Working Class Calendar

I appreciate what he did. I hate that he is in Russia.

A common critique of China and Russia is mass surveillance of their citizens and this is true, China through more in depth social registration and facial recognition, Russia through sorm and isp data retention, etc.

The difference is that Snowden revealed America does much of the same but without any transparency. His leaks forced some - PRISM, XKEYSCORE, MUSCULAR, STELLARWIND, etc are now public knowledge and have congressional oversight. But a lot has changed in the past 12 years. Modern AI was essentially nonexistent during his leaks. His leaks did not cover any military or CIA programs. By his own and the governments admission information was highly compartmentalized for security so he potentially only knew a small chunk of what was happening at the time.

Since then there have been a number of tools and things acknowledged but not expanded upon that are used by the government, such as the cia vault 7 tools disclosed by Wikileaks in 2017 (malware for many things, smart TVs, ios and android, cars, many web browsers, etc). To further complicate things a lot of government surveillance in the us happens outside of the government thanks to our military contracting system. Actors such as booz allen, amazon govcloud, and palantir maintain databases so they bypass FISA requirements.

This is finally becoming more concrete with trumps ICE raids as we begin to see leaks that show ICE, DHS, FBI, and local police departments are relying on palantir databases of American citizens for profiling and arrests. These databases did not appear overnight. They were built over a long time and indicate our government clearly has an issue both with spying on its own citizens and being transparent about it.

In the modern age it is clear that we are going to be tracked. We need to demand transparency and regulation surrounding this. We also need to demand fair treatment for federal whistleblowers, especially related to the military as these often get exempted from whistleblowing protections and charged as espionage. Snowden still lives in exile and is facing 30 years, reality winner got the harshest espionage sentence in history for leaking memos about russian hacking in the 2016 election (by the trump admin, which seems unfair), Chelsea manning got 35 years (which was commuted by Obama), Daniel hale got 45 months, etc.

Cant forget about the OG Thomas A Drake who blew the whistle years before Snowden

I think it's hilarious that he sacrificed his life to reveal US secrets because he couldn't stomach the idea of widespread domestic spying.

But then in Russia suddenly he cares about his safety again, and he's repeating their propaganda... helping others to get bombed.

But nah, he's American and the people being terrorized by Russia are foreigners. Makes sense he doesn't care and only risks his life for very specific things related to American intelligence.

I got his book as an audiobook. was pretty good

It's all so tiresome, the machine controls you no matter what; any collective effort is futile when everyone is divided. There government runs mass surveillance programs on its on citizens and you're powerless against it; there are people living in hell and there is nothing you can do about it — whose crimes are they paying for? It's to divide, always to divide.