How did we travel so far from the original vision of the internet as the one place humans could communicate and organize free of state and corporate control?
Recently Barack Obama talked about "truth decay." There would be less decay if people like Snowden were treated as patriots instead of criminals. We need an independent press that makes room for Greenwald, Taibbi, Hedges and so many more!
The early internet was inherently a techno-geek paradise. Techno-geeks built it, ran it, and used it. Almost nobody else did any of those things. But the commercial interests couldn't be kept out.
The second coming of (e.g.) America Online as an internet "destination" is symptomatic. It is representative of a hundred million boomers invading a space they don't understand, being horrified at the behaviour of the dirty hippies, and calling the national guard.
I'm less trusting than Snowden when he says that the internet tech giants didn't want the burden of censoring the internet. They didn't do anything to resist it and they are now, as he readily concedes, the primary engine of censorship. What they really wanted was the easy ride that tax free concessions and non-publisher legal protections afforded. They were willing to do almost anything to gain those benefits and plainly they are willing to do almost anything to keep them. Including the most eye-watering Clapper-like lies to Congress.
I won't even start on how many of them are only in business because they were directly financed by the spooks from the beginning or were plucked out of obscurity and talked up globally by intelligence assets in the media.
The trenchant point is that it is the very attributes that made the internet attractive to thinking people - the freedom, the anonymity, the incredibly low cost - that most threatened the established gatekeepers who are now hellbent on destroying those very attributes. The irony (my favorite dish) is that Twitter and facebook and YouTube are de-platforming some of their most profitable content providers. There's a saying that proposes that any organisation that is fully converged on the pursuit of social justice objectives can no longer perform its original functions. The internet tech giants are actively trying to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs, to limit their own reach, to not merely alienate but ban large portions of their target addressable markets. They are emulating the print media's suicidal affair with the deep state and the consequences can only be the same.
I agree with a lot of points Snowden brings up here.
However, I would believe his cause with the Freedom of the Press Foundation even more, if they wouldn't accept donations from lobbyist organisations like the Open Society Foundation.
Their close relationships to governments is exactly what he was explaining in the interview. However that can change and hopefully is improved in the near future.
In the beginning of the video Snowden talks about private email services. He belonged to one, called Lavabit. Not only was encryption encouraged, but Lavabit would not give out any information about their users. They would not even confirm or deny that a user existed on their service. After Snowden was identified, Lavabit was hit with a federal court order demanding certain information and possibly the need for the federal government to install its own snooper software on the site. On August 9, 2013, the owner of Lavabit announced the service was shutting down after 10 years. They had challenged the government’s right and lost in a secret court hearing. Almost immediately other private encrypted mail services also shutdown.
McCullagh also speculated that Lavabit had been served with a court order to intercept passwords and encryption keys in a Google+ post that is no longer available. And, as far as I know, private email services still face the same pressures that Lavabit faced in 2013.
Ladar Levinson offered a prescient warning this is still good advice today:
“This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
"Didn't we all learn this point early on in school: there are criminals in the world, and allowing the police to break down our doors without warrants would help criminals be caught. Despite that fact, we don't allow the police to break down our doors without warrants, because the police can catch criminals by searching homes only when they have warrants, a process enshrined in the Constitution in order to avoid the inevitable abuse that comes from allowing the Government to search our homes without any oversight. Thus, people (such as the Founders) who favor the warrant requirement before the police can search our homes aren't pro-criminal. They know that criminals can be caught while preventing government abuse and lawlessness. Why is it so hard -- for some people -- to apply that same, quite basic reasoning to eavesdropping and all other forms of surveillance?"
Glenn Greenwald, in 2006, How it started...and how it's going.
I first got on the internet in the late 1970s, LONG before most people even knew it existed.
There was no "web" then, it was mostly bulletin boards of various types, "list-serves" which evolved into something called "usenet" (which is topic-based), a very early and by modern standards primitive email system, and other text-only features.
My favorite "site" was called "The Source". It was a big computer and we who connected in effect were time-share users, though The Source didn't call us or their system that. Perhaps their most impressive feature was / were various live feeds from news outlets around the world including the Associated Press. ... You could set up "filters" based on keywords you'd give and then it would put articles that contained the patterns you gave it into your email in-box.
I got to the internet via a modem, at first acoustic-coupled where you'd literally plug your telephone hand-set into the device, and later I had a "d-cat" - direct-coupling (that is, via an RJ-11 plug just like the then-new "modular jack" telephone connectors).
Before the '70s were out, I got a job as a computer programmer and wrote an operating system for the TANO Outpost - this is LONG before Windows and Microsoft had just been founded - they were pedaling this primitive operating system called DOS, which was antiquated the day it was released, truly technically inferior (Gates surely didn't make his money due to technical superiority of his products!)... ... I wrote the networking software for the Outpost so it could talk with other computers, though it was all for private networking, usually via dedicated phone lines known as a T-1.
I later, in the early '80s, joined Digital Equipment Corp (variously "DEC" or "Digital"). DEC had the world's largest known network of computers in the world - connecting its own people! That network was done via something called Decnet and Digital sold that ability to others - the DEC-internal network was by the mid 1980s some tens of thousands of nodes. And Digital was busy working on improving the networking and at one point I worked on their most important networking team and helped develop DHCP - Distributed Host Control Protocol - which is still used today.
If I recall correctly, Decnet's original protocol, the first version of which was known as CSMACD - Carrier Sense, Multi-Access, Collision Detect - transmitted fairly large data packets to multiple computers simultaneously using a large diameter coaxial cable. They then added several other networking techniques because CSMACD was intended for local area networks and it would be nice to have remote connectivity, of course. And, eventually they went with small diameter coaxial cable as used on cable-TV at the time (and still).
As all that was happening, I also helped a little with this new fangled thing - new to us anyway - called Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. TCP, later TCP/IP (the IP for Internet Protocol) would break up messages into smaller sizes. This lowered total throughput on a good line but on a bad line it worked better since a re-send of a big data packet is more expensive than sending a little one. BUT, TCP is point-to-point.
...The internet is really all based on computer networking, so these technologies were maturing in the mid 1980s. By the early '90s, I had moved on to database systems and joined a company working as a high-dollar consultant. Because of that role, and because of my technical background, I got to visit a substantial fraction the larger computing sites in the world - everyone from Boeing, hundreds of universities, large government facilities, you name it. And one of my key interests was the networking, so I'd ask how people were doing what they were doing....
At that time, the internet primarily consisted of one or more computers at a given site dedicated to the network. If you wanted to be on the internet, you'd have to volunteer to host a node and the dedicated networking lines to get the data in and out. And, of course, you'd also have to volunteer the technical talent to run the system(s). Everybody cooperated, donated time and resources, for the good of all.
So, as a user, you'd have to have some way to get to the network, such as in my own case, I had a computer on my desk connected to the company's internal network. If I wanted to send an email to someone in another company, I had to use our "email gateway," and how to do that depended on what kind of computer you had on your desk. Some of us had Unix boxes - you can think of Unix as an older version of Linux - and I was lucky having both Unix and VAX/VMS access, so I had multiple ways of getting to the internet other people didn't have, which occasionally was useful in overcoming some kind of technical problem. ...If I wanted to get online from home, I'd use "telnet" and these modem phone-banks for dial-up service and from there I could get into my computers at work and from there to the internet.
During that period, there was no web yet, no web browsers, etc, and it was mostly still as it was back on The Source except that now sound, images, video and other content had been standardized reasonably well. And, it became possible to log-in to other computers remotely and access their content "directly" as if you were logged in to a computer on your own desk (thanks to X-Windows). Not all that many people did this, but I liked it and still use the technique.
There were definitly security problems with this type of world, but there were few crackers, and most networking staff were pretty sharp and did a good job keeping things reasonable secure while also allowing many kinds of access. One common technique was to put content to be shared on a particular machine and then lock down access from that machine to the rest of an internal network. Rules like this made things pretty clumsy and nearly impossible for most corporate network users, but as I was a senior guy, I usually had system administrator privileges and could work around these issues.
Then, in about 1995, this all changed when the first web browsers, like Netscape, were launched and encryption started to truly come of age as well. At that point, the modern internet had been born, and in less than a year I was running my own web site. . . . THIS, I presume, is the Era that Snowden was thinking of - the second half of the 1990s...
Snowden pointed out the obvious problem that people expect advertising companies like Google and Facebook to protect free speech. Clearly, this expectation is wrong.
You're a breath of fresh air, Glenn. As a Millennial I'm not accustomed to paying for news content, because 90% of it is free, but your interview with Rogan, and your criticism of the militarism and corporatism on both sides of the aisle, convinced me of your sincere journalistic integrity (a characteristic in short supply today) and the need to support such integrity financially (in the hope it will grow). Finally, your exposure of the Hunter Biden scandal suppression, and criticism of all forms of social media and government censorship, makes it clear you are not a paid propagandist of the establishment (like many of your counterparts in the MSM) and you are willing to call bull$#!% on all censorship, even if it's not popular to do so. Keep up the good work
I love the way Mr. Snowdon closed the interview with, "Stay free." I've been saying that for a while now as a reply to those who use the banal "new normal" post-conversational salutation, "Stay safe!" I usually preface my reply with something like, "Safety is an illusion," just to clarify my point.
Sadly, in our (anything but) Brave New World, I suppose that has also become true of freedom.
Snowden signs off, "Stay free." You've done rather well on that score, Mr. Greenwald. Congratulations. I subscribed today simply because I value integrity in journalism. You've got it. It’s a rare quality in any profession in America today. I wish I could afford to give more.
How will Glenn’s operation grow ? Will he have staff and research capability moving forward ? I suspect everyone who joined his substack for $50 is on some watchlist kept by someone for some reason. All this Stasi like tracking and spying is so much wasted human energy.
Not very bright future ahead on freedom of speech and freedom of journalistic activities. Hope judgement on Julian Assange is a refusal of extradition, for himself of course in the first place, and also to may be open a window to go start reverse the course. Unfortunately we cannot think that we could have virtous governments in the western said democracies, which we should speak about really, as it is the point where it all starts.
Thanks for posting. I feel honored to be getting such information first hand early on in the news cycle. It has become impossible to ferret out the truth by reading both sides with all of their agitprop, feints and double dealing. Will Biden et al break up “big tech” or cut their own deal to continue keeping out Conservatives ?
How long before we are at “War” with the Neo Liberals returning to their seats of power and influence ?
Recently Barack Obama talked about "truth decay." There would be less decay if people like Snowden were treated as patriots instead of criminals. We need an independent press that makes room for Greenwald, Taibbi, Hedges and so many more!
Can I just say how much I admire the intelligence, clarity, integrity and humility of Edward Snowden? Thanks for having him, Glenn. Stay free.
The early internet was inherently a techno-geek paradise. Techno-geeks built it, ran it, and used it. Almost nobody else did any of those things. But the commercial interests couldn't be kept out.
The second coming of (e.g.) America Online as an internet "destination" is symptomatic. It is representative of a hundred million boomers invading a space they don't understand, being horrified at the behaviour of the dirty hippies, and calling the national guard.
I'm less trusting than Snowden when he says that the internet tech giants didn't want the burden of censoring the internet. They didn't do anything to resist it and they are now, as he readily concedes, the primary engine of censorship. What they really wanted was the easy ride that tax free concessions and non-publisher legal protections afforded. They were willing to do almost anything to gain those benefits and plainly they are willing to do almost anything to keep them. Including the most eye-watering Clapper-like lies to Congress.
I won't even start on how many of them are only in business because they were directly financed by the spooks from the beginning or were plucked out of obscurity and talked up globally by intelligence assets in the media.
The trenchant point is that it is the very attributes that made the internet attractive to thinking people - the freedom, the anonymity, the incredibly low cost - that most threatened the established gatekeepers who are now hellbent on destroying those very attributes. The irony (my favorite dish) is that Twitter and facebook and YouTube are de-platforming some of their most profitable content providers. There's a saying that proposes that any organisation that is fully converged on the pursuit of social justice objectives can no longer perform its original functions. The internet tech giants are actively trying to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs, to limit their own reach, to not merely alienate but ban large portions of their target addressable markets. They are emulating the print media's suicidal affair with the deep state and the consequences can only be the same.
Few will mourn.
I agree with a lot of points Snowden brings up here.
However, I would believe his cause with the Freedom of the Press Foundation even more, if they wouldn't accept donations from lobbyist organisations like the Open Society Foundation.
Their close relationships to governments is exactly what he was explaining in the interview. However that can change and hopefully is improved in the near future.
Otherwise top notch interview!
In the beginning of the video Snowden talks about private email services. He belonged to one, called Lavabit. Not only was encryption encouraged, but Lavabit would not give out any information about their users. They would not even confirm or deny that a user existed on their service. After Snowden was identified, Lavabit was hit with a federal court order demanding certain information and possibly the need for the federal government to install its own snooper software on the site. On August 9, 2013, the owner of Lavabit announced the service was shutting down after 10 years. They had challenged the government’s right and lost in a secret court hearing. Almost immediately other private encrypted mail services also shutdown.
You can read all about it in an article in The Guardian by Glenn Greenwald. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/lavabit-shutdown-snowden-silicon-valley
CNET’s Declan McCullagh interviewed Lavabit’s owner, Ladar Levison, in October. https://www.cnet.com/news/lavabit-founder-says-he-fought-feds-to-protect-the-constitution/
McCullagh also speculated that Lavabit had been served with a court order to intercept passwords and encryption keys in a Google+ post that is no longer available. And, as far as I know, private email services still face the same pressures that Lavabit faced in 2013.
Ladar Levinson offered a prescient warning this is still good advice today:
“This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”
"Didn't we all learn this point early on in school: there are criminals in the world, and allowing the police to break down our doors without warrants would help criminals be caught. Despite that fact, we don't allow the police to break down our doors without warrants, because the police can catch criminals by searching homes only when they have warrants, a process enshrined in the Constitution in order to avoid the inevitable abuse that comes from allowing the Government to search our homes without any oversight. Thus, people (such as the Founders) who favor the warrant requirement before the police can search our homes aren't pro-criminal. They know that criminals can be caught while preventing government abuse and lawlessness. Why is it so hard -- for some people -- to apply that same, quite basic reasoning to eavesdropping and all other forms of surveillance?"
Glenn Greenwald, in 2006, How it started...and how it's going.
The man never changed, Gd bless him.
I first got on the internet in the late 1970s, LONG before most people even knew it existed.
There was no "web" then, it was mostly bulletin boards of various types, "list-serves" which evolved into something called "usenet" (which is topic-based), a very early and by modern standards primitive email system, and other text-only features.
My favorite "site" was called "The Source". It was a big computer and we who connected in effect were time-share users, though The Source didn't call us or their system that. Perhaps their most impressive feature was / were various live feeds from news outlets around the world including the Associated Press. ... You could set up "filters" based on keywords you'd give and then it would put articles that contained the patterns you gave it into your email in-box.
I got to the internet via a modem, at first acoustic-coupled where you'd literally plug your telephone hand-set into the device, and later I had a "d-cat" - direct-coupling (that is, via an RJ-11 plug just like the then-new "modular jack" telephone connectors).
Before the '70s were out, I got a job as a computer programmer and wrote an operating system for the TANO Outpost - this is LONG before Windows and Microsoft had just been founded - they were pedaling this primitive operating system called DOS, which was antiquated the day it was released, truly technically inferior (Gates surely didn't make his money due to technical superiority of his products!)... ... I wrote the networking software for the Outpost so it could talk with other computers, though it was all for private networking, usually via dedicated phone lines known as a T-1.
I later, in the early '80s, joined Digital Equipment Corp (variously "DEC" or "Digital"). DEC had the world's largest known network of computers in the world - connecting its own people! That network was done via something called Decnet and Digital sold that ability to others - the DEC-internal network was by the mid 1980s some tens of thousands of nodes. And Digital was busy working on improving the networking and at one point I worked on their most important networking team and helped develop DHCP - Distributed Host Control Protocol - which is still used today.
If I recall correctly, Decnet's original protocol, the first version of which was known as CSMACD - Carrier Sense, Multi-Access, Collision Detect - transmitted fairly large data packets to multiple computers simultaneously using a large diameter coaxial cable. They then added several other networking techniques because CSMACD was intended for local area networks and it would be nice to have remote connectivity, of course. And, eventually they went with small diameter coaxial cable as used on cable-TV at the time (and still).
As all that was happening, I also helped a little with this new fangled thing - new to us anyway - called Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. TCP, later TCP/IP (the IP for Internet Protocol) would break up messages into smaller sizes. This lowered total throughput on a good line but on a bad line it worked better since a re-send of a big data packet is more expensive than sending a little one. BUT, TCP is point-to-point.
...The internet is really all based on computer networking, so these technologies were maturing in the mid 1980s. By the early '90s, I had moved on to database systems and joined a company working as a high-dollar consultant. Because of that role, and because of my technical background, I got to visit a substantial fraction the larger computing sites in the world - everyone from Boeing, hundreds of universities, large government facilities, you name it. And one of my key interests was the networking, so I'd ask how people were doing what they were doing....
At that time, the internet primarily consisted of one or more computers at a given site dedicated to the network. If you wanted to be on the internet, you'd have to volunteer to host a node and the dedicated networking lines to get the data in and out. And, of course, you'd also have to volunteer the technical talent to run the system(s). Everybody cooperated, donated time and resources, for the good of all.
So, as a user, you'd have to have some way to get to the network, such as in my own case, I had a computer on my desk connected to the company's internal network. If I wanted to send an email to someone in another company, I had to use our "email gateway," and how to do that depended on what kind of computer you had on your desk. Some of us had Unix boxes - you can think of Unix as an older version of Linux - and I was lucky having both Unix and VAX/VMS access, so I had multiple ways of getting to the internet other people didn't have, which occasionally was useful in overcoming some kind of technical problem. ...If I wanted to get online from home, I'd use "telnet" and these modem phone-banks for dial-up service and from there I could get into my computers at work and from there to the internet.
During that period, there was no web yet, no web browsers, etc, and it was mostly still as it was back on The Source except that now sound, images, video and other content had been standardized reasonably well. And, it became possible to log-in to other computers remotely and access their content "directly" as if you were logged in to a computer on your own desk (thanks to X-Windows). Not all that many people did this, but I liked it and still use the technique.
There were definitly security problems with this type of world, but there were few crackers, and most networking staff were pretty sharp and did a good job keeping things reasonable secure while also allowing many kinds of access. One common technique was to put content to be shared on a particular machine and then lock down access from that machine to the rest of an internal network. Rules like this made things pretty clumsy and nearly impossible for most corporate network users, but as I was a senior guy, I usually had system administrator privileges and could work around these issues.
Then, in about 1995, this all changed when the first web browsers, like Netscape, were launched and encryption started to truly come of age as well. At that point, the modern internet had been born, and in less than a year I was running my own web site. . . . THIS, I presume, is the Era that Snowden was thinking of - the second half of the 1990s...
Snowden pointed out the obvious problem that people expect advertising companies like Google and Facebook to protect free speech. Clearly, this expectation is wrong.
I am glad to see that Mr. Snowden is doing well. I have ordered his book. Society has not rewarded him for his service and it is the least I can do
You're a breath of fresh air, Glenn. As a Millennial I'm not accustomed to paying for news content, because 90% of it is free, but your interview with Rogan, and your criticism of the militarism and corporatism on both sides of the aisle, convinced me of your sincere journalistic integrity (a characteristic in short supply today) and the need to support such integrity financially (in the hope it will grow). Finally, your exposure of the Hunter Biden scandal suppression, and criticism of all forms of social media and government censorship, makes it clear you are not a paid propagandist of the establishment (like many of your counterparts in the MSM) and you are willing to call bull$#!% on all censorship, even if it's not popular to do so. Keep up the good work
I love the way Mr. Snowdon closed the interview with, "Stay free." I've been saying that for a while now as a reply to those who use the banal "new normal" post-conversational salutation, "Stay safe!" I usually preface my reply with something like, "Safety is an illusion," just to clarify my point.
Sadly, in our (anything but) Brave New World, I suppose that has also become true of freedom.
Why does "theintercept.com" roll after the end credits? Aren't we finished with The Intercept?
Snowden signs off, "Stay free." You've done rather well on that score, Mr. Greenwald. Congratulations. I subscribed today simply because I value integrity in journalism. You've got it. It’s a rare quality in any profession in America today. I wish I could afford to give more.
How will Glenn’s operation grow ? Will he have staff and research capability moving forward ? I suspect everyone who joined his substack for $50 is on some watchlist kept by someone for some reason. All this Stasi like tracking and spying is so much wasted human energy.
Not very bright future ahead on freedom of speech and freedom of journalistic activities. Hope judgement on Julian Assange is a refusal of extradition, for himself of course in the first place, and also to may be open a window to go start reverse the course. Unfortunately we cannot think that we could have virtous governments in the western said democracies, which we should speak about really, as it is the point where it all starts.
Thanks for posting. I feel honored to be getting such information first hand early on in the news cycle. It has become impossible to ferret out the truth by reading both sides with all of their agitprop, feints and double dealing. Will Biden et al break up “big tech” or cut their own deal to continue keeping out Conservatives ?
How long before we are at “War” with the Neo Liberals returning to their seats of power and influence ?
Is Nation Building in vogue again ?