Edward Snowden made an appearance on TED this past week to discuss his actions. Berners-Lee gets some stage time here too. Interesting to see TED be a stage like this. A lot of their talks from the last couple months have been super boring… this is pretty much the opposite of boring.
A senior official from the NSA gets the TED stage in response to the Snowden appearance.
Snowden comes off as expected. I’m sure he’s had a lot of time to prepare his words for these types of opportunities.
The NSA guy takes a while to hit his stride with a lot of umms and aahhhhss but eventually gives a fairly compelling counterpoint to Snowden and Chris anderson.
Personally I appreciate his sacrifice for the potential betterment of the country. Knowing what he knows and what is public about our justice system and current security state I would not want to just turn myself in either. He would be made an example of for all the wrong reasons. Detention and torture, and somehow the crafty DOJ will make a legal case for it. Shit look at what they did to Bradley Manning, that turned him into a girl!
delicate balance between security and autocracy though. both sides have some merit. the fact that the US is confronting this decision this openly is why the US is the US… that’s a compliment too. it’s just a shame that people have to give up their lives to bring it to the fore.
Eesh. The NSA Director was hard to pay attention to.
I think it’s fairly clear that Snowden’s intentions by releasing information was anything but malicious, which is what makes his exile and espionage charge a bit overkill. Not to mention that there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence that his actions put anyone’s life at risk. I’m really impressed with his interviews. He seems like a level headed dude that knew he was giving up his life to try and help his country.
somewhere some level headed dude in the CIA or NSA or whatever who isnt totally drunk off the kool-aid could put together a pretty concise case about how these leaks and the wikileaks case do in fact put people’s lives at risk and costs the country hundreds of millions of dollars and do reduce security even if only temporarily while the security industry regroups and repositions… the counter-point to that is that they never should have produced leakable leaks that would create this kind of backlash.
the counter point to that is that no matter how far they went before being found out it always would have been too far… if they had of gone twice as far as they already have (relatively speaking - i dont know what that would be) we would still be exactly as upset and Snowden would be in exactly the same position. Had they been found out to have only have gone half as far as they have (again relatively speaking and i dont have an analogy) we would still feel exactly the same about it.
in the end this is the process we get to go through that the Chinese or Russians will not get the chance to go through. YAY AMERICA!!!