What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign citizens? I was a big fan of Snowden until he started doing that. That isn't whistleblowing against Constitutional violations and seemed to indicate a shift in his objectives. It now appears that he is just against US spying at large, which is a perfectly acceptable political opinion to have, but it doesn't justify whistleblowing in a lot of people's minds.
> What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign citizens?
1. Removing plausible deniability. "Well we might be deeply involved in domestic surveillance but we certainly don't do it outside the US!". The laws that enabled the NSA to do the surveillance were attributed to accessing data that traveled outside the US.
2. Demonstrating the power and reach for legitimacy/plausibility.
I'm sure I can come up with more than the first 2 minutes it
took to assemble this post.
1. They don't need plausible deniability because they wouldn't deny they are spying on foreign nationals. Every world power spies on foreign nationals. The controversy that Snowden revealed is that they are spying on their own citizens, spying on foreign citizens is already known and accepted as a reality of modern politics.
2. No one was really questioning the plausibility or legitimacy of the documents Snowden released (there was some challenges on the interpretation of those documents) and revealing unconfirmed and unrelated intelligence operations does nothing to confirm the information about the domestic operations that he released.
Your assurances that you know what the NSA (or proxy) would reason is laughable, for example. You have a view that he's a bad actor and it doesn't matter to me, other than it's a trivial thought experiment to justify his actions. GL
> What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign [human beings]?
Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights. If he leaked documents about operations against Americans, and then also about operations against foreigners, in my mind he did the same thing twice.
If there was another difference, like spilling the location or identity of a person likely to be at risk, please spell that out. I have yet to see an example.
>Which side of an imaginary line you were born on should not determine your rights.
That is what I am talking about as a "perfectly acceptable political opinion", but it is not an opinion that is based off any laws. Almost no mainstream political figure would share that opinion and therefore if that is the basis of Snowden's arguments, it isn't a wonder why he was treated harshly by the mainstream political system. Foreign spying is an accepted aspect of modern life. I totally understand if you think that spying in unethical. But Snowden would have been received much more favorable if he simply focused on the domestic spying operations which are largely unpopular rather than also revealing the foreign operations which are mostly accepted as necessary by the general population.
Just the fact that, at the time in 2013, a large amount of unknown data was stolen and shared with foreign powers by someone with such privileged access was certain to have catalyzed risk adjustments to global operations, including down to the level of specific human assets. Without a doubt, those in the military are informed that Snowden absolutely did real damage to operations. I’ve heard this in person from multiple military officers. Casualties aren’t going to be discussed.
Snowden’s leaks clearly benefitted adversaries of the NSA:
* domestic global powers such as goog and fb were able to lock down their customer data, which has the downside of shifting unchecked power to those entities
* foreign powers of the us now had confirmed intel on usa’s global intelligence gathering playbook and adjusted accordingly
Additionally, we can perhaps gain insight to any potential upsides or downsides of the proliferation of civil libertarianism that is directly attributable to the actions of Ed Snowden. I do believe personally that the first global superpower (whether the CIA and Google, China, etc) that obtains a way to break all current encryption (and has all of the pcaps) will have a huge upper hand in understanding social effects of this movement of the late 2010’s.
> Without a doubt, those in the military are informed that Snowden absolutely did real damage to operations. I’ve heard this in person from multiple military officers. Casualties aren’t going to be discussed.
They said the same thing about Chelsea Manning, then in her trial the prosecution finally admitted that they couldn't actually point to any casualties.
As a European citizen I’m very glad that Snowden reveled the depth of US surveillance over the world. It may have not benefited US citizens, but it had removed US surveillance from conspiracy theories to put it on a list of facts and I’m very glad for it.
Sure, I read them. Many of them were about operations against US citizens. However, not all of them were. Here[1] is one example that comes to mind. That story in this leak is interesting, newsworthy, had serious repercussions, and was potentially unethical for the US government to do. However it is also exactly the type of thing everyone expects the NSA to be doing and it doesn't involve the spying on any Americans. This is the type of leak that will ensure that Snowden isn't embraced by the US government.
