Posted by the-mitr 12 hours ago
It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
1. https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/18/2002875198/-1/-1/0/NSA...
During my career I signed dozens of NDAs. They were all either umbrella or caveat specific. All of them cited Title 18 referencing punishments (including death) for violations of the NDA, and all of them were related to either Title 10 or Title 50 activities.
Without being too specific, what I observed was the use of NSA assets to surveil grow operations within the US. It was explained to me that it began with Ronald Reagan's War On Drugs.
I've seen much worse since then while supporting Waived / Unacknowledged programs. Present classification requirements dictate that those be reviewed for declassification after 40 years, but they will never see the light of day because all documentation is destroyed at the end of the program and not archived anywhere.
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
Most people on HN? Definite no. Most people on HN who work in roles where they're exposed to such mass surveillance or other evil at scale (like Meta)? Absolutely not.
What a different world we'd be living in, if the (back then, at least supposedly) greatest democracy would have shown the way to a universal safety net.
How fucking sad that we ended in a world where the finders of flaws or zerodays are being suppressed and prosecuted, instead of allowing them to make the world a better place.
A handful of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths now hold almost all power with these structures.
At least now the pretense of democracy is dropped.
It truly is. I can’t emphasize this enough.
Yeah the solution is to not put yourself into a position where you need to make these choices. The fuel for the fire that are organizations like the CIA are people who don't have moral qualms or who have flexible ones.
The less people who work for these organizations the better.
If all the people of conscience quit, they are left with a workforce without a conscience, which I guess is pretty much what they have now, at least in certain areas.
That’s a good thing.
It isn’t really a radical or counterintuitive thing to say ‘don’t do evil work for evil people.’
People who give mealy mouth excuses like ‘I was just following orders’ or ‘I was just a contractor’ are part of the problem.
That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.
What happens when people with conscience leave legitimate institutions is that they lose legitimacy. Now you have a legitimate institution with power and no conscience, and a myriad of non-legitimate institutions with little power and some conscience.
This is a strictly worse situation to be in.
It's been thirteen years since Snowden, and twenty years since Mark Klein, and there have been no real reforms in the system, people continue to work for them, and with them and it's only gotten worse.
The course of action that you suggest is exactly what has lead America into a Mad King scenario with big tech oligarchs and theocratic running the show with China on the cusp of becoming the world hegemon.
People keep chasing that carrot, keep working for the man and the end result is that they to chase that carrot a little bit harder, burning them out until the man replaces them with someone new just as eager to chase that carrot a little harder.
And all along the way the noose around all of us tightens a little bit more the temperature outside gets a little bit hotter and America's grip on the world weakens.
Where does this go?
Which do you think works better--protesting/suing the people making the decision? Or being the person making the decision? It's much harder to change the course of law from the outside, without access to power. The problem is that power corrupts.
Either works if enough people care enough. Maybe instead of blaming the messengers for not putting their own careers on the line, you should blame all the people who just didn't care at all?
You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?
Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.
I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.
However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.
But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?
Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?
And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!
You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.
We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.
The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.
Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.
Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.
You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last 20 years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.
It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.
Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.
The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.
It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.
Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.
Here's the Safety Ladder that exploits Fears to justify anything - Why are you doing X?
We are doing it for your safety.
We are doing it for the safety of your family.
We are doing it to keep the org and thousands of jobs afloat.
We are doing it to save the country
Reducing peoples fears, not increasing them is the only path to prevent the entire chimp troupe quickly climbing that ladder any time something unpredictable happens.
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
From the inside, talking to coworkers definitely seems risky. If they are not like minded, they could report you. It'd have been better to just have quit at that point.
Because of all of that, "ethical" leaking really does seem like the only option left. It's then a matter of can the leaker live with the consequences.
I know HNers don't like "surveillance everywhere", but...
if you're some law enforcement, every chance to get info means hours/days saved on your work... so you reach for the "easy-way": if you can get comms of a drug gang, you can identify who belongs to that gang (instead of risking their own life by actually 'joining' the gang)
But... some do cross their lines (eg watching comms of their ex, getting paid by political actors to listen over opponents, etc)
it's not like law enforcements are 100% bad guys, but things are "complicated"
So - sure - it’s the “right thing to do” to speak out, but when dealing with government you have to do it with the foreknowledge that this may have mortal (or worse) consequences for you and your family.
Profoundly formative experience for me, witnessing it all.
The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.
In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).
The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.
Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".
Words mean nothing. They can be interpreted how ever they need to be interpreted by those in power.
Crash carts sat unattended, usually a screen filled with porn and a cable running on the floor to the nearest tap. I got the feeling that many of the techs were hosting porn sites as a side gig.
On my second visit, in plain sight, was new construction. A corner of the room with what looked like four inch fiber bundles going in and out. One dusty, one fresh. Taped dry-wall, unpainted. If the door wasn't so fancy you'd never look twice.
Is that...? Dude grimaced and nodded.
I worked data centers for my IBEW apprenticeships — during Snowden revelations — and it was definitely "confusing" knowing that all the technology they said didn't exist existed. "Black, LLC" didn't officially exist/make connections among our clientele.
Unless you were actively vandalizing our public infrastructure, I never questioned anybody's presence/activities on our datafloors.
Probably security is tons better now, but the social entries are still most-commonable.
Can't wait to read Cohn's book.
Also RIP Mark Klein. A true American hero who never tried to turn his whistle-blowing into becoming a celebrity.
That's a better outcome than I'd feared.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.
Or you don't control your key material.
Or your tech supply chain.
Or leave your device unattended.
Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.
I could go on...
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.
1: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-0...
2: https://www.newsweek.com/new-documents-shed-light-cias-conne...
j/k It's a good excerpt, and makes me want to read the book.
We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing.
The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!