I just assumed he wanted to drop some public notoriety so I respected that… otherwise it would be my callsign and signature name drop
I remember a few years ago John Oliver flew to Russia to interview him. He showed him a bunch of vox pop interviews of young people in America asking if they knew who Edward Snowden was and what he did, and almost all of them had no idea.
You could visibly see him die inside after watching it.
I have to belive that most of these quizzes where “reporter” walks around asking questions are fake or just show the stupidest answers.
It has to be so. No way the general populace is that stupid. Please say they are fake.
Edit; Love how many people take their time to comment how obscure Edward Snowden is now, when i meant these quizzes as general.
I have to belive that most of these quizzes where “reporter” walks around asking questions are fake or just show the stupidest answers.
Yeah. I take that pretty much as a given.
No way the general populace is that stupid.
It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.
He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.
The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.
When I looked it up, the Oliver interview was 11 years ago, and Snowden was still fairly fresh in the public consciousness.
He has been largely forgotten. Recently we were talking about data collection with my slightly younger gf (21) when I mentioned him. Turns out she never even heard his name. It’s not that she’s stupid or does not care about privacy, he just hasn’t been mentioned in mainstream media for over a decade, nobody makes reels about him on Instagram/tiktok. Tbh I haven seen him mentioned all that often on lemmy too.
With the rise of fascist parties worldwide, and especially here in the EU, and talks of AI, privacy seems to have taken a back seat in mainstream discourse.
It has to be so. No way the general populace is that stupid.
Even if it wasn’t Murica (they’re that stupid), most GenZ or-whatever-the-tag-is was in diapers during the 2010s so yeah, there’s a generation who hasn’t heard (or cares) about him.
most GenZ or-whatever-the-tag-is was in diapers during the 2010s
That’s Gen Alpha at that point.
gen z is unlikely to know him, anyone older will.
Meh. I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine. They even gave hints. When the interviewer told her who he is, she wasn’t even shocked or just having a brain fart. She blamed it on her history teacher…
I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.
There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.
On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.
Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.
Ah. The late Aldof Hilter. The failed fascist who turned into decent artist.
Of course, it was all her teacher’s fault and not her being too cool for school to actually pay attention in class.
Why would Oliver do that to him
It’s good TV!
No it’s not
I didn’t mean that in a complimentary way.
I think about him regularly. You know now would be a good time for europe to get him to a better place.
Would be stupid for him to fall for it. Now they give him a better place, next day they give him to the US. Not to mention the whole CIA thing. Russia or even better China are the only countries he can feel relatively safe.
would be stupid for europe to continue a cozy relationship with the us at this point. The breakup has already started.
The sad truth is we said exactly the same thing during Trump’s first mandate. Granted it was not as bad as this time, but on a general principle: “we know someone like Trump can happen once, so we need to assume it will happen again!”. And… as soon as Biden started talking, the EU went back under a cozy mama-wing, easy solution.
This time might be different… or not. Far right parties are getting stronger in France, Germany, already in power in Italy. They all somewhat allied with Trump and his goons. All the effort made to render the EU sovereign could be discarded just as quickly as they were put in place. Imagine Trump’s successort is someone smart enough to understand (or rather not too stupid to not understand…) the benefit of US military supremacy and protection, and you may see some EU govs happily reduce their military spending again: the US promised to have their back!
At this stage, I am less pessimistic than I am careful: the direction is somewhat correct. We (the people) need to make sure it stays that way.
But for Snowden’s case: I wouldn’t come back either. The minute he sets land in Europe, he becomes a bargaining chip in sode negotiations with the US! He could try his chances in Spain, until the next election, then it’s uncertainty all over again.
That is something that worries me. You get these flee the us threads and its like. Fight em here or over there but there is no escaping the planet. While here we have some of the most agregious examples what I see in europe, canada, and australia is like just a few steps back in some cases. And they play off the various locations. fox news came out of australia and there was a media thing that arose from canada to. A lot of this came out of putin though so can’t say russia is such a great location.
Von der Leyen’s EU?
I’d stay in Russia.Good comrade, move to your blood soaked imperialist totalitarian utopia that is modern day Russia. No one is stopping you.
OH right, i forgot, Russia bad, US good… EU good too.
Thumps chest.
That’s the right answer, right? No grey areas whatsoever, right? Dumbass.Yes comrade, Russia good! Thumps chest.
I am plenty critical of the US regime and of Europe too. Unlike you I don’t glorify the Russian dictatorship however, that is currently waging a bloody war of conquest, attempting the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine, while making the surveillance state in Russia worse by the day, with heavy censorship, persecuting any kind of independent protest, persecuting any organisation not approved by the regime and now making even consumption of non approved news sources a crime. Also attempting to push a state controlled super app to surveil every single step of every single person.
Is everything fine in the EU? Absolutely not but show me what is worse in terms if civil liberties, compared to Russia.
Talking to me about grey areas while telling me that VdL is worse than Putin.
I don’t glorify the Russian dictatorship
Neither do i. Bye.
You did by claiming "VdL 's EU"is somehow worse than Russia. That is utterly absurd. It wrongly implies that the EU is somehow owned by VdL like Russia is owned by Putin. Unsurprisingly you did not even specify in which way exactly things are worse in the EU.
It’s kind of sad. He sacrificed his freedom to let us know about surveillance of the citizenry and we shrugged a little and accepted all the surveillance they could throw at us.
People dont care about their privacy one bit. They want their tiktok brain rot.
This is such a “phones bad” comment, but holy shit is it true. If you tell people why you don’t have WhatsApp and instagram or whatnot, they just look at you like you are the idiot. Yeah they are evil, steal and sell my data and rot my brain but have you seen this bot posting ai videos of cats?
Yeah people are amazed I dont use those apps. I am amazed they’re dumb enough to use them 😅
Phones have decreased tech literacy a massive amount unfortunately. As they were designed to. Dumb people dont know they’re being taken advantage of and corporations and oligarchies love that.
You realize how ironic this comment is on Lemmy, right?
Were trying to be better, the internet is about communication. Instead of eating processed soilent slop on major platforms, were sitting here on our gluten-free unpasturized Reddit.
Have you ever met a health nut not evangilize about their one trick to a healthy colon? Because thats what we are. Digital health-nuts!
What’s the ironic part?
Uninstall Instagram? Why I’d never!
/S
Is the ‘/s’ because you do in fact have instagram installed on your phone?
There was one program that “spied” on Americans in his whole dump, and it was shut down after, so the opposite of what you said happened. (It collected all phone pen register data in the U.S.)
lmao. so blissful to think the government is not spying on its own citizens. especially after DOGE went through and collected all the data on american citizens to pipe into Palantir’s surveillance pipeline. what does it feel like to be blissfully ignorant?
Melsaskca said we shrugged and accepted the surveillance. The opposite happened. There was a single program that could be interpreted as domestic surveillance that Snowden leaked, and Americans shut it down.
There is no evidence that DOGE fed data that they had access to into Palantir. Palantir would charge the government to do that.
And they definitely never ever broke the rules again, nuh uh, double pinkie swear
I should read his book again.
I do understand why the state wants to prosecute him, but I also think the public deserved to know what Snowden revealed. It’s definitely the kind of thing the pardon power was created for, not for drug lords to bribe their way back into freedom.
I do understand why the state wants to prosecute him
Because he exposed the state for being a massively illegal and corrupt pile of shit directly perpetrating crimes against not just the American public, but the world at large?
Like yeah, I understand why cartels kill informants, that doesn’t make them justified in doing so.
The american public are just overworked sheep… the proof they did not deserve this info, is in that they got it and literally did nothing about it.
To this day poeple won’t stop using Meta and Twitter and there are 29 extra reasons to never touch those platforms again
ugh my wife wanted to show me something and it was on x. im like why aren’t you using xcancel like we have discussed before. how do I do that. like I said before just add cancel after x. Im sure down the line she is going to show me something from x. sigh.
Get that woman Firefox, so you can install ToXCancel for her, so you can stop giving yourself an aneurysm.
she already does but I did not know about the add on. this may be just the thing. thanks. EDITED - gotta say I love how the name works in two ways.
Don’t forget Reddit! That has always been a skidmark-filled guilty pleasure.
They literally sued the U.S. government and shut down the only program that was collecting Americans’ data. https://www.cohenandwolf.com/publication-nsa-phone-metada
and this is why the gov doesn’t spy on its ciizens anymore and everyone lived happily ever after… my sweet summer child
I’m responding to the claim that Americans did nothing. It might be the case that there is illegal government surveillance going on today, but there is no evidence for that in any leaks, particularly not Snowden’s. If there is illegal government surveillance that we learn about later, the takeaway from the Snowden saga is that Americans will take action to shut it down.
might be the case
Everybody knows the U.S. is a massive surveillance state still. They literally have renewed FISA every year. And I know, it’s supposed to be for foreign spying. But you’d have to be a naive child to think they abide by the law.
Nevermind all the spying Meta, Google, and windows do. And the government just buys up that data on people as if it were candy in a gas station.
But you’d have to be a naive child to think they abide by the law.
If they didn’t abide by the law, surely there would be evidence for it in the massive trove of documents that Snowden released.
Are you trying to be intentionally obtuse? You seriously think governments don’t lie…you trust them? Then there’s nothing to discuss.
Pardon power and the jury nullification.
Sounds ok except for living in Russia.
Edward Snowden is a permanent resident and naturalized citizen of Russia, living in Moscow with his wife and two sons. Granted citizenship by President Vladimir Putin in 2022, he remains in exile to avoid prosecution in the US under the Espionage Act. Snowden continues to criticize Russian policy while working in IT and presiding over the Freedom of the Press Foundation
the usa literally trapped him in russia while he was flying back to the us, by cancelling his passport. Also putin sees him as a useful propaganda tool as well.
Living in Russia and criticizing russian policy sounds like how those intrusive thoughts about jumping from windows get into your head…
No no, the thoughts intrude by way of bullets into the back of your head, before you jump comrade!
They’ll probably give him some leeway since they’d rather have him living there as a fuck you to the USA and constant reminder of how fucked up the USA is as well.
That’s what happens when the US waits to cancel your passport until you are stuck in the transit hub of a Russian airport waiting for your next flight out of the country.
iIRC it took like 12 months until Russia granted Snowden asylum and he could leave the airport hub.
It was revoked before he left China. https://apnews.com/general-news-587786e6e63b4dc2b70c471606d7f584
That didn’t stop China from ignoring his asylum request following his release of documentation of hacked Chinese systems and kicking him out of the country because whether you have a valid passport doesn’t matter for geopolitical issues. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259508/edward-snowden-us-government-has-been-hacking-hong-kong-and-china
Russia was under no obligation to keep Snowden instead of letting him continue to Ecuador. Putin just wanted to use him as a bargaining chip with the U.S., but the U.S. understood that all his documents were already public, so Putin hasn’t been able to play that card well yet.
Like that Tom Hanks movie! I think it’s called The Terminal
Which itself is based on the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who lived in Terminal 1 of Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, France, from 1988 to 2006.
It is uncommon, but passports being invalidated during travel does happen.
Didn’t see the movie, I had no idea it was that long.
Wikipedia says this guy was mostly responsible for what happened to him. He allegedly lost his passport, and refused any help from France and Belgium.
He actually sent his passport away to Belgium while en route to London, refused to sign a new passport with his real name, demanding one with the name Sir Alfred and no mention of his Iranian citizenship, and returned to the airport even after he had left it once to go to the hospital.
Sounds to me like he got used to his life there, with the fame and not needing to work.
He also made $200k from the filming rights.Wikipedia says this guy was mostly responsible for what happened to him. He allegedly lost his passport, and refused any help from France and Belgium.
No idea what the fuck you’re reading, because the Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to say any of that…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
Belgium isn’t even mentioned on the Wikipedia page. And France is mentioned specifically from an interview in 2019 where Snowden said he had requested asylum in 2013, but it was denied under President Hollande. A second request later was received favorably by Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet under President Macron, but no other members of the French government expressed support. That’s not at all refusing help from either of them. In fact there are multiple sections in there about his asylum requests to dozens of countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the_United_States
In fact, the Wikipedia page goes pretty in depth about his intended travel out of Hong Kong. The US revoked his passport, it wasn’t lost.
His plans upon leaving Hong Kong never had anything to do with US allies, it very specifically avoided them because of US leverage.
So where, on Wikipedia, are you reading the exact opposite of what the Wikipedia page says?
I’m pretty sure, the comment of Something Burger was related to Mehran Karimi Nasseri
That’s a lot of words for someone with poor reading comprehension skills
Little aggressive, but in your defense, pronouns with limited context can be difficult sometimes.
Unless this is supposed to be a shit post, in which case, bravo.
Ah you are right. I seem to have gotten it mixed up with the initial 1 year refugee status he was granted, before the first 3 year temporary residency permit.
Either way, the US tried to prevent his leaving Hong Kong but however they submitted it, their request didn’t comply with Hong Kong law so there was no legal basis for them to detain him.
Four countries had offered Snowden permanent asylum: Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. No direct flights between Moscow and Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua existed, however, and the U.S. pressured countries along his route to hand him over. His intended destination was Ecuador, but his passport being revoked while he was in flight from Hong Kong meant he was stuck in Russia.
He had given all copies of the evidence he had to journalists in Hong Kong reporting on American issues, specifically so when travelling through Russia they would have nothing to leverage.
Snowden said in July 2013 that he decided to bid for asylum in Russia because he felt there was no safe way to reach Latin America.
Considering they grounded Evo Morales’ plane because they thought he was on it, I’d say that’s a fair bet.
Snowden should get a fair trial but the US won’t let him argue that his whistleblowing was for the greater good and outweighs state secrecy clauses
Snowden continues to criticize Russian policy
I’m totally showing my ignorance here but I’m surprised they let him do that
More valuable openly criticizing the US. He’s American so it is “expected” for him to have Western values. The fact that he hides from the US, but lives in RU with issues is a political win for Putin.
They actually have parties in Russia.
Not the Blue/Red MAGA circlejerkAnd anybody who disparages Putin gets poisoned. It’s such a wonderful system, right?
Hey, it’s not true, poison is expensive these days, after all
Indeed, defenestration is making a comeback in Russia. The Prague tourism industry is in shambles. Nobody wants to see the second best.
yawn, sure
Thanks for the update. I didn’t know he had children, but I guess life moves on. I still think it is absolutely shameful that Europe wasn’t and isn’t able to allow Snowden to live in Europe.
They’re vassals to the empire. He wouldn’t be safe there anyway
The Europeans bucking the US would require them to not be vassals. But right now we see Germany trying to placate Trump and while France does a lot of saber rattling, they also aren’t going specifically against the US. Only Spain is currently defying the US, but only insofar that they don’t allow the US to conduct its war of choice with Iran from spanish soil. They are not opposing the US on anything that isn’t as clear cut morally. That’s a lot of words for saying yes, unfortunately, Europe, and Germany above all, is too cowardly to defend what is right against the US. The only opposition allowed against the US is bureaucratic opposition. And even that is failing.
♥️
All whistleblowers need our support
Doesn’t he live in Russia now? Probably not.
Suddenly you don’t hear about P.Diddy as well
Is he active somewhere and posts so one can follow?
Celebrating the singular person most responsible for Trump initially taking power is always weird to see because it is usually by people who you’d presume are Anti-Trump-Putin-Netanyah. I guess if you don’t read further into it other than “he leaked us gubberment secrets cool” he is a cool guy.
could you elaborate on that a bit?
He gave the NSA’s tools of influence and power over the internet to Russia. It is pretty self elaborating is there anything in particular you want to discuss?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
No, none of that is correct. He exposed the government metadata collection program to the Gaurdian, then the Obama administration revoked his passport while he was changing flights in Russia and he was forced to seek asylum there. There’s no evidence that he gave the Russians any classified materials, and he’s long maintained that the only materials took were shared wirh the Gaurdian.
In fact, your own Wikipedia article that you just shared mentions Snowden exactly once, in a footnote, and it links to an article in which Snowden criticizes Wikileaks for being careless in how it handled the DNC email leaks. The idea that Snowden helped Russia hack the 2016 election is ahistorical nonsense based on recycled intelligence community lies that were adopted by liberals who don’t know the difference between Snowden and Assange.
His passport was revoked while he was still in Hong Kong. You don’t need a passport to be deported. He’s in Russia because Putin wants him there, not because of passport issues.
His passport was cancelled less than 24 hours before his arrival in Russia. Either he was already in transit when the passport was cancelled, the Hong Kong government was not aware of the cancellation when they let him leave, or Hong Kong fudged the paperwork because they were getting heavy pressure from the U.S. to extradite Snowden and they wanted him gone. To my knowledge, it’s still unclear which of those is true, but in any case, he says he was headed to Ecuador, he had Ecuadorian emergency travel documents, and other famous leakers like Assange have gone to Ecuador for aid, so there’s really no reason to doubt that claim.
Ooo great bullshit but I never said anything about hacked I said influence and power then linked to an article about russia’s influence and power.
If you have to make shit up to engage just fuck off seriously what is the point?
You said Snowden, “gave the NSA’s tools of influence and power over the internet to Russia.” This did not happen. There is no evidence he shared anything with the Russian government, he has long denied that he gave the Russian government any of the materials he took with him, and the only people who suggested otherwise are security agency hacks who tried to smear him in 2014. You’re treating old, unsubstantiated accusations of Snowden passing materials to Russia as proof that he materially helped them influence the 2016 election. It’s absolute nonsense.
Wtf is that dude’s reading comprehension? Good on you for debunking him lol.
Well, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. A lot of the, “but her emails,” crowd weren’t paying attention to the Snowden leaks because it happened under Obama. They conflate Manning, Snowden, and Assange. They don’t know the difference between Wikileaks and the Snowden disclosures. They just remember, “Snowden, hacker, leaks, Russia,” and assume it has something to do wirh Wikileaks publishing the DNC emails that Russia hacked. It’s especially pissing me off right now, given that Congress is trying to quietly pass an extension of FISA, and even though it gives Trump a massive domestic spying tool, there is a bipartisan effort to get it through.
I’ll take the intelligence community over the pinky promise of a traitor any day.
You’ll clearly believe anything, even if you don’t understand it. Explain what you think Snowden did that materially help the Russians? How did a metadata collection program help hack John Podesta’s emails? Or build Russian troll farms? Share one intelligence source that you think made a credible case that Snowden shared information with the Russians.
The entirety of your belief that Snowden helped Russia influence the 2016 election is based on the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, “maybe he shared Intelligence with the Russians, we don’t know,” in 2014. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
If what I read at the time is accurate Snowden was not at all selective in what he grabbed and some people probably died because of him.
It’s good you wrote here then, because you are wrong. Snowden wasn’t being specific in what he grabbed, but he closely worked with Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian to publicize what he grabbed. There is a whole Wikipedia article of the release, which makes only one mention of irresponsible disclosure putting an agent at risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures . Also Snowden himself was demanding agents not be exposed.
Now, who most likely got a lot of agents killed is the leaker in chief, Trump himself.
Thanks, I will check these links out. Based on the comments I was getting I figured I must be way off base on this one.
Glenn Greenwald
Yeah, anyone whose career ends up with a Rumble show is problematic.
Does seem like something snapped in Glen Greenwald. Once a good investigative journalist. Now a conspiracy freak.
That dude was never a good investigative journalist. https://reddthat.com/comment/26181758
Yes. The Snowden leaks happened in the pre-brain-snap era. Back then Greenwald was a respected investigative journalist.
They made a movie about him too. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4044364
He was specific in what he released. He released a list of compromised Chinese systems in order to try to gain asylum in Hong Kong, which is the first place he went to. China kicked him out of the country, so he had to change plans. Edit: ~~https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259508/edward-snowden-us-government-has-been-hacking-hong-kong-and-china~~ see below
How do you read into that article that he handed a list of compromised systems to chinese authorities?
Those sources still don’t say that Snowden gave information to china. He talked to a newspaper. And to that newspaper he confirmed that, among other places, the NSA hacked chinese computers. No mention of a quid pro quo.
That newspaper is a Chinese newspaper, now an English propaganda apparatus of the Chinese government. Why do you think Snowden went to Hong Kong to begin with? Why do you think he specifically knew he had those documents in his trove of documents that he claimed he didn’t look at?
The conspiracy-brain is strong in you. But there are perfectly rational arguments for all your allegations. Snowden went to Hong Kong, because it offers comparably high living standards to the US and was still somewhat free back then, while being squarely outside of the US sphere of influence. So he didn’t need to fear being extradited or kidnapped while being able to take advantage of the freedom of the press that existed back then in Hong Kong.
He absolutely had some idea of what information he had at hand, as he was able to give the journalists pointers on what to report on first. Furthermore, the first reporting that SCMP did that you linked was on June 13th. The first reporting done on the leaked material was done by the Guardian on June 5th, so by the time Snowden gave the interview to SCMP, he and the journalists had to have dug through the material already.
The SCMP is, as you said, a chinese newspaper. So it absolutely makes sense that they’d ask China-focussed questions like “Were there chinese systems compromised?”
There has been absolutely no reporting on Snowden meeting with chinese officials.
I mean Trump requested a top secret list of CIA assets in Russia. Had a “private” meeting with Putin kicking everyone out of the room. A month later 80% of those assets were dead…
and allowed troops to be slaughtered by russia too.
How would be you be selective if you have time constraints and the NSA is on your butt anytime?
Think about it. He could have been selective at home where he had plenty of time. And he was never really caught, was he?
He was though… He was in hong long, got kicked out from us pressure, fled to costa Rica or smth with a stop in russia, but the us got his foreign passport invalidated so russia kept him there.
Passport revocation means nothing in this case. He left Hong Kong after his passport was revoked because China didn’t want him. He couldn’t leave Russia because Putin wanted him.
I just gave the story from his Autobiography
That dude has a history of not understanding what is going on. The only thing the passport revocation did was give Russia an additional excuse to tell him to keep him in the airport instead of allowing him to meet people outside the airport while they figured out what to do with him. They could have let him out of the airport or onto an airplane at any time. There is no requirement for travel documents to deport someone from your country.
Obviously, but they couldn’t have technically (important word here) held him there without the revocation
Or maybe the government who punishes people for breaking the law shouldn’t break the damn law and put those peoples lives in danger themselves doing so.
Ah the good old regime’s ‘he put brave US operatives in danger’
Interesting, how it’s all turned out to be some kind of deep fsb infiltration campaign for the sake of testing their interception of information and people of great importance. This dude anyway probably was their triple agent or something. Moreover, information received back then still helps them to establish dominance of chinazis and rasians over dtrump and massive part of us intelligence, compromising whole us as a state. Damn shame people are letting some bunch of degenerates like fsb and mss to sorta rule over them.
Those are … Words!
Well, some of them are…
And the ones that are words are in the wrong order
wut?
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