How is anything Snowden released hard evidence? Every single thing Snowden released could have easily been faked. Hell, those powerpoints look fake. Who thought an intelligence agency would use something straight out of the world of TPS reporting and cookie-cutter presentation templates? Note, I'm not saying they're fake, but it would be trivial for someone to make this stuff if they wanted. So the argument that there's this overwhelming proof that the public can't ignore seems like weak sauce to me. The public isn't terribly interested in hard proof (or have the time/expertise to weigh claims), historically. If they were, we'd probably be a society of hard atheists scoffing at anything that can't be trivially proven in the lab.
The real issue here is why certain things go viral and others don't. Snowden's fleeing was fairly dramatic and I'm assuming that helped get the ball rolling. The timed release aspect of his disclosures are fairly clever too. Frankly, I think Assange cut a path for him by normalizing this type of leak and the journalist/news system was ready for it. In the past, this system was too busy avoiding these issues, or worse, being a mouthpiece for the current administration (See the NYTimes' disgraceful Iraq pre-war reporting, repeating Bush admin propaganda without question.)
Without the Assange/Manning path, the previous whistleblowers only received marginalized exposure. Now news managers realize how profitable leaks are especially with the White House not reciprocating with the 'blocking of access.' Obama's more liberal direction probably guarantees more leaks in his terms. We'll see how things are with the next POTUS. I suspect a GOP POTUS won't be as forgiving as the Bush administration has shown (Valerie Plame/Wilson affair for example).
It's the reaction. With faked documents, the administration is free to say the documents are faked. The leaker can be immediately discredited. The wiser approach to faked documents is no comment, but that lacks the political power of completely discrediting opposition.
With real stuff, people freak out and tip their hand. Media contact is made, discussions about endangering lives are had, and everyone accepts that the core idea is true.
> Who thought an intelligence agency would use
> something straight out of the world of TPS reporting
> and cookie-cutter presentation templates?
In short, the crappy clip art and cookie-cutter templates make me appraise it as authentic. I think that anyone who as ever dealt with any defense contracting bureaucracy, with their endless slides, documents, and so forth, would feel similarly.
These are people interested in making arguments, and dumping massive presentations on other people. Defense IT is pretty much 99% Microsoft, and the people making presentations are neither designers nor (usually) people who care about optimum information delivery. They add what flair they can.
Imagine the most restrictive IT department ever, with layers of bureaucracy hardened over years to prevent you from getting work done. No one is going to open Photoshop and make custom photos, as no one can install it, and the military networks are so locked down that I'd be surprised if they could reach sites with stock photos. (OK, that's probably allowed.) I expect that the only things they have are MS OFfice and the stock clip art.
> So the argument that there's this overwhelming proof that the public can't ignore seems like weak sauce to me.
Your argument is that someone could fake them so having documents or not doesn't matter.
The one big issue is when they aren't fake and that people look at the documents no matter how real or fake they look and test them to see if they are true. That is what happened with Snowden. He got documents and SOME of them were able to be used to show validity and than the other documents and his actions build up the case. Without those this whole Patriot Act would have just been extended. Not that this new one is extremely better.
"it would be trivial for someone to make this stuff if they wanted" - it gets hard to consistently fake it when you have so many documents. Wikipedia says it is thousands - anyone has more precise stats?
For all we know, Snowden is a CIA agent who's taking one for the team as part of the ongoing NSA/CIA turf war. Honestly I kind of lean that way -- he was a CIA direct hire before he was an NSA contractor.
Along the lines of a Snowden conspiracy theory, Dave Emory has done a fair amount of research and constructs quite a complex theory (see the "For a The Record" series on spitfirelist). He presents some interesting arguments that serve as counter point to the pervasive (libertarian) rhetoric that hails Snowden as a champion of freedom.
Stepping through the dreck of Emory's arguments[1], the only substance I can find is claim that all these folks are libertarians or right-ward sympathizes (It's not true that everyone defending Snowden is Libertarian but that's only one problem with Emory's off-kilter claims and argument-style).
I'd view myself as left-to-far-left with zero sympathies to libertarian politics as such. But any claim that all the libertarians are working together seems preposterous. Libertarianism appeals to geeks, constitutionalists and other sectors of the American population who tend to take it's positions seriously.
You weren't down voted for the CIA System Admin job he had (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden) You were down voted for saying he "Took One for the Team". I didn't down vote you though. You were presenting a conspiracy theory.
Rewind to a decade ago and suggesting that "the government" was committing mass surveillance and spying on everyone would be considered a conspiracy theory. You'd be assigned to a mental ward if you suggested that several governments were working together on this spying.
Not to defend his theory - but I find negatively reacting to any "far-fetched" theories merely because they are theories is rather short sighted given the number of them that turn out to be true, or partially true.
> Not to defend his theory - but I find negatively reacting to any "far-fetched" theories merely because they are theories is rather short sighted given the number of them that turn out to be true, or partially true.
You are falling prey to survivorship bias. You forget the huge, overwhelming majority of conspiracy theories that are wrong, and remember the ones that turn out to be right. Without evidence, it's a waste of time to even consider them.
I never said to consider them - be as neutral and uncaring as you like. But to be negative to them by default is inherently wrong if they have even a scrap of evidence or reason to believe. If they have zero evidence or logical reason to be suspect - be as critical and negative as you like.
Poor evidence is evidence that is still investigated and proven to be credible or not. In the scenario where it cannot be investigated, one forms a belief around it and chooses whether to believe it themselves or not. This is how many conspiracy theories form. Feel free to be negative of people who hold their beliefs even after whatever evidence they had has been disproven, proven to be fake, or proven to be non-credible.
Snowden was a CIA agent. There is at least some history of the alphabet soup agencies competing and trying to shortchange another. That can be reason enough to suspect he's a plant.
The world is not black and white. There is a ground other than "believe" and "don't believe". You don't have to believe Snowden is a CIA plant. However you don't need to hold a negative view against the possibility, however small or improbable.
And what's wrong with that? He didn't present it as if he thought it were fact. Why do people have such a strong reaction to "conspiracy theories"? It's not as though these things never turn out to be truthful, but some people seem to reject all things that resemble conspiracy theories without consideration of any kind. Some even seem to take the existence of a conspiracy theory as evidence of the opposite.
As far as the idea in his post goes, the hypothesis presented is reminiscent of the USSR, where historically multiple internal security and intelligence units competed behind the scenes for power and sometimes undermined each other for the same.
I lean toward he did this at great personal sacrifice.
I agree, but I am not so well informed that I can reasonably exclude all other hypotheses; nor do I think is anyone else so well informed. I don't put a lot of stock in the Snowden-is-a-CIA-operative-kneecapping-the-NSA hypothesis; it's more of a whimsical idea that is amusing to think about. It reminds me of some spy fiction I read years ago by Viktor Suvorov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov
>If it was a turf war he wouldn't left for China and stuck in Russia.
I'm not sure how that follows. Snowden's wellbeing would definitely be in jeopardy if he had remained in the US, even if he were a CIA operative.
How is anything Snowden released hard evidence? Every single thing Snowden released could have easily been faked. Hell, those powerpoints look fake. Who thought an intelligence agency would use something straight out of the world of TPS reporting and cookie-cutter presentation templates? Note, I'm not saying they're fake, but it would be trivial for someone to make this stuff if they wanted. So the argument that there's this overwhelming proof that the public can't ignore seems like weak sauce to me. The public isn't terribly interested in hard proof (or have the time/expertise to weigh claims), historically. If they were, we'd probably be a society of hard atheists scoffing at anything that can't be trivially proven in the lab.
The real issue here is why certain things go viral and others don't. Snowden's fleeing was fairly dramatic and I'm assuming that helped get the ball rolling. The timed release aspect of his disclosures are fairly clever too. Frankly, I think Assange cut a path for him by normalizing this type of leak and the journalist/news system was ready for it. In the past, this system was too busy avoiding these issues, or worse, being a mouthpiece for the current administration (See the NYTimes' disgraceful Iraq pre-war reporting, repeating Bush admin propaganda without question.)
Without the Assange/Manning path, the previous whistleblowers only received marginalized exposure. Now news managers realize how profitable leaks are especially with the White House not reciprocating with the 'blocking of access.' Obama's more liberal direction probably guarantees more leaks in his terms. We'll see how things are with the next POTUS. I suspect a GOP POTUS won't be as forgiving as the Bush administration has shown (Valerie Plame/Wilson affair for example).