On 6/16/2015 7:13 AM, John Young wrote:
WikiLeaks WikiTweets only .05% of Snowden documents have been
declassified for release by the spy-micking hoarders, out of nearly 1M.
Cryptome tallies 7% of Guardian's magically variable 58,000 or .02%
of DoD's defense industry mass overkill 1.7M.
The reason for this is the work that all of these institutes do. It is bigger then what an individual or, is some cases, a small group can accomplish. And can easily be undermined if details are published. Who is it to say that what CIA has been doing is not in U.S. best interest. You? Me?

How many people know that the institute been used as a road to power? 5? 10? 10.000? We know that in hindsight Bush Senior during his days as the captain was very much so into promoting his own agenda. He did things that if you and me would do 'm we'd be locked up, gassed or otherwise effectively terminated. An agenda, that in is own head, is in the best interest of the U.S.

How does the institute itself look upon itself? We don't know. But most likely they are EXACTLY what I'd expect from the U.S. public in general:
If it were that easy to breed even a thing as consensus among the American public, to whom admitting to be false or admitting that they do not hold all the key information is far more likely to be interpreted as a personal attack then parsed on a rational level as self-criticism... the enablers of many mad politicians would have a hard(er) time.

I can tell you that any low-level contractor or employee with brains looks upon the three-letter institutes and sees exactly that. And they are even allowed to. Ed walked around the office in a EFF sweater. And the CIA very well knows that they can not change that mentality.

So accountability does JACK SHIT. Transparency does not change the equation, because, people cling to power. And even now a lot of things are out there, in the open, we, as a nation are still O.K. with electing Jeb Bush into office (I think he'll win).

However, bending, massaging the general public in a slow, but very effective way does yield it's rewards. As we know, Ed's work steered/stirred public debate on some level.

This affirms the Snowden-idolizing MSM are hardly better journalism
than Sunday Times at customary citizen-subject-consumer
hoodwinking relying on rhetorical exaggeration with minimal
substantiation, that is, following the model of royalty, official spies
and commercial public relations (bestow on Apple's CEO for
lying about iSpookery), why even, pardon the ad disruption,
cryptosecurity everywhere floggers, nay, nay, hordes of educators
indenturing wage slaves, religious hustlers token-sucking the poorest
tax-avoiding the richest, and not worth slathering horse-dookie on
Lady Gaga Godiva, bloated governments wielding the armaments
of utter obedience for most none for a few.

It is a cultural issue. It is not like people are going to suffer from cognitive dissonance if they do not allow themselves to peep outside of the box.

Which, clang cymbol, why demand only NSA stop it, stop
stomping invented civlib, why not demand all the world's spies
close shop, defuse the PALs of the WMD terrorists. Spies beget
world's worst spies, govs beget world's worst govs, biz begets
world's worst biz, secperts beget, so on, to wit, shit methane.


That sounds quite nihilistic. People will do what ever they can come up with. Unless someone tells them: "No, you can not do this. And if you do, I'm here to stop you." However, as long as people cling to power, the enablers so to speak, are there will be hard times ahead for people that are on the shitty end of the shtick. 

Tis a damn lie, verily a rigged stat, a TED yip, that some official
secrecy is okay (Schneier, most secperts) just not too much, that is,
my secrecy, my NSA protection racket sold to world spies and
clueless public as costly and methaney, is perfume, yours is
RU and CN bowel gas -- as mirrored by RU and CN.

True. Especially if it is concerned a people's government. But that would re-frame reality in which secrets serve a purpose. Most battles are preceded by a conspiracy of some kind. A conspiracy usually requires a great deal of security. And I'd like to venture into saying that people in power will not give up the power they legitimately have. Ever. Most of the public debate has been polarized to the point that people planting themselves on the middle ground of any argument are eaten by both sides anyway. There is a reason why people are closed gays, atheists, black, smurfs, anarchists, etcetera. If everyone would be as understanding as you and I we would not have to have this discussion in the first place.

But we don't live in that world. People do hurt each other per-emptively because of a difference in culture, color, flag etc.

At 12:20 AM 6/16/2015, you wrote:
On 06/15/2015 05:13 PM, zaki@manian.org wrote:

<SNIP>

> 2. There was a period of time when the Snowden cache was controlled
> primarily by journalists with limited organizational support. Many bad
> things could have happened. It is still mysterious if they did.

Indeed.

> 3.It also seems likely that competing services had access to many of the
> same documents as Snowden did. It seems reasonable to assume there were
> more people exfiltrating docs for private benefit than for public benefit
> on the top secret network.

Well damn, they could have been decent enough to post them on Cryptome
or WikiLeaks ;) Even a hidden service site with a paywall would have
been cool ;)

> 4. What standard should organizations who handle secret information be held
> to? The Intercept has hired some of top practitioners in the field. Is that
> good enough? Less well funded institutions?

What does "be held to" mean? By whom?

> On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 11:10 AM, <dan@geer.org> wrote:
>
>>  | Glenn Greenwald at The//Intercept on The Sunday Times birdcage liner
>>  | 'reporting' that brought the story to press.
>>  |
>>  |
>> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/14/sunday-times-report-snowden=
>>  | -files-journalism-worst-also-filled-falsehoods/
>>
>>
>> If Snowden had zero copies and Greenwald/Poitras had the originals,
>> then any Russo-Chinese fiddling with those originals was the result
>> of having stolen them from Greenwald/Poitras, not Snowden.
>>
>> As the world turns,
>>
>> --dan
>>
>>
>