evidence he used.
> For example, there may have been evidence of other crimes, and there would be no way he could sift through the documents while still working.
If I understand your argument correctly, it's: "it's possible something here is illegal so let's just take all of it." I shouldn't have to explain why that doesn't jive.
> Also, he recognized that he needed to leak slowly in order to keep the story afloat, or else he would get buried under propaganda and forgotten, as has happened to other whistleblowers that released all at once.
None of this addresses the fact that it seems he did a recursive pull of supersecretnsadomain.gov and deuced out to China under the pretenses of whistleblowing.
My point is how do you pardon someone for whistleblowing when literally 99.99% of what they took from a classified space has nothing to do with what they were supposedly blowing the whistle on?
If you're going to leak 1.5 million documents and flee to China on the grounds of being a whistleblower after following proper channels, wouldn't you want to display some, any sort of proof that you indeed did attempt to follow the proper channels?
People claim this dude was a genius, make him out as some sort of tech/hacker savant, so why not make the slightest effort to show the world you really are a whistleblower?
> Is patently false. He did attempt to use those channels and was ignored [1] - at least once as confirmed by the NSA itself, and many other times according to him, which the NSA disputes.
The same article you link says Snowden "tried to go through channels". It's not "patently false". It's "he claimed he tried". Meanwhile, investigations show only one email he sent regarding general clarification on NSA authorities but zero raising any concern or complaints: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...
> WRONG - He has stated many times that he did approach all manner of "Oversight" people who basically told him to shut up. What happened to Tomas Drake and the others who tired the insider approach - nothing ever came of it.
Then why not bring proof? 1.5 million documents and he can't bring the emails he sent? No, we saw the emails (that is to say, one email: https://news.vice.com/article/nsa-finds-new-snowden-emails-b...) that were sent to OGC, and nothing in them indicated he was raising any concerns.
> How do you verify this? you can't
He took 1.5 million documents and we've seen what, maybe 100-200 documents and slides over the course of three years? What's the other 1,499,800 million classified documents about?
> Meanwhile the NSA was illegally infringing the privacy of almost 310 million americans
Fine, if he had only taken documents pertaining to his qualms then there would have been a much greater chance of him being labeled a whistleblower or at least be met with some leniency even if he didn't in fact follow the proper channels.
> the activities were NOT lawful (as in legally defensible when challenged in a court), they were not overseen by anyone and some of them were unrelated to intelligence.
1,499,800 documents that likely have absolutely zero to do with what he was supposed to be blowing the whistle on.
IIRC, in this case the FBI served up a "diagnostic" executable to users. Since they're using Tor browser, in general, simply enabling Javascript won't do anything to de-anonymize the user (unless the Feds had a TBB 0-day or something of the like). This executable obviously called out to FBI-controlled servers and provided a real IP.
Basically, the only people they ended up busting were people who for some reason decided it was a good idea to download and run an executable being served by their favorite CP site on the "darknet".
I love how headlines like this are supposed to incite anger and fear.
The article mentioned nothing about manipulating "social media" (like reddit or HN as the headline would lead you to believe), in fact it mentions that none of the correspondence will even be in English. All this is is creating fake personas on extremist/underground forums as a source of intelligence.
I can almost guarantee the people against ALPR are most likely the same people who have no problem throwing a camera in somebody's face in your local Starbucks or something, and then when asked to stop recording, they say "but bro it's a public place".
As someone in the computer science/cyber security field who didn't go to college, I tend to agree with this article in a few ways. Having no college degree has really hindered me in terms of landing interviews, but once I'm given a chance on the job I'm always flourished and proved my worth.
I've also found it strange that it didn't matter what my degree was in, just having one wold have secured me interviews. A theoretical degree in Turfgrass Science would have benefited equally as a proper degree in CompSci.
> All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex.