Why do those people think "it's ok" for NSA to hack Huawei's servers? Is it ok for China to hack Google's servers, then? You can't have it both ways. Also, I remember Obama saying that a "cyberattack" is just as bad as a real world attack. That reinforces the fact it's bad for both China <i>and</i> US to be doing these sort of attacks - unless they are outright calling each other "war rivals".<p>This is still very much WW2 thinking that you need to have spies within a country and hack into them <i>at all times</i>. It also exposes US for its hypocrisy, because until now they've only said about "how bad China is for hacking others". Something tells me they'll shut up about that now.<p>I also disagree with the Lawfare guy. Here's the thing, if either NSA or CIA starts conflicts abroad, then it's <i>very much in the interest of the US public</i>. The people deserve to know when it's the <i>US</i> starting conflicts for various reasons, otherwise they'll only experience the <i>backlash</i> from those conflicts, and they'll <i>wrongly</i> think that country is the aggressor. And of course the US government will do whatever it can to paint them like that, too. This is why it's so important in such cases to unveil the truth, even if it "damages national security".<p>Governments are often led by corrupt psychopaths, and the people should know the truth so it can stop its own government, before creating a major crisis that everyone will pay for with blood. The American people deserve to know if the US gov is pissing off China with its hacks, to the brink of war, just like the Chinese people deserve to know if its own government is doing the same with its cyberattacks against US. Either way, the people need to know, and secret ops should be kept at a minimum.
A big takeaway is in the second point:<p>>By publishing yesterday’s Huawei story, the NYT obviously made the editorial judgment that these revelations are both newsworthy and in the public interest, should be disclosed, and will not unduly harm “American national security.” For reasons I explain below, I agree with that choice.<p>>But if you disagree – if you want to argue that this NSA story is reckless, dangerous, treasonous or whatever – then have the courage to take it up with the people who reached the opposite conclusion: in this case, the editors and reporters of the NYT (indeed, as former DOJ official Jack Goldsmith observed[1], the <i>NYT‘s Huawei story was “based on leaks other than the Snowden documents</i>”).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/03/the-nyt-on-nsas-huawei-penetration/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/03/the-nyt-on-nsas-huawei-pe...</a>
It's not just "US Journalists Against Transparency” up in arms about this release, apparently popular opinion is mixed too, as evidenced by the reddit comment section on the NYT article submission [1]. This firstlook.org article is important in that it highlights how journalists and editorial boards are deciding what to publish.<p>However, this safeguard is made more problematic by the fact that journalists outside of the US have access to the same set of documents and don't have the same degree of concern over exposing US national security interests.<p>I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published. I liked the irony of the NSA deeming it necessary to compromise telecom equipment while simultaneously declaring said equipment unsuitable for use in the US since it may have back doors. On the other hand, this does seem like an expected function of the NSA best left implicit instead of explicitly exposed.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2139b3/snowden_documents_reveal_nsa_breached_servers_of/cg98hcl" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2139b3/snowden_do...</a>
The book, apparently soon going to be published in Germany, from which Der Spiegel and the NYT took the Huawei story for their last articles:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.de/Der-NSA-Komplex-Edward-Snowden-Überwachung/dp/3421046581" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.de/Der-NSA-Komplex-Edward-Snowden-Überwach...</a><p>The article by Der Spiegel:<p><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chinese-government-and-networking-firm-huawei-a-960199.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chine...</a><p>The information is already internationally known no matter what the NYT decides to cover. The NYT was only able to decide if they are going to be the first to report it or to leave it to some other (U.S.?) media.<p>Can anybody really imagine supporting U.S. doing censorship like this:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989#Censorship_in_China" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...</a>
> these journalists argue that these revelations are unjustified, even treasonous, because this is the type of spying the NSA should be doing<p>No, the NSA should NOT be doing this. It's not done to prevent any attacks on the US, it's simply economic espionage. It's economic warfare. It doesn't belong in any "democratic" country.
I found these parts interesting:<p>> <i>Now, obviously, anyone is free to agree or disagree with Snowden’s framework for how these materials be handled and reported. I personally think the process of government consultation is often used to suppress newsworthy information, though for the NSA stories I’ve worked on, government arguments to suppress information have been rejected in at least 99% of the cases; I also think non-traditional outlets such as WikiLeaks have done a superior job in many cases with reporting classified documents than government-loyal traditional outlets.</i><p>Ok, so mention how people can disagree with Snowdens framework, mention suppression of information through traditional media outlets (NYT, Guardian, etc), mention the superior job non-traditional outlets have had when it comes to classified documents with WL as the example, and some how trying to put Firstlook on the same pedestal indirectly if we ignore or are ignorant of the conception of the two identities/orgs? Amusing.<p>><i>But what you shouldn’t feel free to do is ignore that this is the framework on which Snowden insisted. You shouldn’t demand that journalists violate their agreements with him (by publishing all the documents) unless you are willing to admit that this is what you’re advocating. And you definitely shouldn’t pretend that it’s Snowden, rather than these media outlets, who are making the choices about what gets published in order to demonize him for the latest disclosures you dislike while cowardly refusing to criticize the media outlets that actually made the choice to publish them.</i><p>Because amongst this "public service" that is to determine what is "public interest", there remains the profiteering of the "leaks" (that have been mentioned to the public by Binney, Drake and many others in the past to some degree), kind of makes this moral argument to the sanctity of an agreement between multiple parties (founded on treasonous grounds if you would ask the Five Eyes) pretty laughable.
If I were to export a single chip to Iran, I would be a legitimate target of NSA. When Huawei sold network monitoring equipment to Iran -- knowing full well that equipment is used to target and kill people, and in contravention of US export laws -- they made themselves legitimate targets of the NSA.
You know guys, to be fair... with all these stories coming about Snowden revelations, it's not very clear how this information is obtained or revealed. Until now I had been actually wondering why the stuff is coming out piecemeal. If I, a person who is interested in this kind of stuff and reads HN quite a bit, could have missed the mechanism of how NSA stories are reported -- for months, mind you -- then so can other more vocal people. Including journalists.<p>In short ... this info should be more widely disseminated.
Greenwald quotes Goldsmith in saying that this information was received from sources "other than Snowden", while the articles that both cite (the NYT and der Spiegel) state expressly that the information did come from Mr. Snowden's releases.<p>I'm not sure what to make of the argument that by releasing the trove of documents to journalists (instead of, say, as a big torrent) Snowden is absolved of complicity in any releases of information. That almost sounds like doublespeak. It also suggests that he either didn't know what he was releasing or didn't understand all of its ramifications. Both could be permissible (and, indeed, given the things that we have learned from the releases, is probably laudable from at least a utilitarian perspective), but it complicates the idea of Snowden as a brave truth-teller. Then again, that whole thought is filtered through the lens of this particular piece, in which Greenwald seems to be trying to separate a part of the leaks and recontextualize it separate from the other, definitely necessary stories.