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USA Today Names Edward Snowden Tech Person of the Year
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the USA Today tech column: "...But until a lone information-technology contractor named Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents to the media this summer, we didn't know just how much we'd surrendered. Now that we do, our nation can have a healthy debate — out in the open, as a democracy should debate — about how good a bargain we got in that exchange. For facilitating that debate, at great risk to his own personal liberty, Snowden is this column's technology person of the year for 2013."
And yet by the government he is named as traitor and fugitive.
Edward Snowden is a shoe in.
Of the untold numbers of spooks working in / for NSA, Ed Snowden is the only one who has the conscience and the courage to reveal the dastardly unconstitutional secrets of the NSA.
Thanks, Mr. Snowden, for what you have done for the country !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In my view; the revelations have far more impact for nations in the World other than the USA (you know; such nations do exist; and are home to 20 times more people than in the US). But when the Internet is controlled largely by the US; and these revelations indicate even more erosion of other nations' peoples' rights; the debate must include the entire World. One fears that just like the US Presidential debate; the implications for the rest of us will be ignored totally.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
What are the corrupt power-mongering double-talking ghouls gonna do? "Oh yeah, we're the bad guy. Sue us" ?
They do not need to tell us.
We already know.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
free output at most motels.
Come Wednesday, Snowden will be last year's news, and nothing of consequence will change. Meet the new year, same as the old year.
Yeah, if only he turn himself in. I hear they serve McDee's at Guantanamo now!
He wrote half their stupid info-graphic stories for them! Snowden was their most productive employee, so of course they should award him a prize.
To all you idiots out there, if you've got nothing to hid then you have nothing to fear. Edward Snowden is a big a danger to the US today as the Soviet Union was 4 years ago. He should be executed without trial.
Now that the USA Today columnist has brought it up, I'm much more worried about the invasion of individual privacy by big businesses, including the major Internet companies, banks, credit card issuers, and credit agencies, and phone/cable companies, than with surveillance of phone calls and web activity from the NSA/FBI/CIA. It is getting to the point where they can assemble comprehensive journals of daily activities (transactional or otherwise), combined and collated with data of record, on every person in the country (not to mention foreigners), and use them to model and predict our future actions.
Mr Snowden is not being given shoes.
we didn't know just how much we'd surrendered
Probably because you stopped listening to people telling you when Barak Obama got elected. Perhaps his Nobel Peace Prize got caught in your ear.
Yep, he's jumping around like a five year old on Christmas morning.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"USA Today was raided by the Internal Revenue Service of the U.S.A. today."
Come Wednesday, Snowden will be last year's news, and nothing of consequence will change. Meet the new year, same as the old year.
Given how everything he says is taken as gospel, the massive confirmation bias going on, I sort of expect to find out that he has exaggerated or fabricated some things and he will quickly become yesterday's news like that army private who dumped data to wikileaks.
The government however is not divided that I can see. They want his ass on a platter. Strung up, drawn and quartered with his parts sent to the four corners of Scotland as a message. This is telling in this day and age of 'partisan' bickering to keep the masses distracted with largely inconsequential issues. Patriotism is not serving in office. Or recording every bit of data you can weakening our country, technology and economy in the process, to supposedly protect us. It is not giving lip service to the constitution, while you wipe your arse with it by your actions.
It is about standing up. It is about saying wait, this is NOT what MY country is supposed to be. It is about being able to stand up to a Tory, or a Tea Partier, or a Donkey and saying "fuck you, give me my rights, give me my liberty, or give me death", to paraphrase Patrick Henry. It is not in cow towing to the powers that be, but resisting the ever reaching yoke of the powerful.
But we don't stand by and large. We listen to Fox news and MSNBC talking heads and nod. We scream at our football games or hope to see a blurred nipple slip on TMZ. We laugh at cat memes and snapchat sext our co-workers while the spouse is away. We wonder at the changes in the climate then get into our unneeded and wasteful SUV.
What happened to our spine? The one that beat the brits? The one that helped show Germany and Japan where they could put it when they wanted to remake the world into their bleak image? Why are we more interested in goatse, and goth chicks and godzilla than righting our government? Why can 10 random people not discuss issues without at least 1 to 2 people completely derailing any progress? Why do we continually bend over while those in power plum our innermost depths to their own ends?
I wish I knew the answers. I though many of these thoughts as a teen 20 years ago. Then I had the optimism to think that we were on the brink. That we would stand, that a revolution was imminent. That the way things were would be changed and we had the power to do it. I was cynical then, but had hope. Now I think I am a defeatist. I would like more than just a few people to prove me wrong. The Snowdens of the world are currently the exception that proves the rule. Why is this?
Silence is a state of mime.
Ironic, then that it was USA Today who first broke the story about NSA warrantless wiretapping and phone metadata collection ***in 2006***
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
From that article, again, this was REPORTED BY USATODAY IN 2006:
Snowden is a dupe at best...he's probably being blackmailed...but assuming the best, any way you look at the situation, he was duped by high-level criminals or foreign governments, or both, into doing this.
He's probably being blackmailed. He's not a free man in Russia. All the reports indicate he's essentially in jail when not being paraded in front of reporters.
Again...this info was reported by USA Today itself...in 2006...Snowden just gave operational details.
The "national conversation" about privacy could have happened w/o Snowden releasing that info. We US citizens could have demanded more transparency w/o Snowden releasing this info...
Because...we already knew it was happening. Snowden told us it was called 'Prism'
Even Senator Ron Wyden was sounding alarms on the Senate floor, before Snowden's document release....this from 2011: Senators Say Patriot Act Is Being Misinterpreted. Remember the PATRIOT ACT people?
One last time, as my first link shows, the USA Today reported on the NSA phone meta-data program with significant details **in 2006**
Thank you Dave Raggett
"we didn't know just how much we'd surrendered."
I find this insulting. Read FISA, read the Patriot act and related bills. If you interpret the language liberally(meaning as open ended as possible) then you will realize all that Snowden leaked was already known. And if you think they'd never do that, then you're putting your head in the sand, they don't pass laws for no reason.
If your 'debate' is out in the open so your advisories know exactly where you are watching or what you can track, then what is the point of debating? The 'civil libertarians' (who lost the last election), get their way. And then Snowden/Glenwald are in control until the NSA comes up with new ways to monitor the bad guys and keeps their secrets locked up a lot better.
Come Wednesday, Snowden will be last year's news, and nothing of consequence will change. Meet the new year, same as the old year.
I've been wondering this too. Will Edward Snowden's revelations ever lead to a better system in USA? Usually I just hear Americans pointing fingers at other countries and saying "they are doing it too!". I don't know, maybe it's damn hard to start a revolution to change everything. But some day Snowden runs out of juicy documents to leak. Then things will cool down, people forget the whole issue in a few months and NSA gets to continue doing its same old job without interferences. Right?
Yes, we did! We've known all along how far down the rabbit hole we've gone. All Snowden has done is allow us to step back and react in faux-shock over things we've all known about for years. The fucking cognitive dissonance on display in articles like this is shameful. We all knew what was going on, and it was fine so long as nobody pointed it out... now we're all racing each other to see who can be the most outraged about it the quickest. It's damned disgusting, people. Own up to it, already.
I found this laughable:
"Now that we do, our nation can have a healthy debate — out in the open, as a democracy should debate — about how good a bargain we got in that exchange."
Really!
I'd say, "[Un]Civil War" against the Unelected Government of the U.S.A.
Let the "Blood Flow!"
He deserves all the recognition we can give him. Whether he did things the right way or not, he did what he thought he should do for the good of Americans, even though he knew it would result in his becoming a refugee in another country, or possibly imprisoned and tortured here in the states. He didn't do it for money, and I doubt he did it for fame; he did it because his conscience told him he had to. He is a patriot who deserves to be treated as one. Here's to hoping he gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
He is known for breaking a spy scandal. The subject there is intel. Tech had nothing to do with it (except that the files he stole were digital, for all I know, all of them were). Very little tech here. Very big intel. The theme does NOT apply to snowden.
Who gives a crap what "titles" USA Today bestows? They're the McDonalds of news media.
If we "didn't know how much [liberty] we've surrendered", did we actually surrender any? How can you surrender liberty and not know it? (This is kindda like the old question about whether a tree that falls in the forest makes a sound if no one hears it.) I haven't heard of a single person who was prosecuted (or persecuted) as a result of information gathered by the NSA. Oh, except that Snowden himself got in a lot of trouble over it.
Although folks may not much like the activities of the NSA now that they're known, those activities seem to have been non-intrusive to the point of being unknown until they were revealed by Snowden. Evidently, Snowden did us the "favor" of making known - for the first time - our loss of liberty. Finally, we all can grieve.
In contrast, the activities of the literary Big Brother of "1984" fame were clearly announced to the populace in order to have maximum suppression of liberty. This ain't exactly Big Brother stuff, folks.
Again and again we need to keep telling that all phone conversations, call logs and the contents, as well as all internet activities including (but not limited) to emails (and their contents), internet searches and any internet activity (including social networks), together with all other digitazeable records (healthcare, prescription, library, movie, gun ownership, hobbies, religious, tax, train and airline travel, banking, EZ pass, and automatic plate number readers, smartphone location, etc) as well as your analog records is a fair game now and can and will be searched by automated intelligence software and human analysts from cia, fbi, cia, dea, irs, ssa, tsa, dhs, and many other organizations within USA as well as multiple countries outside United States, who will know you better than you know yourself.
This does not, of course, does not include tailored operations and human intelligence.
While that famous judge who ruled that spying on americans is a fair game. Why his rulling was silent about other nations (israel, germany, sweden, uk, australia, canada, new zealand etc) who are recipients of NSA intelligence on US citizens, NSA provides raw data. I thought NSA is supposed to be guarding against spying agasint US persons, not provide their data to third parties and commercial entities.
released the unredacted documents and remained anonymous. To ensure public exposure for the actions of the NSA all that was required was to widely distribute the materials to media in multiple countries.
Back in my day, the *Russian* spooks defected *to* the *USA*.
Now get off my lawn!
Except that's damnably creepy when you think about what a change that is.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
It's called documentary evidence: Hersch is "certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence. "Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,"" http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media
So much for any credibility he has.
Or perhaps its an NSA conspiracy to discredit him. Hmm.
IMHO Snowden is more of a social engineer (with warped values and sensibilities) than a great techie.
Same with Time Magazine. Every few years over the last many decades, they would name someone Person of the Year who many Americans would consider and evil person. People like Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger....
Inevitably Time would get criticized for naming someone the criticizer hated.
There is a logic to this. The old Victorian ethos of unmentionables (women's navels, etc.), carried over to concepts and people. If the sphere of discussion and information is walled offed to verboten people, concepts, etc., then they never get a 'hearing', and can't rise to any level because they are 'invisible.' See also 'taboo.'
LOL all these "anonymous cowards" posting pro-government public relations. If they're tonguing government's balls why would they need anonymity? I smell government public relations all paid for with your taxpayer dollar.
Way to ignore another story and the FISA finding that the government was breaching the Constitution. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/16/judge-nsa-surveillance-fourth-amendment/4041995/ http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/22/fisa-court-ruled-nsa-program-unconstitutional-said-nsa-misled-them/ That you're ignoring these smacks of a shill. The right and left are united on this. On the other side are government workers like yourself living a parasitic existence off the hard-working taxpayer.
> Snowden is a sellout who took what he had and likely ran to the highest bidder with the info.
Not a shred of evidence do you have. Now get a real fucking job, you piece of shit government shill.
That's the thing that I can't get past. We haven't surrendered anything. We haven't "traded" security for liberty. We haven't made any bargains of the sort. All of these "erosions" on our freedoms and rights have been perpetrated against us without our will and without our knowledge. They have lied and cheated and stolen from us our birthrights as humans as recognized and defined to us under the US constitution. And without the revelations, the world would still be living under the huge, thick blanket of lies.
Are we all expected to blame ourselves for "voting someone in"? This goes back futher than many people know and isn't tied to any one president or any one political party. We keep wanting to simplify everything to the point that we simply can't and do not want to understand the full scope of the disillusionment we are experiencing.
...gives a fuck?
Seriously. How many times do people need to be beaten over the head with reality before they actually acquire the correct information.
We're a democratic republic.
We have democratic forms of selection for various public offices.
What we do NOT have is direct rule by the citizenry.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The real reason Obama’s poll numbers are down are because of his support for the NSA. His putting security through secrecy and their crony laws over truth, has put his ratings in the doldrums. He thinks Snowden’s empowering our adversaries and straining relationships with our allies more detrimental then the fear in the populace of an NSA out of control. Who many think will turn on us, on a dime, once they’re, the NSA, is wholly politicized.
His, Obama’s assumptions based on basketball, thinking the other team more lethal, and about to score again and that the opposition’s fans are everywhere even among our populace . That the NSA protects the team, and our people this way. That people don’t change; that evil will always exist in the world. That adversaries will eventually fall to greater power. That our history is good evidence for that. So we need to be hard nosed about our security.
Those being the assumptions, the world view of most of the policy makers in our foreign policy establishment, i.e. our Military, Oil, Industrial and Intelligence communities in the US and elsewhere. Despite what’s come from Snowden’s leaking.
Namely we've been notified as to how close we are to, ‘1984’. We've been shown once again, how those who think they’re trying to protect us can so easily lie to us. We’ve been alerted to the suicidal amount of money involved in intelligence gathering. We’ve been given an opportunity to assess the efficacy of our spy and intelligence gathering services. Even those in the Intelligence community, were given a opportunity to access what they’re doing here on the earth at this time. At least those who haven’t been totally captured by their assumptions, and their world view, like the one listed above, and by the money and their indoctrination. Who like sheep can only justify and rationalize their peeping and blacklisting in order to maintain their jobs, outlook and equilibrium.
Yet with a different set of assumptions about the workings of the world, all that supposed hurt and damage, that Snowden did, that all falls apart. Knowing spying and intelligence gathering is more often perceived by others as nefarious, thus fear producing, which people will defend against. That one’s enemies are entities developed by fear and opposition albeit unconsciously? That enemies are a function of their opposition’s policies as much as they are a function of their own greed and dogma. That an adversaries lethality is a function of your own. That they’ll attempt to match, or even better yours. That this years enemies are next years friends if you play you cards right, an look for win-win solutions, explain what your doing, by winding down tensions and establishing trade and economic ties.
That openness and truth allows you to make decisions about efficacy. Whether spying really protects you and yours. If it isn’t just setting your grand children up for wars in their time and generation. That spying isn’t just duping for enmity. That people in the world can evolve up and away from enmity by choosing differently and having different assumptions, thinking strategically.
There’s plenty of evidence in history for this as well. So with this set of assumptions Snowden’s more like a savior. Saving the NSA that is, giving it a chance to reform into an agency that works for veracity instead of its opposite. So the question is, which set of assumptions do you want carved on your tomb stone, by you son’s and daughter’s when you die, telling the sky what you did, who you were and why?
I don't suppose Snowden will ever be stupid enough to turn himself in, but what if he were standing trial here in the USA? The public, particularly the tech public, would come to his defense, maybe even with civil disobedience. I would, if I could.
Maybe the government *can't* try Snowden because of the public respect he's garnered.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Problem is it's way beyond terrorism and well into commercial espionage. Here a politician used Australia's spy agency to spy Timor Leste's government to help Woodside Petroleum screw them over in negotiations. The politician is now an employee of Woodside Petroleum. This is one case we know about. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/lawyer-acting-for-east-timor-is-raided-by-australian-agents-8983566.html
...the media is nothing...."awarding" an "award" to a criminal....
is enough proof for anyone...did you read it?
Thank you Dave Raggett
who is this "we" you mention...
it's not Slashdot, b/c Slashdot has been talking about this stuff since the Patriot Act and before...
you must be new here...privacy and government spying are one of the biggest topics on slashdot
Thank you Dave Raggett
Hang the fucking traitor.
To quote an American Revolutionary War period hero, Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty, or give me death". And to paraphrase one of the greatest of the Founding Fathers of this so-called Democracy, Benjamin Franklin, 'those who would trade liberty for security, deserve neither liberty nor security'. For my money, I would impeach Obama for betraying the very spirit of the Constitution he swore to protect by moving us three steps closer to Orwell's 'Brave New World', and I would give Edward Snowden the Medal of Freedom for his selfless act of patriotism. Don't 'protect' me from terrorists at the expense of my fundamental liberties without my knowing and willing consent!
We seem to really be convinced that Ft. Mead is the only such place on the planet. We have to take into consideration that Russia, China, etc. have their own national security agencies. Now, their spy agencies are more effective than ours! Since ours has been damaged we should ask these other nations to show the world the inner workings of their spy agencies. Give the probable existence of these other spy agencies do we still feel Ed Snowden did a good thing?
Dick
Here's what I'm thinking:
The US keeps having mentally unstable people going into schools, malls, etc, and shooting up a bunch of people, before turning the gun on themselves. I realize there aren't really a lot of these, considering the population of the US, and the number of guns in circulation, but that's irrelevant to my point.
If we accept that these kinds of shootings are going to happen regardless, as long as you keep your guns, which seems to be the prevailing opinion (again, not saying it's right or wrong; just that that's what US citizens say, for the most part) then why don't these unstable people do something to benefit society, and go shoot up a bar full of NSA management? It's not like their chances of dying are going to change. They're going to pull the trigger on themselves before the police have a chance to do it for them, so what difference does it make to them who they shoot? Heck, they could even shoot their way into a certain data center in Utah, and it's not like they'd be any more dead at the end of it.
But if one of them did this, it would probably be looked on much better by the rest of the US population than going and shooting up a public school.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......