Edward Snowden, Ars, the NSA, and me: digging through the past

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/edward-snowden-digging-through-the-past-of-the-gamer-who-changed-the-world

by jadell • 13 years ago

142 31 13 years ago

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I remember seeing all my comp.sys.amiga posts return to life after DejaNews indexed them all. Shudder. I find it interesting to read peoples writings over the years to see where they have focussed and where they have moved on. Its like going through the boxes and boxes of snapshots which had been taken over the years. When my kids die, nearly their entire lives worth of bits of ephemera will probably be on some archive somewhere. Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography.

samstave• 13 years ago

There is a forum that I was active on daily since 2004, that was shut-off in 2008, though is still online in read-only-mode...

I like to go back and read some of my posts on there and I sit and go "wow - I can't believe I wrote that" -- but in a good way.

Other times I see stuff I wrote on there and feel it was from a completely different person!

tracker1• 13 years ago

I have to admit, a fair amount of my posts outside of conversations like this, have been because X pissed me off... Some not so nice at all. I think that it really comes down to being young or older today that sets it all apart. I think that some people with utilize anything they can get as a weapon. I also think that in the next decade, some of the HR weenies out there will really need to grow a brain and look beyond their big brother rules and roles. (And I will never care if an HR weenie sees this and is offended, if you can't take criticism find a less offensive profession.)

unimpressive2• 13 years ago

Sure will make for an interesting addendum to some famous persons biography.

The copyright status of forum posts probably means that they'll never be included in any book or work written this century except in the very limited form allowed by their authors. (Assuming that the current copyright ridiculousness is not quelled.) Which is too bad, as they're pretty interesting and I doubt their authors care so much unless you got rich off them.

arrrg• 13 years ago

Eh?

Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. Biographers can at the very least use all the available material for their writing. Even quoting non-substantial parts of someone else’s writing – something that could be copyright infringement – is pretty uncontroversial and legal. It falls under fair use. And not the wobbly part of fair use you can easily shot holes into. Especially if the quotes are embedded in a much larger work (say, a biography).

wyck• 13 years ago

Much ado about nothing.

geetee4• 13 years ago

Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing. We (collectively) can't hold the government to a standard that we can't even abide by.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing.

That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged.

I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.

geetee4• 13 years ago

I absolutely agree that private communication is a whole different ball game.

That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.

205guy• 13 years ago

You have to believe they do monitor all public postings, though that is a job in itself. 2 thoughts about that:

1) they could probably justify secret rooms and data gathering on the volume of public traffic alone. In other words if they are hitting the public APIs millions of times a day, Twitter, FB, et al. Would rather give them privileged access. Then whoops, might as well read all the private stuff as well.

2) just imagine the power of analyzing topics, trends, and personalities on all public forums across the Internet, US and international! Google indexes it, but what if the NSA were able to make sense of it somehow. From usernames and posting profiles alone (and maybe language analysis) they might be able to bullied a DB of online personas. Of course, if they could read everybody's email or get IP addresses from servers and ISPs, then they could easily correlate with actual persons.

moskie• 13 years ago

The relevant distinction involves defining where the assumption of privacy exists. And I don't claim to know exactly where the line is (or should be) drawn.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

First, where do you get that Snowden is trying to "prevent" anything? Secondly, we aren't law enforcement and can't torture with impunity the people whose posts we find. Thirdly, public internet posts aren't subject to privacy, and to the degree one may think they are of the sort that phone calls and private emails ought to be, what is the standard being described as hypocritical here?

I think you're either confused or trying to muddy the waters.

res0nat0r• 13 years ago

Thirdly, public internet posts aren't subject to privacy, and to the degree one may think they are of the sort that phone calls and private emails ought to be, what is the standard being described as hypocritical here?

Isn't this a bit ironic then if you are one who is up in arms about this NSA story? IE: Wholesale scooping up of unencrypted emails / forum posts etc should be expected. It hasn't been proven that actual listening in on phone conversations involving US citizens is actually going on, just phonecall metadata.

geetee4• 13 years ago

First, where do you get that Snowden is trying to "prevent" anything?

Isn't that what whistleblowers do?

Secondly, we aren't law enforcement and can't torture with impunity the people whose posts we find.

We are the government. If enough people want to judge someone by what they said on a forum, it'll work up the chain to someone with power.

Thirdly, public internet posts aren't subject to privacy, and to the degree one may think they are of the sort that phone calls and private emails ought to be, what is the standard being described as hypocritical here?

The hypocritical part is looking back on a trove of data and applying a narrative to it. Nobody wants to be held responsible for what they said as a teenager, but how fast are we to gobble it up when it's someone else.

e3pi• 13 years ago

Another Streisand Effect iteration, try: `the broken symmetry of information entropy conservation', further on, there may be some grand law/theorem you could adapt from information theory where this asymmetric abuse of total surveillance of private information will have systemic catastrophic conservation-requred unpreditable and unintended consequences.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I would feel so sorry for the analyst(s) who had to read everything I've written online, even just in public and semi-public forums, over the past...23 years.

jfb2• 13 years ago

Yeah, no kidding. "Sorry, faceless NSA algorithm. I'll buy you a beer next time I'm in the same zipcode as the server that you're running on."

rdl2• 13 years ago

I guess you're lucky/you win if you only ever get automated analysis :)

gyepi2• 13 years ago

I am reminded of the relatively recent poll on HN about whether to use real names. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721896

At the time, I was of the opinion that using real names was fine because the internet is a public space and one could self moderate. However, one big difference between this public space and public spaces INRL is that this one never forgets. I think this is a significant qualitative difference. With the ability to sift through the past, this means that your past self is not really past. I guess Faulkner was right. Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet!

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet!

Every time I try to imagine that, that person ends up failing to explain to me why they're so lame... I can honestly not think of anything I ever said that I would be ashamed of in comparison to that.

Sure, sometimes "old stuff" can be an indicator for what to look out for in the "current stuff", and I am fine with that, even if just to not be a hypocrite. But other than that, obsessing about things that are months or even years past just betrays people who never learn and never change projecting their mediocrity on me - and if they cannot see that, I have to do it for them :)

hobs• 13 years ago

Don't worry, you are not that interesting.

gyepi2• 13 years ago

Not to you, at this point in time. In any case, the point stands regardless of your level of interest. Even boring people deserve the same measure of privacy as interesting people, maybe even more.

Furthermore, I claim that when the costs (dollars or time) of finding out about anyone are low enough it won't take much interest to warrant a look at a person's history.

How long did it take for people to start googling new acquaintances and potential dates?

Edward Snowden, Ars, the NSA, and me: digging through the past

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