Among other things, this is the tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed.
If all these powerful companies agree, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, that this is an important problem, then Snowden is ipso facto a hero for bringing it to our attention.
The curious thing is, I feel the linkage works in the other direction too. If Snowden had been caught and was now having his brains scrambled by solitary confinement in some secret prison, these companies would have been at least slightly more reluctant to issue such a statement, because it would have seemed to be espousing the cause of someone people were hearing described on the news as a criminal.
Snowden made his disclosures much more effective by escaping.
This is a fulcrum for how Snowden is viewed by the populace; I find it all too easy to imagine the government symbolically caving in to this cause while still forcing Snowden personally to live out his life as a political refugee from the United States hiding from charges that never quite go away.
And yes, getting imprisoned makes you less credible in the eyes of the public; people love a winner. :/
I never really considered that I would see in my lifetime two people be persecuted so strongly by the government for doing such a beneficial thing. This seems like more "1950's over-zealous anticommunism".
My cynical prediction is that the government will symbolically cave on bulk surveillance whilst doing a massive knowledge and expertise transfer to an ally with a populace not so troubled by surveillance. The process for searching through bulk data will just have an extra step where the US sends requests for intelligence data to their ally who can then lawfully search bulk communication data.
Indeed it's happened before. The Bush-era 'Total Information Awareness' program (someone really dropped the ball branding that one), got shelved supposedly, but in reality was changed or continued under different programs or names.
I feel the same way, and have also been hoping for internet companies to put a stake in the ground.
On the other hand, it frustrates me that the tipping point for how Snowden's legacy will be viewed is action by a set of corporations, and not action by elected officials, the media, or an informed public...
>On the other hand, it frustrates me that the tipping point for how Snowden's legacy will be viewed is action by a set of corporations, and not action by elected officials, the media, or an informed public...
Democracy is effectively dead; who could we have voted for that would not have done these things if not Obama?
The United States is an oligarchy, just as the Internet has become feudal. Sometimes we'll agree with the decisions of the oligarchs; other times we won't.
But that isn't the question. Should we live in an oligarchy?
(Personally, I'm less optimistic that this is any sort of "tipping point." Humans rarely change their minds, and Snowden became a traitorous footnote to most people a long time ago.)
I kind of like it. It's a nice blow to the straw viewpoint that corporations should have no rights to speak.
Everything these companies say is informed by discussion in the media, among the public, and, yes, with elected officials. The line you want to draw is extremely fuzzy at best in reality.
I have read that Genghis Khan's original plan after conquering China was to raze the farming villages to provide more pasture for horses (and the Mongols that horse populations supported). Some bureaucrats pointed out to him that he could personally do better by taxing the Chinese farmers. And he sold out the Mongols to do it, which worked out great for him and the millions of peasants he didn't kill.
Do we count that as action by the peasants, who held essentially zero formal power, or by the mandarins, who could never have afforded to pay for the deal themselves?
the straw viewpoint that corporations should have no rights to speak
But the CEO's also have a moral obligation to lead. Frankly, they have this obligation even if its not in the financial (narrow) interest of their company. Although what we are clearly seeing here is the 'existential' threat not only to their business models, but that <history> will view them as compllicit in a bad thing, imho.
In a funny way (funny because we're usually seeing strictly the opposite happen) corporations can represent public interests in a way that none of those other groups do. Corporations are, after all, nothing more than solutions to the Collective Action Problem.
You take a disenfranchised minority, pull it all together to collaborate, give it some money... and now you've got an enfranchised minority (usually called a Political Action Committee.) Make that source of money self-sustaining, though, and you've got the definition of a (perhaps not-for-profit) corporation.
That may end up being the view, but in fact it is the people behind these corporations making the decisions.
Given this is the United States Military waging an espionage offensive on domestic soil (as well as internationally), I regard it as a brave effort for anyone at any of these companies to stand up and push back.
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor.
Government surveillance has become a political wedge issue, similar to abortion. No one likes it or encourages it but people have strong emotions on both sides. Snowden is deserving of credit, he may have helped to spark another enduring and polarizing american social debate. It's unfortunate that he won't be around for the resulting legal process.
It's worth noting that the modern surveillance state didn't begin when Edward Snowden stepped in front of a camera for the first time. Where were these responsible tech giants five or ten years ago? When everyone in the country was flipping the heck out over 9/11, some of these companies went along with the crowd and gave the government access to everything. Their points are very valid, more government transparency and accountability is always good. But courage is about doing the thing when it's hard, not when it's easy. It's good to see movement in the right direction but it would have been nice if things had gotten to this point sooner. Then maybe Snowden would still be sleeping in his own bed.
> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia.
I was born during the Cold War and I don't see it that way. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards.
I remember being alive when the USSR and East Germany were going concerns, and those countries seemed so horrible -- the USA really was on what any sane person (by my definition) would describe as the right side of that struggle.
Living under constant surveillance, scared to speak out even in private, corruption and bad pretense in place of the rule of law? Those things were horrible, and living under such a regime sounded unimaginably awful.
Fast forward some decades and here comes Snowden. That shit really resonated with me and virtually all friends of my age (39).
America is becoming that kind of place. Most of us had a creepy feeling that was happening after the G. W. Bush debacle, but Snowden proved it.
It's the same fucking fight, man: the fight for freedom. The fight for human rights and a non-dystopian future for our children.
The Cold War resonates, but in exactly the opposite of what you describe. We've got all that shit now: hyper-surveillance, secret and therefore meaningless 'laws', kidnapping, torture, America has fucking gulags now. The difference between us and East Germany is now mainly a matter of scale. But as Snowden showed, we were scaling up pretty fucking fast.
Snowden blew the lid off of it, he exposed the massive scale of it, and then he was literally running for his fucking life like some kind of Jason Bourne figure. He had a massive, ruthless security apparatus chasing him, willing do who knows what, and if they caught him it meant he was going to be tortured in solitary confinement for the rest of his life like Bradley Manning.
Nobody in their right mind would begrudge him from going any fucking place he had to in order to escape that.
And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.
I am 39 also, and I have also been following "Conspiracy Theory" topics since the late 80s. I have been aware of, and decrying, this sort of thing for two solid decades now.
The GP's question is predicated on the assumption that people have not been paying attention to the creep toward tyranny that these programs have brought for years... but the fact is that not only have people been paying attention; there has been a decades long effort to shield mainstream awareness of this. Media has been more than just complicit in MISO (PSyOP) activities to marginalize anyone who has been discussing these topics.
Christ, Hollywood has been out-right guilty of running PR for the MIC bastards for 30 years now.
There is a very clear crew responsible for this as well.
The CIA built by GHW Bush and his cabal of war/drug profiteers.
> And to my Cold War-shaped mind, it is impossible to think of him as anything other than a whistleblower that this country badly, badly needed.
Imagine this was 1980 and the issue at hand was apartheid.
Jelly-fish CEOs print an open letter in newspapers, asking governments to improve race relations because unhappy black folk don't want to buy their products.
Not once is Nelson Mandela mentioned in the letter, so out of the public eye, his years in prison continue.
Mikko Hypponen said some interesting things in a recent TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed... and specifically emphasises the point that until the whistleblow, we didn't know about the surveilance. Anyone who suggested the government was capturing or listening to calls was branded a crackpot or tin-foil hat wearer. These are Mikko's points.
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia.
I am a Russian American and I see this the other way around. The fact that Snowden had to escape to Russia (of all places!) to maintain his freedom is an indictment of the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. Traditionally the U.S. has been a beacon of hope for political prisoners and has a proud history of shielding dissidents. Just think of it -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner, Joseph Brodsky, I mean, the list is endless!
To me (and a lot of other people whose cultural identity is tied to that era) the idea that we're now moving into a world where things are flipped upside down is incredibly weird. I really can't think of other events that cause greater cognitive dissonance. Just think of it -- political dissidents seek asylum in Russia now?! Does that not seem odd?
It seems odd because Russia always gets demonized in the media. It's always the same: mafia, corruption, hackers... I can't remember the last time a positive story was published in the English speaking press.
The Thai government have just dissolved parliament and called new elections due to protests. Can you imagine that happening in many so-called "democratic" Western states? You can't even get a crack-smoking mayor to resign these days!
> There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor.
Let's break this down. You'd have to:
not know the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union
not know that Russia wasn't where Snowden was trying to end up
not understand the difference between a political defector (defecting to a political system that doesn't exist anymore!) and a guy trying to evade prosecution
I don't say this very often but I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are. People who think Snowden is a traitor would feel the same if he were in Iceland or something right now.
I'm sorry but this is just wrong. If Snowden was is Iceland, Switzerland, Germany or France he would certainly be viewed differently. Russia still has a way to go politically. Putin has been running the country for how long? Journalist tend to get killed:
And Russia is also a dangerous place to be gay. Snowden in Russia looks like politics on the part of Russia. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't find out some time in the future that Russia has their own surveillance program that was similar to ours.
It is one thing to avoid Russia from a position of power and freedom but it is completely understandable to go to Russia as a place of personal safety when so much of the world is denied to you as was the case for Snowden. I think it quite reasonable to assume that Snowden opposes Putin's nasty politics but also I believe it is reasonable for him to keep his mouth closed about that, having all the major governments of the world actively hating you is a bit much to ask of one man.
His going there made no statement that Russia was free or good just the for him personally it was possibly the safest move at that time.
I would also argue that his publicly speaking out on the abuses in the US, UK etc. may in the long term do far more to improve the freedoms in Russia by improving the acceptable international standards from where they are slipping to than if he had never leaked.
Politicians and even athletes who go to the Olympics have a greater responsibility to speak publicly against some of Russia's policies than a whistleblower on the run.
Considering that the group of people we are talking about probably overlaps with people who still think Obama is a muslim [1], I think you are giving common sense too much credit
By adding noise to the argument, you are hurting Snowden's case. People are simply going to conclude that Snowden must be wrong people because people who believe in him are wrong. The fact is that most people live busy lives and actually don't spend much time thinking about Snowden. I think his 15 minutes of fame are up. I don't see him mentioned in the news, except HN, where the story will never die.
> No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor.
Your post is absolutely right, and the people responding to you really fail to capture the dynamic existing in American society. The nature of the American public is that it is willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, but will view with intense skepticism those associated with Russia or China. That's the legacy of the Cold War.
This is, incidentally, why you see so much support for surveillance in the first place. People aren't intentionally trying to bring about some sort of futuristic dystopia. But the surveillance apparatus has been in place for most of the post century, and has saw America through the Cold War. Politicians of a certain age and temperament see the latest programs as simply adapting the apparatus to changing technology, not fundamentally increasing its scope or invasiveness.
This is not the same "surveillance apparatus [that] saw America through the Cold War." It's simply not comparable to even just fifteen years ago. The changes in technology and the self-satisfied attitude of the spooks have changed the game entirely.
Half of the people in this country are deluding themselves just like you.
It is ahistorical and (perversely) wishful to suggest that communications surveillance in the 1950s was less onerous to the civilian population than it is today. During the heyday of the Cold War, no police force needed a court order to wiretap a phone; the notion of wiretap authorization dates back to, what, 1968?
Today, we have rumors and gossip about NSA analysts "training" on Obama's comms in the early '00s. During the Cold War, the FBI brazenly monitored and transcribed all calls to various public figures and then blackmailed them: see Martin Luther King.
I know you have a background in this, and I understand the intelligence agencies COULD have monitored anyone they wanted to in the past, but they couldn't automate it to create the scope of surveillance now in place.
A phone tap in the 1950s would require recording and someone listening to it, would it not? How many people could the NSA employ to listen to conversations? Millions?
Either way, just because they have been doing disgusting things for so long does not make it something we should stop getting upset about.
Here's the thing: I don't even disagree with you. But "technology changes everything" is an argument that, while it resonates with a certain subset of people, is simply not compelling standing alone to many others. The tech community has the challenge of explaining to a generation that went from black & white TV to smart phones (and saw manned space travel, supersonic aircraft, and the nuclear arms race in-between), why in this case the change in technology yields a change in the very nature of surveillance. And everything I've seen linked on HN on this topic fails dismally in articulating this case in a way that doesn't presuppose an audience that already agrees with the anti-surveillance position.
It seems like you could pretty easily explain it in terms of having a million virtual police listening to all calls at once versus the old way, which involved humans, and so naturally limited itself to conversations of interest.
Two of them didn't exist ten years ago, and half of them would have been entirely unaware of the surveillance problem because they were too small to be targets. It's looking increasingly like Google didn't know until Snowden told them - they were just straight-up compromised by a hostile attacker breaking into their networks. So I can't blame most of them for not doing anything sooner.
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor.
I was born during the cold war.
I remember the outrage when it was found that the East German secret police (the Stasi) had files on 1/3 of the population of East Germany.
I remember the commentators telling us how no one in the Western, Free world would ever stand for it, and how it could never happen.
I was born during the Cold War, but I'm capable of understanding that
(i) when the government failed to give Bradley Manning due process, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for fleeing. Daniel Ellsberg is in a better position to comment on this than just about anyone else; here's what he said (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427... ):
"Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.
There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to 'incapacitate me totally').
I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.
He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as 'cruel, inhuman and degrading.' (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)
Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts."
(ii) when they forced down the Bolivian presidential plane, they forfeited the moral right to criticize Snowden for staying in Russia.
We got laws protecting whistleblowers of big corporations. Why not protection for someone who reveals CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS!?! Why not ADMIRATION and GRADITUDE?
"Tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed"? This? They did it for us? Yuck. I share the sentiment of some others here that i'd rather see human beings fight and win in this battle, not the faces of some bottom lining marketing machines protecting their product.
A human product that lets its product owner tip the scales and control its future? Puke. Double puke.
The sooner this privacy debate ends for them the better. I'd rather the debate continue and we develop better technology and opinions around ownership of our own actions and lives so we harden ourselves from parasitism, instead of cheering when one of our parasites takes out another.
They may not all care what happens to Snowden, but I think it's unfair to say they're merely showing off. I think these companies are acting on pretty high principle. They have little to gain by issuing such a statement, except the goodwill of people like us, but since they're all participating, such goodwill is evenly distributed and no one of them derives an advantage from it. Whereas they all depend on good relations with various bits of the federal government, which they risk offending with this statement.
They have a lot to gain. Many analysts are saying that surveillance, or the perception of complicity with it, is going to lose international customers and have other negative effects on business partnerships.
I agree that for the most part, geeks at these companies are as opposed to surveillance as people outside - probably even more so. However, usually, it's business impact that turns private opinion into official corporate policy.
These companies want the conversation to be about surveillance, not Snowden. Had Snowden been mentioned in the letter, it would have set off a distracting debate. They probably appreciate what he did, but publicly thanking Snowden isn't going to help them achieve their goals.
Snowden is also not the only whistleblower. To some extent, the more-limited actions by Binney, Wiebe, and Drake were even more amazing because they were without precedent (at NSA); Snowden went far beyond them, but had their example in mind.
Snowden didn't do this for publicity or to be grand-standed, he did it because he believed it was right. I think he would agree that he is not the issue people should be discussing. Instead, it should be how to fix the problems he brought to light.
I think his point was that they're all doing it for selfish reasons, not for some "principles". The principles are the public agenda, but they're really doing it because they're starting to lose business overseas - fast. So now they've taken on this "principled" crusade against the government.
I don't really mind it as long as it really works, and it's the outcome I wanted to see anyway, but I think it should be seen for what it really is. If this was really about principles, they would've done something about it years ago, not after they see their financials or relationships overseas drop because of it.
> I think these companies are acting on pretty high principle.
I wouldn't say that. With news spreading about the NSA having access to your Google data, including your Gmail, people start to worry, and more importantly, they start to look towards alternatives. Google is getting a pretty bad reputation these days when it comes to user privacy, and this isn't helping their cause. This obviously affects their bottom line, and so they're looking for change.
> I think these companies are acting on pretty high principle.
These are the same companies that stand shoulder to shoulder with the same US government when it comes to putting immense pressure on foreign governments to give up their civil rights protections when it comes to privacy.
I can only guess as to their motives, but "high principle" definitely isn't one of them.
I wasn't aware that Twitter was working with the US Government to put immense pressure on foreign governments to give up their civil rights protections on privacy.
People won’t use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.”
—Brad Smith, General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft
That makes it pretty clear to me why this campaign is being orchestrated by the companies involved.
I think these companies are acting on pretty high principle.
NOt that i disagree, but I do think if other companies (eg, apple, intel) signed off on this it would remove the stigma of self-dealing. If the "tech industry" was more broadly represented (and included say, Stanford & MIT) again this would be a much more powerful statement. But the reality, is that SV lives off of the governmnet in many indirect ways (nasa, defense, NSF grants, etc) and while they may be principled...well, I sure you get the idea. They're not that principled.
Yes, thats ~weird how they are two sets and apple omits contributing a 'voice' in support. I stand corrected on the point cetainly, wrt the letter at the end.
Edward Snowden isn't mentioned, no, but it's largely due to him that the debate and recent revelations have been so heavily discussed by so many.
We'd known about strange telecommunication interception by governments for years[1] but Snowden's disclosures and the following saga brought it to the attention of the world by providing a theatrical backdrop for the media to start using. Now it's something that normal people know about, not just techies.
Regulating government surveillance is the issue these companies are best positioned to support. If they'd explicitly mentioned Snowden, the discussion could quickly be derailed.
Curious, PG, how do you personally reconcile Silicon Valley's participation in the Surveillance State? E.G. Palantir's tech, possibly, being core to some of the capabilities - and by extension, VCs such as Peter Thiel's support of such companies...
Its such a complex issue, I think, for this industry; Strive to make incredible technologies, hope they are used for good.
I came down pretty hard on Manning, but Snowden is a hero. It's one thing to declare war on secrecy itself by dumping everything you can find. It's something else to release narrowly-targeted material solely for the purpose of pointing out to the voters that their government is lying to them. That's heroic in my book.
I wonder, empirically, to what degree this whole problem shows that these companies are even powerful. I think some observers have concluded, after the revelations about internal NSA documents claiming to be able to monitor internal server-to-server communications in the big tech companies, that the companies are weak. It also appears to be beyond dispute that some NSA practices were known in the industry for a long time but the companies didn't lobby about those directly to Congress.
in an unprecedented show of unanimity
I think these tech companies, in various combinations, have lobbied in concert before. How long those combinations last depends in part on how unified their interests really are when the details of regulations are drafted. The current call to action is "we hereby call on governments to endorse the following principles and enact reforms that would put these principles into action." Not all of the HN readers are unanimous even on the broad outlines of the principles, as the comments kindly submitted below your comment show, and anyone familiar with national government legislative and regulatory processes knows that the devil is in the details, as one webpage of bullet point policy goals gets changed into dozens of pages of national laws, international treaties, and administrative regulations.
All that said, I fully agree that it is very significant that the companies in the industry are speaking up, and I think that will do a lot to move legislative and regulatory reform of NSA surveillance programs. I agree with other commenters to your comment that it will be a good idea to help consumers have reliable products and services to ensure their own privacy on an individual basis and to regulate how private business corporations gather data on Internet users as well.
Snowden with NSA should be considered to be white hat hackers: they demonstrated the inadequacy of private information protection by Google and other companies https://medium.com/p/1bcff7c0f25f
Maybe, I am naive, but I'd like to believe that if Snowden had been captured, he would become a martyr and people would be on the streets now. Eventually the movement would grow strong enough that the big companies would join in.
Not true. People won't be on the streets unless the gov actions directly affects their lives in the ways too grave to ignore anymore.
Manning disclosed that US military was killing civilians basically for fun [1], and yet no people were protesting on the streets (not in large numbers, at least)
The fact of the matter is: We have clearly seen that the governments have been lying to us the whole time.
And of course they will ultimately make some promises.
But it's too late for promises. Nobody trusts the governments anymore. Their degree of corruption is painfully obvious.
As long as there are agencies like the NSA/CIA with the insane budgets we give them, the abuse will continue (best case: it will be slowed down temporarily).
If all these powerful companies agree, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, that this is an important problem, then Snowden is ipso facto a hero for bringing it to our attention.
The curious thing is, I feel the linkage works in the other direction too. If Snowden had been caught and was now having his brains scrambled by solitary confinement in some secret prison, these companies would have been at least slightly more reluctant to issue such a statement, because it would have seemed to be espousing the cause of someone people were hearing described on the news as a criminal.
Snowden made his disclosures much more effective by escaping.