Because he is starting at China, one superpower that is an antagonist of the US; taking the first leg of his trip to Russia, another superpower that is an antagonist of the US; and traveling through one to three countries (Cuba, Ecuador, and/or Venezuela depending on the the report) that style themselves as enemies of the US. His travel itinerary is strong evidence that he was a spy for a foreign power this whole time.
Incidentally, every one of the countries on the list plays the Great Game as aggressively as the US does, and spies on and oppresses its people more aggressively than the US. These are not places where someone with an interest in peace or human rights can seek refuge.
The countries that he has to fly through to avoid immediately being detained and sent to the US are all countries that you find suspicious and "baddy".
>>His travel itinerary is strong evidence that he was a spy for a foreign power this whole time.
You have very loose standards for what constitutes evidence, much less strong evidence.
In reality, his travel itinerary only shows that he's a very smart man and travels through countries that are least likely to cooperate with the USA due to the very antagonistic relationship they have with the USA.
>>These are not places where someone with an interest in peace or human rights can seek refuge.
Are you suggesting that he should have traveled to some place like Iceland, which is peaceful and has a fairly decent human rights record? Because that was already answered by one of their own:
The entire Snowden hoax is a media event, a PR campaign to cover up the fact that he spied on the US for foreign powers. It's the most effective case of spin and damage control that I've ever seen.
Spying on the fact that the US spies on everybody?
Do you think people who keep their mouths shut as they and their coworkers do things like torture other human beings and build totalitarian surveillance infrastructure are good people?
Sorry to invoke Godwin, but the Nazis would have loved folks like that.
If a global system to capture the digital communications of everyone on the planet does not merit the term 'totalitarian', then that term has lost all meaning.
I didn't call you a Nazi. I said the Nazis would have loved people who were ok with that kind of thing. Isn't that fairly obvious?
Do you think they would have preferred a guy like Snowden?
There is nothing to add, as it wasn't a discussion. You put forward the assertion that the entire thing is a hoax and that Snowden is a Chinese spy. You provided absolutely zero evidence. And you expect me to "add to the discussion?" What a joke.
I'm still waiting on Snowden to provide evidence of the NSA breaking the 4th amendment and illegally spying on the American people. For all the panic and the republication of old stories about the NSA, it is Snowden who has provided absolutely zero evidence.
What we do have is that Snowden copied a large cache of thousands of sensitive documents and gave them to who-knows-who. Suddenly countries that position themselves as enemies of the US are very happy to help him out, and he is happy to accept their assistance. In between, there was a public relations campaign to call him a "whistleblower" even though that is not what he did. The documents provided as supporting evidence do not say what Glenn Greenwald's reports say they do, while the journalists who have reported on these programs before are all facepalming at how wrong Greenwald's reporting has been.
So yes, it looks like the entire thing is a hoax and Snowden is a spy. YHBT by Glenn Greenwald and whoever else was involved. YHL. HAND.
The NSA secured an order from the FISC directing Verizon to turn over metadata on all calls made within the US, which includes data about the location of their customers' mobile phones. The Supreme Court has ruled that long-term tracking requires a warrant. The decision was unanimous, but split as to reasoning. The majority held that such tracking without a warrant violates the 4th amendment. It is quite likely that obtaining phone records for the purpose of tracking location has the same legal status.
> I'm still waiting on Snowden to provide evidence of the NSA breaking the 4th amendment and illegally spying on the American people.
Recording meta-data of phone calls and certainly the phone calls themselves, is a gross violation of the 4th amendment and the people's right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".
And that is true regardless of what a pack of jackasses appointed to some court have decided and it is still true regardless of what a pack of jackasses elected to congress think. I'll even include the president, just for you.
I'll even go so far as to say that this right isn't even dependent on what a bunch of jackasses happen to think on the Internet. Crazy, I know.
My right is absolute and independent of what anyone else thinks. It is a right given to all human beings by God himself. A natural right recognized in any civilized country.
Yes, it's important to remind to other people (they seem to forget) that according to the US constitution, these rights are not given to humans (not citizens) by the government, they are recognized, since they are innate.
Seriously? So you're okay with the NSA spying -legally or not- on everyone, when the highest ranking people have denied this for years? Do you really think spying on Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft users as a whole constitute probable cause for a search?
I don't care about the consequences. If the US had apologized for this terrible mess and all the lies to its own people, Snowden wouldn't have had to do any of what had followed. Instead, it still refuses to corroborate his claims, making it seems likely that there's something incriminating here.
If this doesn't seem fishy on the US side, and if you think anyone wouldn't have thought about blowing the whistle on all these lies by our leaders, you're seriously delusional. Or a troll.
Do you get paid to shill for the establishment or is it just for the lulz? Maybe you get a Junior G-Man badge and a code name?
The NSA has every incentive to spy on everyone -- that's their job. The only "oversite" they have is by a toothless committees that will rubber-stamp anything they do.
Do you really trust the government to always do the right thing? Even with historical evidence of continual abuses of such power?
No, the Verizon warrant came from Snowden. It was the first published by The Guardian in the series of documents from him. The EFF has been seeking a classified opinion by the FISC where they ruled one of the NSA's requests was unconstitutional. They have not yet been able to obtain that ruling, but the FISC has since asserted that the White House cannot order them to not release it.
Assata Shakur? The terrorist? Of course she did not "find a safe haven here in the U.S." while she and her Black Liberation Army were shooting people and blowing up buildings. The police were trying to put her in jail.
"just"? The BLA was shooting people and blowing up buildings, no scare quotes needed, they actually did that. That is why the police were after them: they were breaking the law in a serious way. How confused do you have to be to say that they should not have been investigated for these crimes because they were doing something else also?
Regarding the idea that someone would have leaked something, WorldNetDaily seems to get a lot of leaks from the CIA. This raises several questions about any of these stories starting with how fake is it, what kind of person would leak to WND, and are they trying to plant a story or suppress one?
They are already effecting change; seeing this on the front page has made me have much less respect for the Hacker News community. How can so many people be so stupid, and on HN of all places?
What outrageous actions? What outrageous policies? What long-festering problem? You haven't said a damn thing, just as Snowden has yet to expose any wrongdoing on the part of the NSA. He has said that the NSA is spying on everybody, but all of the evidence he has presented has shown nothing of the kind and in fact shows that procedures to protect our privacy and 4th amendment rights are in place and being followed.
AJAX and REST sure are evil. The fact that 229 people have upvoted this is certainly proof that web-based UIs are something that we as hackers ought to oppose.
We are all aware that PRISM has been exposed to be nothing more than a user interface to information provided by companies that receive a search warrant after the request has gone through courts and lawyers, right? Surely 229 users of Hacker News cannot be that uninformed about PRISM, after so many front-page articles on the subject giving so many opportunities to hash out the details of what it is and is not, that they imagine it to be something nefarious?
It's good to be skeptical, and it's important to counsel against irrational or knee jerk judgements. But you're way, way too far on the other side of this.
When a related warrant, having "gone through courts and lawyers", turns out to have been a blanket demand for all call data from all Verizon customers, I think it's reasonable to assume that perhaps the checks and balances aren't as robust as we'd hoped.
And for those outside the US, a response like this seems quite reasonable to me. After all item #2 is "Uncover the facts".
Note the .EU domain name and the non-US/Europe focus of the content. As far as I've seen reported or stated by US representatives there's no going "through courts and lawyers" for non-citizens. PRISM may very well not have changed any of that but it was at least a wake up call outside the US for the fact that using US-based companies puts decisions about your data privacy in the hands of governments that view you, as a foreigner, as having absolutely no rights.
This is particularly scary because people have so far been used to considering the Internet as a sort of borderless global place and when it comes to privacy from government snooping it definitely is not.
Thats why much of this is a call for more transparency and law within Europe, including banning things that may be happening in the US, whether they are or not. We know that some European governments are doing things along these lines (with lower budgets). We had the Stasi in Europe, just a few years ago; we invented the Panopticon, and we have had a very mixed record.
Not my point at all. If I put my data in a European datacenter I'm in the same legal jurisdiction as the potential government snoop. If I put it in the US the USG may be more or less prone to snooping than my local government but what I'm sure of is that I will never have any legal standing to challenge it if it does snoop.
I knew this before of course. And before I assumed the snooping was low enough that I didn't care that I didn't have any legal standing to challenge it. Now I'm not so sure.
So does this mean I don't have to listen to people on HN complain about Netflix/Xbox Live/Pissroulette/etc. not being available outside the US anymore? Thank God!
"We are all aware that PRISM has been exposed to be nothing more than a user interface to information provided by companies that receive a search warrant after the request has gone through courts and lawyers, right?"
The Obama administration is awfully worried about people knowing about the existence of that front end. There are high-ranking officials committing perjury before Congress in an attempt to cover this story up. Somehow I doubt that they are worried about a mere front end.
Really, your response follows the same line of reasoning as the least untruthful statements being made to Congress right now. You are being pedantically specific -- PRISM itself may indeed just be a front end -- while ignoring the real story here, which is the NSA's ongoing wholesale surveillance. You are ignoring the fact that the NSA is keeping information that might be indicative of criminal activity, a dangerous mixture of intelligence gathering with law enforcement. When members of the Senate are saying that this is the tip of an iceberg, I do not think you can just write off this story as some misinformed reporters hyping up a front end.
It is not just an interface. The NSA is collecting data and using secret courts. The programs are clearly unconstitutional. If they are needed and the people want them, let's pass a Constitutional amendment. That's how it's supposed to work.
If the NSA were making individual wiretaps based on criminal suspicions, that would align with the Constitution. Instead, they are wiretapping almost everyone in the US.
As long as we're playing at labels, I am a socialist and you are a goddamned idiot. There is no such thing as a corporatist. You're just using it as a nasty word to accuse your debate opponents of malicious intentions.
Back to the point: people freely give their personal data to Facebook. Facebook now knows that information and can publish it, sell it, whatever. The people have no expectation of privacy which would be necessary for a 4th Amendment defense. Anybody can go to Facebook and just ask for the data, government agents included. It is Facebook's choice to give it away, set a price, or refuse.
Maybe it should be. Contract law was written/established to govern negotiated agreements between comparably well-informed parties, not untold pages of labyrinthine jargon attached to every transaction that the consumer won't understand and doesn't have a chance to argue except by refusing to use the service. If you as a business (who has significantly greater resources and expertise, and therefore greater responsibility, than the customer) want a random person to sign a legal document with you, you should have to go to some reasonable effort to make sure they understand what they're signing, not just shove it at them and say "sign on the dotted line."
How would your proposed system work in the real world? In the civilized world, we expect people to handle grievances in a court of law and not just club each other when we are not happy, so how could your proposed system ever be workable in any real sense? Just asking.
I can't wait to wait in line at home depot while the sales register person explains in detail their various return policies, possible limits on liability due to you being an idiot with a snowblower, etc.
Incidentally, every one of the countries on the list plays the Great Game as aggressively as the US does, and spies on and oppresses its people more aggressively than the US. These are not places where someone with an interest in peace or human rights can seek refuge.