But if you can get past Andreesen's unfortunate choice of framing††, this story is useful as an indicator of how captive we are to our filter bubbles. The valence of Andreesen's feelings about Snowden isn't at all weird. Lots of people share the perspective that Snowden is doing more harm than good, but people on HN seem to have a hard time believing that.

Finally, regardless of how I feel about Snowden, I agree (for once) with the consensus opinion of the HN thread that if there's economic blowback to the revelations, it's hard to pin that on Snowden. The only way I could see that being valid is if Snowden made up his own facts and was then taken seriously. Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility, but the most outlandish claims seem to have been widely dismissed by now.

† Which I doubt a lot; it's too interesting, and the most boring narrative always wins.

†† You're not required to get around it; you might believe in a corollary to "bad facts make bad law" and think that continuing a discussion that has already been poisoned is a waste of time.

In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies?

First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.

As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.

(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)

You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.

An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).

1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.

2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.

3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.

You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.

Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.

EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.

If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.

Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).

It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.

Worse now, perhaps. But remember that Snowden's original point, immediately after the leaks became public but before he became so outspoken against the USG, was that he wasn't worried about controls on NSA per se. He was worried that the controls on NSA were mostly policy instead of law; mostly internal and non-transparent instead of external and public.

In his words, NSA was only a single Administration away from being a "turnkey tyranny". Isn't that true for Germany too, if parliamentary control is laughable? Just because Germany inherited a lousy foreign intelligence service doesn't mean anything about what they can do in the future. Honda and Hyundai both used to make some of the worst cars on the world market.

That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.

First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.

It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.

Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.

Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.

And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.

Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.

You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.

But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.

Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.

No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.

IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.

And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.

My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:

Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.

It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.

And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?

Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.

This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.

Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.

Most European countries don't do mass surveillance. In my country there are two spy agencies, civilian and military one, and they both have less than 200 people working for them. their budgets are just too small for large scale spying.

> a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.

There is nothing wrong with cooperation and SIGINT. Spy agencies should spy and exchange information. It's the mass surveillance that is the most problematic aspect.

The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.

I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.

London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.

People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)

There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.

This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)

Of course they do not have the resources, the means or the opportunities to enact such global pervasive surveillance as the NSA is doing. Almost none of the other secret services even come close.

Some of them would love to if they could, but only the NSA is in that position (mostly due to so much bits of Internet traffic routing in some way or another through US servers).

Only the NSA is actually doing it to this extremely insane extent.

Think about that next time you're frustrated.

Of course I care about my own government spying on me. I care a hell of a load more about some other government (one that shouldn't have any business with my life) spying on the whole fucking planet. Is that so hard to understand??

It is not clear to me why the fact of foreign surveillance alone should have greater consequences for the US than for France, Germany, etc. To me it appears the NSA revelations have been exploited by certain political factors, especially in Europe, to strengthen their own mass surveillance efforts; for example, it strains credulity for me to believe European efforts to get more services located in Europe because of the NSA revelations are really for your protection and not so the BND and other European surveillance organizations can access the servers directly without having to negotiate for them with the NSA in a tit-for-tat. That would contradict everything we know about mass surveillance programs in European countries.

I'm not impressed by tech's leadership on this. Their fear today will mean a new generation will see secret pervasive surveillance as a feature to be added to; and perhaps that generation already does.

If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.

However, when you spy domestically, the US citizen can't exactly defend himself and can get railroaded under National Security...then tossed in jail.

There is a very, very big difference between what domestic security forces can do to you vs. foreign ones.

Patently false. See, among numerous other incidents and legal cases, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). The US can and does arrest foreign citizens in foreign countries for offenses committed in foreign countries without the consent of any foreign country, and has done so overtly for quite a long time.

That's what parallel construction is for, which is rather orthogonal to the issue of whether the target is a foreign citizen located in a foreign country at the time of the arrest or a US citizen in the US at that time.

And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.

Parallel construction relies on having other law enforcement agencies available with which to conduct the parallel evidence (re-)gathering.

How would that work in a foreign country? It seems at the very least we'd have to have FBI or similar in their country (which limits the possibilities to nations with agreements that permit this).

The U.S. LE agent abroad would then still need to be able to detain and search for the evidence to re-locate, all while maintaining U.S. rules of evidence, and all while not getting arrested by the host nation in the process. The latter sounds like a guarantee to me if you should even whisper a hint that "parallel construction" is taking place over there.

A counter-argument is that Constitutional protections are not all considered to apply on foreign soil by U.S. courts, but given that these actions would be taken by an agent of the USG I'm still not sure how such a case doesn't get thrown out immediately.

> And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.

But nor are the options literally infinite.

The fact that the person was in a foreign country doesn't mean that there isn't evidence available to domestic law enforcement agencies.

> But nor are the options literally infinite.

Sure, but while arrest and criminal prosecution may be more problematic (though not impossible) with a foreign citizen in a foreign country, extrajudicial killing is generally less problematic there, largely for political reasons (and, in large part, as a consequence of the perception that arrest and criminal prosecution is more difficult.)

So, I wouldn't agree that being outside of the USA makes you safer from any consequences imposed by the US government as a result of surveillance information gathered by the NSA.

Yes, that's a good point. Even with some form of executive due process it will never be likely that foreigners abroad have more or equal Constitutional protections than citizens on U.S. soil, and the NSA could tie back into that.

That is very, very different than them saying "We can kidnap someone from county X for reason Y without an extradition treaty in place."

It was them basically saying "Mexico agreed to the unspoken terms that we'd use our legal precedents that preceded the treaty unless expressly forbidden to do so."

So, Mexico consented by way of treaty and by not excluding forcible abduction (which was considered legal at the time the treaty was signed). That isn't the same as "did not consent". That is the Mexican government saying "Oops, we consented 60 years ago but we want to take it back now. We just forgot to mention it."

https://www.aclu.org/safe-free/united-states-v-alvarez-macha... https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/504/655/case.htm... "(b) Neither the Treaty's language nor the history of negotiations and practice under it supports the proposition that it prohibits abductions outside of its terms. The Treaty says nothing about either country refraining from forcibly abducting people from the other's territory or the consequences if an abduction occurs. In addition, although the Mexican Government was made aware of the Ker doctrine as early as 1906, and language to curtail Ker was drafted as early as 1935, the Treaty's current version contains no such clause. Pp. 663-666."

The NSA is a military agency. The Military is not afforded police powers. The NSA is restricted in its ability to cooperate with the FBI. Furthermore, any illegally gathered evidence is tossed out before it is told to the jury.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

The US is allowed to spy on its citizens, as appropriate under the 4th amendment. IE: With warrants, due process, and all that good stuff. When the DoJ / FBI fails to comply with the rules, illegal evidence is tossed out before trials even begin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

NSA hands it over to the DEA who arrests you based on an investigation based on that information.

They've been doing it and getting away with it so I think your believe that the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree will protect you is false.

On the books, legally and in front of a judge, the NSA and DEA are not allowed to work with each other. Parallel Construction is a (probably illegal) technique that DEA agents are using right now to get around the legal authorities.

But it involves DEA agents lying under oath towards judges. IE: I don't think the practice of parallel construction is going to hold up in courts in the long term.

What isn't true anymore (replace Germany with Pakistan for an extreme example) and don't really matter anymore, because it looks like all the mafias that own governments are supporting each other nowadays.

why arrest when we can blackmail them. (evil laugh)

Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.

Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.

Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.

Ptacek's razor?

Of course it's weird. In one breath he says Snowden gave US national security secrets out to "everybody on the planet" and then proceeds to claim what came out shouldn't be surprising because everyone could have known already.

Either it's public knowledge or it's secret.

And that's not even counting the public knowledge and suspicions that, a year ago, simply weren't taken seriously because they was too far into tinfoil hat territory.

Now we know for sure that shit is going on, and people can form a real opinion about it and speak up about those opinions without immediately being labelled a paranoid schizophrenic, because we can't deny it any more either.

Read that again maybe, if you don't see how that's a huge deal, even if his revelations were merely things we already sort-of knew and suspected.

If that's not weird, it's at least stupid and disingenuous.

BTW there was no reason (at all) to insinuate the idea of Snowden working together with the FSB in the first sentence of that post of yours, similarly as there's no evidence at all that you're hired as part of one of those psyops campaigns to downplay all things related to Snowden/NSA here on HN, none at all. You know I feel really dirty for just writing this and planting that idea? Why didn't you?

I don't mean to nitpick, but why would you want to be dispassionate about your rights?

If anything, being dispassionate has caused the steady erosion of our rights. Americans are asleep at the wheel and not looking out for the greater world (& their own) interests.

Instead, Americans dispassionately accept being told what to think and what to dream of.

Now detachment, I can get behind. But feel what you feel. It's good for you.

These are people that I would describe:

1) are in favor of establishment of totalitarian power 2) favor blaming the messenger over blaming the NSA's dogmatic and psychopathic overreach

The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on.

The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere.

Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner.

In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight.

---

EDIT: I've moved this post from the duplicate thread; tptacek's reply can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468

In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests.

Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate.

As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.

That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies.

Another thing is the wording - Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies. That is a consequence of his disclosures. But this information was hidden from the American taxpayer (which is also easy to justify because we all don't have security clearances), but more egregiously, the information was hidden from Congressional Committees that actually have direct OVERSIGHT. And they have security clearances, so what's your excuse then?

So sure, the Russians and Chinese governments now know what the NSA is up to. But that was their full time job to find out and they are probably hardly surprised.

But thankfully, even Congress and the American public know exactly where our taxes are going. And we really aren't the enemy of the NSA.

What we ask our representatives to do with this information will say it all.

Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays.

Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody.

From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.

I think this is all besides the point, though. Unless I'm missing something big, Snowden's crimes are all conditions of his having a security clearance.

While I don't buy into the "Snowden is a traitor" argument (as traitor has a specific Constitutional definition for a reason, unlike any other crime), you can certainly be guilty of espionage even if you also provide information to the American public.

E.g. The Soviet spies who got information on American nuclear weapons development programs were clearly guilty of espionage; note that this is true even if they didn't actually manage to get the information to their Soviet case handlers.

But if they leaked those same nuclear weapons programs to the American public (and by extension, the world public) in addition to their Soviet case handlers they'd still be guilty of espionage.

Snowden is the Manning case all over again. You can make an argument for whistleblowing for information he revealed showing crimes committed against the American people. For literally all other information (stuff that doesn't reveal crimes, stuff that reveals the NSA doing its literally assigned security mission, etc.) it's illegal espionage, whether the American public happened to be CC'ed or not.

I've been as confused as Andreessen about the fact that there's been such a huge outcry (which is great per se) after decades of complacency. For those of us who found the NSA to be despicable before Snowden's leaks, I feel like there was just a feeling of resignation that people just didn't care (even in tech circles like HN). It was a similar feeling to thinking about climate change in the late 90s/00s. I considered what you're describing as a potential cause, but I ruled it out because of the HUGE disparity between the reaction to this and the reaction to the warrantless wiretapping scandal of the 2000s. Wasn't that spying on American citizens as well? Why do you suppose that was essentially ignored by most people while this has become such a significant issue for so many?

And that is a reason that foreign countries should be concerned about doing business with american companies. There are questions as to whether major players were complicit or were infiltrated, but it was foolish not to expect infiltration at a minimum.

Anyway, fuck Marc Andreesen. He's on the wrong side of history if he thinks that the massive surveillance apparatus recording us through our social media apps should have been kept secret so that his portfolio would continue performing as expected.

That is the psychological profile of a traitor and he deserves a sound kick in the balls for using his influence and media reach to say this sort of nonsense.

I wouldn't accept investment money from him after this.

(I'm not saying I agree that warrantless wiretapping is not a problem -- just that I can see how it might not grab people.)

You may have assumed that. I have always thought of the NSA as harvesting whatever signals they can pick up, not just analyzing known vectors like numbers stations or military radio traffic. I mean think about it, how are you going to find new hostile communications patterns if you don't do broad-spectrum data collection? It's not like you can just spider al-qaeda.com and follow the links you find there; for that matter foreign government signals traffic for espionage purposes isn't necessarily going to be hosted on government websites. I doubt that (for example) Russian spies check in with Kremlin.ru weekly, don't you? Ideally, you would not want to depend on any .ru address.

I don't think there are spies everywhere or anything like that, but the fundamental nature of espionage is that participants don't wear uniforms and instead employ informal and ad-hoc methods of communication - exactly the sort of patterns you look for in metadata analysis.

Respectfully, I don't know how you could be surprised they were spying on everyone if you followed NSA news. We've had a consistent stream of leaks for _decades_ indicating that the NSA consistently expanded their capabilities to whatever the technology was capable of. Do you remember ECHELON? William Binney? AT&T fiber taps? Warrantless wiretapping? What else would those massive datacenters be for?

People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything.

But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it.

People are blind to it.

I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA.

Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan.

The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised.

The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter.

And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe.

Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.

Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt.

Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.

I really fail to see which part of the Snowden revelations does directly help foreign agencies. They probably knew most of the things he disclosed years before, because it's their job to know in contrast with the average citizen who has other things to worry about.

Andreessen's anger is entirely misplaced and should be directed at the NSA. They are the ones that are intercepting American technology products, like Cisco routers, and modifying them before shipping them overseas. All without (as far as we know) the knowledge or consent of the companies that make the products.

All American technology products are now suspect, in ways they never have been perceived in the past. Not because of the NSA spying on foreign countries, or collecting domestic meta data. But because the NSA is now tampering with American technology products and companies.

The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.

Why? Silicon Valley VCs know exactly what they are building - massive repositories of user information to datamine for the highest bidders.

The NSA does not require exclusive use, is independently funding datamining research, and has subpoenas - so they are a natural early client.

These facts have been plain as day to anybody who thinks about the implications of their technology choices. Most don't, so the services become widely adopted and even quite hip (unfortunately).

Snowden comes along and ignites the media in a way that Binney and Klein hadn't, just as the pendulum is starting to naturally swing towards decentralization. It is now in the public consciousness that perhaps these companies are not to be blindly trusted with the contents of your life.

Of course Andreessen is pissed. The entire business model of modern SV has been illustrated.

I'm sadly surprised that there are still so many people willing to work on these things. :(

Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be.

He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.

IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.

He's not angry about some moral issue, he's angry that revenue is going down.

This feels like a wasted opportunity.

He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.

I don't condone such an amoral approach, but at least he's honest.

Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.

I don't particularly respect Andreessen's position on this issue. But then, this isn't a huge surprise to me - he's espoused similar views on Hacker News before. It's been fairly obvious in his writings about Bitcoin, Carl Icahn, startups, etc. that he's out for his own bottom line, he defends his own self-interest, and if people are pissed off about that, oh well.

But you also have to admit that he's done a lot to bring technology to the masses, to educate prospective founders on what it's like to do a startup, and to make the current investment climate more founder-friendly. And he and his wife are two of biggest philanthropists in Silicon Valley.

I feel like most of the comments are from folks who put Andreessen up on a pedestal and only now just realized he's a flawed human being like the rest of us, with beliefs that we may not agree with. But that's par for the course; if you agree with everything that comes out of someone's mouth you have a cult, not a leader.

I guess fundraising with him is off :)

I took a venture capital class at Berkeley where I got to meet government groups from Russia, China, Poland (and a few others that escape me right now). They all shared a common goal of learning how Silicon Valley works so they can setup their own technology hubs in their home countries. Right now, Silicon Valley is a magnet for the best and the brightest in the world. Why wouldn't you be concerned that we're loosing that edge for no benefit?

You're telling me that, pre-snowden, you assumed that governments were inserting moles into open-standards processes and working to weaken ciphers ?

Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?

Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?[1]

I mean, I think we all thought in terms of traffic intercept and the worst-case scenario of a "global observer" ... but I know I for one was very complacent about how protected my SSL and SSH traffic was.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/we-cannot-trust-inte...

Yes. The first conversation I had about this was in the 90s

>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that they were intercepting cisco shipments to alter network gear ?

Yes. I know the TSA goes through my luggage when I fly, why wouldn't the NSA go through my mail? Intercepting physical communications/packages has literally been going on for thousands of years.

>Or, pre-snowden, you assumed that on-chip crypto functions from Intel and VIA were intentionally flawed ?

Hadn't thought of that but it's really not a revelation. We do know that when companies are contacted by the NSA, they are barred from even acknowledging that they were contacted. Again, the first conversation I had about the NSA inserting back doors into consumer technology was in the 90s. This is a novel approach but the general modus operandi is expected.

I think most people just don't appreciate what the NSA is. This is the organization that invented public key cryptography a decade before Ron Rivest and didn't publish the results. It wouldn't surprise me if they had made large advances in quantum cryptography that let them crack any cipher based on finite fields. I can imagine that all of this conventional spying is just a red herring to distract from much more insidious capabilities.

I can imagine their capabilities extend beyond computer networks to the power grid...

The point is that we funnel huge sums of money into an organization that hires the best and the brightest to spy on us. Why would you assume they aren't doing that well?

But, at the end of the day, I just look at the Snowden "revelations" as another Bengahzi or Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The political opposition will use it as a tool to further their interests but no one really cares. No domestic representative is going to cut funding to the NSA and no foreign government is going to act any differently when it comes to their security. They will get on the news and make a lot of noise as they use this as political cover to advance whatever ax they have to grind. But, I can't imagine them actually caring that the NSA spies on US citizens.

Thinking is different than knowing, no?

And, not everyone reads this stuff, so just because they don't have time to read all these books, etc they should not know?

Seems like such strange thinking.

Exactly. And everybody knowing is different than only a few people knowing. I read the books. Convincing people to be skeptical of the 'party line' was fruitless and frustrating. The gov't should have taken Thomas Drake and Bill Binney seriously.

But in his answer regarding the economics, that issue he describes as a big problem. Notice the word choices.

I also think Andreesen is dead-wrong to call Snowden a traitor. One of the most essential principles of having a free and open society is having a government which is transparent, and which is accountable to We The People. Many of the things our government has done, and is doing, belong in the playbooks of 3rd world dictatorial regimes, or totalitarian governments like WWII era Germany, or Soviet era Russia, etc.

Secret laws? Secret courts? Secret legal interpretations? National Security Letters (something that acts like a warrant but isn't a warrant)?? Government agencies that spy on pretty much everybody in the world? Agency officials who are apparently allowed to lie to Congress with impunity???

And he thinks Snowden is the problem? Get real...

He even spells out that logic in his comment. At least he's transparent about where his priorities are:

Andreessen's Morality Flow Chart: 1. Does it make me more money (-> good) or less money (-> bad)?

Probably we have to consider that he was saying this on CNBC, which is a financial news channel, and in that context he had to represent his interests, which include all the people who's money he is managing. I suspect in another context his views on this would be far more nuanced.

Second, he seems to be saying Snowden is a traitor because his revelations are hurting the US tech industry. I can see why that would make Andreessen feel betrayed, but that is hardly the definition of traitor.

Third, as others have said, nobody was surprised the NSA is spying. We're surprised it is conducting pervasive electronic surveillance in the US. (Personally, I'm horrified although not surprised by the scope of the spying outside the US. I would strongly support extending privacy protections to everyone, as unrealistic as that idea is.)

Finally, if we're going to get definitional, Snowden is certainly a traitor. He clearly broke the law, betrayed the trust placed in him and it seems very likely he would be convicted of treason. However, I also think he did the right thing for the right reasons.

Snowden violated his contract with the NSA and broke the law, but neither of these amounts to treason.

Right now I'm reading a brilliant book on domestic abuse [1], and it talks about how abusers create double binds. E.g., family is supposed to go to a birthday party, but at the last minute the abusive dad blows up at something the mom says and refuses to let anybody go until she apologizes. The kids pressure mom to give a false apology so they can go. If she doesn't, she's the one who ruined the outing, not dad. If she does, she confirms that she's the problem, and later the kids are upset when she doesn't stick up for them. Meanwhile, the dad's tantrum is entirely out of scope of discussion, as is the repeated pattern of behavior.

The governmental theory that they could try to hoover up every detail of every digital interaction and never get found out was always insane. It wasn't a question of if that would come out, it was when. I find it hard to believe nobody internally asked that, but either way they are the ones to blame for the consequences, not Snowden.

[1] Lundy Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That?", http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519.... It's the single most astute thing I've read. It's one of those books where it's nominally about a relatively narrow topic, but I keep saying, "Well, this explains X! And that explains Y!" If anybody would like a copy, email me; it's good enough I want everybody to have read it.

Obama could hardly be construed as letting the NSA out to dry. If anything, Obama has gone on record as having the NSA's back and making sure that they are protected from the consequences of their wrongdoing. Obama's pro-NSA actions are in stark contrast to his pre-election discourses on this topic. You'd think that he would love the opportunity to make good on one of his campaign promises rather than double down on the opposite as he's chosen to.

Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."

I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.

At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.

American tech companies were injured from the moment the NSA decided to weaponize them. The secrecy only served to stop the damage from being repaired until it was a giant, gaping would that requires major surgery. What Snowden did was essentially stop the morphine drips, rip off the bandages, and say, "hey, this looks infected."

And the patient blames him for the injury.

All the while, the NSA continues to smear a mixture of poop and lidocaine on their bullets, firing into the air indiscriminately from an armored bunker. They are still doing it. Right now.

This is the same sort of damage the CIA caused when they used a vaccination program as cover for locating Osama bin Laden. And now polio is back in Pakistan, infectiously crippling people. The CIA at least had the decency to apologize for that one, and promise to not do that in the future.

I'm sure the doctors, journalists, and merchandise-shippers of the world are willing to take them at their word. Really. I bet they really mean it this time.

In reality, these people never consider the non-obvious consequences of their actions. They aren't paid to question the strategy, only to complete the mission at hand.

The "I can't believe people are surprised..." trope is dismissive and condescending.

1) show how smart they are, because they already knew that, and perhaps you didn't

2) try to imply that it's "no big deal", since it's been happening for some time, and supposedly because of that you shouldn't be angry about it now.

I disagree with both views, because:

1) most people weren't in fact aware that the NSA was spying on every single person on the planet, guilty of something or not, and also most people (or rather security engineers) weren't aware that NSA is trying to actively attack US companies in order to spy on their users, and even tap the Internet cables to get all plaintext data.

2) most of this stuff has been happening under secrecy (it is a spy agency after all), so just because it's been happening under secrecy for decades, doesn't mean we shouldn't be outraged that we find out about it only now. If anything we should be more outraged, because it's been happening for so long, without the population being aware of it, and giving their consent for it (especially on the part about even innocents being spied upon to "catch the terrorists" - which is already proven to not be the only reason NSA spies on everyone)

I especially wonder if Marc has thought through the implications of his "textbook traitor" line. Let's say he's right that Edward Snowden violated the Espionage Act, which is what I take his comments to mean (the definition of "treason" is "levies war against them or adheres to their enemies," which is arguable at best). 18 USC 798 makes it a felony for anyone to "publish" or "make available" any "classified information" relating to:

- the "nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government" OR

- or "concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government" OR

- "obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government" http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798)

Those are Boolean OR statements above; you only need to hit one to have an all-expense paid trip to Club Fed. Snowden hit all three!

But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here?

Prosecutorial discretion is still a thing, even if "common sense" has disappeared.

Nor has competing interests gone away; there is a natural tension for the American government in maintaining freedom of the press while enforcing the law which would (and should!) act to make the question of suing the NYT, WaPo, etc. not as easy as you make it sound. But for Snowden there is no such dilemma. On the contrary, he even explicitly promised he would not do what he did, something the press has never guaranteed.

Either way, surely you're not trying to claim that there are not gradations in severity, or that the law (even as it stands today) should or does treat crimes apart from their severity. Even our drug laws, abusive as they are, understand the concept of possession of large amounts or small amounts of a given drug, severity categories, etc.

Hell, even murder and rape carry different charges for different levels of the crime, so I'm disappointed that you'd try to undermine the logic of a law against espionage by such shoddy reasoning.

If Carmen Ortiz declines to charge the HN webteam with espionage it says nothing about the logic of charging Snowden with the same.

No, not "suing" the NYT, WashPost, etc. The Espionage Act is armed with felony criminal sanctions. The nuclear option would be for FedGov to indict the news organization, do no-knock raids on the homes of their reporters and editors involved in the story, seize computers (ala GCHQ), etc. The reason FedGov has not is left as an exercise to the reader.

But more broadly, you're attributing views to me I do not hold. I wrote about the Espionage Act at some length here -- this may set you straight (I don't have time or the inclination to do it here): http://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-could-be-vulnerable-to-es...

There's no exercise at all: They'd get pilloried for it in the very same media, on top of what I already mentioned regarding the tension around facilitating a mostly free press. I mean, even the Guardian's editors noted that they preferred working on the Snowden leaks from their New York office rather than their London office. That wasn't an accidental or hasty decision.

Your article is very informative, actually. And to your great credit, I'm not actually sure what specific views you hold after reading it, other than an apparent opposition to the Espionage Act. Some of the points brought up appear to be in the sense of "look how ridiculous this is", but I don't agree with the ridiculousness at all.

E.g. the intent of someone doing the spying shouldn't any bearing on whether someone is guilty under Espionage Act or not; either your spying could have hurt the nation (for some definition of "hurt") or it couldn't. Intent would certainly have bearing into the severity of a sentence, and we could even envision having entirely separate charges for different categories of harm (just as we split murder into attempted murder, manslaughter, premeditated murder, etc.), but whether you spied or not is effectively a binary question at the end, and that very well should possibly extend all the way up a felony.

Maybe your point is that we need to revisit the law as it stands to have those separate categories of harm instead of what amounts to a giant "reasonable man" test, and I wouldn't oppose that. But the law is in many ways demand-paged; it only gets changed in response to obvious miscarriages of justice, and I'm not sure that all possible prosecutions of Assange under the Espionage Act would represent that. He's not a journalist and he's certainly trying to harm the USG (and thereby, the US people) so it's not as if such a prosecution would be obviously mistaken.

Unfortunately you only get a C+ on this exercise. :)

The short answer is that portions of the Espionage Act likely violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech if the EA were used to prosecute journalists who obtained the materials over the transom. (Whether this applies to Wikileaks is a different story. Different facts.)

The slightly more detailed answer is that the modern jurisprudence relating to the First Amendment is far more speech-protective than it was when the EA was codified a century ago. And DOJ doesn't want to risk having parts of the EA declared unconstitutional. So Glenn Greenwald and other reporters were (properly) not indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a federal felony to publish classified NSA SIGINT or cryptographic material.

I mean, yeah we're all operating on the assumption that the government is more or less run by business, but it's still gauche to just come right out and say it like that.

*See the book Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer for an interesting read.

He is angry because he could lose money because of Snowden. He talks about other countries in the world as envious. But a lot of the capital of the US comes from outside US.

The people outside of the US get angry too if they are considered "adversaries" and start doing illegal things to favor US business.

That simply backfires. Most of the people outside the US has not problems with the NSA catching terrorists, but have huge problems with the NSA robbing them (industrial spying)blind.

This is like cheating on your partner and then getting angry with the person that tells your partner about it.

I was already telling people not to trust the cloud or American companies before Snowden, I though that if they could abuse, they will, obvious for smart people like me, a minority of the population. The difference is that now the people I talk to actually listen to me.

For a US Citizen the actual definition of treason is:

  Treason against the United States, shall consist 
  only in levying War against them, or in adhering
  to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. 
  No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless 
  on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same 
  overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

  The Congress shall have Power to declare the 
  Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason 
  shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except 
  during the Life of the Person attainted.

The fact that it has hurt overseas business is a function of the government policy and not the leaker. Snowden wasn't the first at the NSA to blow the whistle, and given what happened the first time, I'm not sure what other course of action people expected.

https://twitter.com/declanm/

I think @pmarca is right in that many technologists suspected the scope of #NSA surveillance pre-Snowden (I’ve made the same point). 1/5

And @pmarca is also correct that early #PRISM reporting was spectacularly wrong (despite my efforts at the time to correct the facts) 2/5

But original documents matter, especially for legal challenges to warrantless bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone records. 3/5 @pmarca

And Snowden’s acts don’t amount to treason, which is the one crime defined in Constitution. Don't fit definition. Shouldn’t. 4/5 @pmarca

Snowden DID violate the #Espionage Act’s prohibition on “publish[ing]” classified SIGINT docs. But so did hundreds of reporters. 5/5 @pmarca

Not only reporters. All you folks on Twitter linking to leaked NSA SIGINT docs are violating Espionage Act ("makes available..."). 18USC798

People on both sides who say stuff like that need to watch the United States of Secrets.[1]

What's going on now is not business as usual. It's business since shortly after 9/11, when the Vice President's legal counsel wrote an order directing General Hayden, the NSA Director, to disable the agency's privacy protections and take whatever steps were necessary to find Al Qaeda, ignoring any sort of constitutional limits on domestic spying. Career NSA employees described the change as bringing the agency back to what it had been when Nixon resigned.

We've been funding this agency for 62 years, but after the Church Commission found that they greatly overstepped their bounds, we -- our elected representatives in Congress -- cracked down on them in the 1970s.[2] Then in 2001, we -- a few people in the Bush administration -- threw those protections away and told them to have at it, full steam ahead.

What followed were a series of resignations, internal protests, and leaks. For people who knew what was going on, it was not business as usual. The first stories about the extent of the new regime started coming out in 2005, four years after it started. If you want to say that you've had a pretty good guess what the NSA was up to since 2005, and the Snowden documents only confirmed your suspicions, that's fine. But you couldn't prove it, and the government flatly denied it. They have shown no compunction about directly lying to us about what they were doing (and, remarkably, they're still trying to). What's different now is that their lies are clear, because the truth is in their own documents.

If you're surprised that people were shocked by what the NSA has done since 2001, then either you were born in 2002, or you need to learn more about how and why things changed.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

Where are your principles now?

Anyone that listens to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" and "Common Sense" podcasts will know how dangerous these government powers can be.

It's also an ill omen that Andreessen, one of the poster-children for a transformative, open medium would come down on the side of a secret, power-drunk apparatus vs. a civil disobedient who used said medium to try to wake up a complacent populous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY

I started college at UIUC in 1995 just after Andreessen took the NCSA Mosaic code and turned it into Netscape, and I remember several of the older CS students and TAs were miffed at him for doing so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

I’ve always taken that story as a sign that if you want to get rich in tech, theft (er, borrowing) is a surefire way to do it. Maybe Andreessen is jealous that someone stole the spotlight for the public good instead of private gain.

As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.

It's a very similar argument that Lanny Breuer put forth in not going after wall street.

What do you think the actual net effect of that will be though? That Andreesen will actually lose out on the best or many deals?

Not only do people have short memories, but money and opportunity smooth over many problems in people's minds. Rationalization. [1] I remember reading how up in arms people were about MIT and Schwartz. Some alum threatened to pull support. So how many actually did? (I don't know the answer).

Of course if the "brand" continues to broadcast opinions on an ongoing basis that are unpopular that's a different story.

[1] Faced with economic opportunity the tobacco industry spreading around wealth and business opportunities did pretty well for many years.

Yes and the costs are estimated to be as high as $180B (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snow...). However, this is a very close-minded thing to say, which I would have never expected from Marc Andreesen.

It's not the Snowden revelations that have caused the $180B damages, it's the government breaking the law and our big tech-companies and not having a spine to fight against these violations that caused these damages.

> Yesterday I didn't have an opinion about Marc Andreessen but today I have a very strong one.

> Wait ... he's a traitor because he released "national security secrets", but the disclosure didn't have value because you should have known

> How are they secrets if you 'should have known' they were doing this stuff?

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/474603349367476224

This sad quote from Andreessen, rather than telling us anything about Snowden, merely demonstrates his own predilection for manipulative thinking styles and rhetoric. Not to mention, implicitly, his profound lack of respect for the intelligence of the listener.

Which makes me all even less interested than I had been in anything else he might have to say.

If Andreesen didn't have a billion or so dollars riding on how the world perceives SV, I might find his opinion more creditable.

And while a lot of the discussion considers the NSA's intent as irrelevant, it wouldn't surprise me to find out later that the NSA was using their technology to clean out the bank accounts of so-called "traitors" or whatever moniker we use to label undesirables.

And yeah, many people have known/could surmise that NSA was watching all. At least those people who paid attention to ECHELON, Cryptome, and James Bamford.

But Snowden's point was to get NSA's activities known to the general population, not the cypherpunks and tinfoilers. I'm unsure Marc sees or cares about this point.

So if we already suspected/knew what NSA was doing, then what harm did Snowden cause by basically only verifying our suspicions?

It's pretty damn weird that an avowed and successful capitalist is arguing against a buyer's right to get an honest evaluation of a product. He'd be talking out the other side of his face if the same information had leaked out of China.

We like to pretend that we don't live in a corporate fascism because we are moral individuals who want nice things for all mankind and that our government should represent us. But let's face it, neither the government nor the corporate elite, of which Andreessen is a part of, gives a shit what the cogs think. The mission of this system hasn't been to represent "the people" in a long time. So shuttup, eat your cereal, work, spend and die when you're done.

(I think he might be right as a first-order effect for the majority of people, but the second order effects hurt US companies, individuals, etc.)

Both, it seems. That's the sad part.