Matt Damon: Edward Snowden did a great thing

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57600048-71/matt-damon-edward-snowden-did-a-great-thing/

by vinhnx • 13 years ago

257 95 13 years ago

news.cnet.com

corin_• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how I hadn't already thought of this, so I wonder has everyone else missed this or not. We've all been thinking that not enough people outside the tech. world have been paying enough attention to these revelations - what better way to change this than through celebrity endorsements? Not necessarily of Snowden himself, but endorsements of the message that what is going on is wrong.

Or has this been happening already and I just missed it?

narcissus• 13 years ago

Totally agree. And to be honest, I've been wondering if there's going to be a moment when certain celebrities and Hollywood 'types' start getting 'caught' in the data that has been found... in some sort of new age McCarthyism.

DoubleMalt• 13 years ago

Celebrities are on average not much different than other people. Most of them are sheep.

Like most of us do not go to protest on the streets over such a thing, most celebrities will not be bothered to stick their head out in a possibly career crippling way.

The ones that do regularly are quickly labelled as parts liberal Hollywood that can be disregarded.

Another thing is that actors are part of the big movie-industrial complex that has a lot of interest in surveillance because they perceive this as their only hope against the free distribution of data.

But I agree it would be worth the effort to actively pursue people like Matt Damon to give the cause widespread legitimacy. Easy it will be not, I'm afraid.

deveac5• 13 years ago

This is the first instance I am aware of where a mundane celebrity not known for an interest/connection to tech has spoken out against the NSA on this topic. I'm sure there have been at least a few instances of lesser known personalities doing so.

I sincerely welcome this; celebrities have large networks.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

What counts as a "mundane celebrity?" Jimmy Carter has already said Snowden's actions were "beneficial" and that "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/jimmy-carter-edward...

roc2• 13 years ago

"This is the first instance I am aware of where a mundane celebrity not known for an interest/connection to tech has spoken out against the NSA on this topic."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/snowden-principle_...

It doesn't seem to have much more impact than when anyone else does it.

seren2• 13 years ago

"If we're going to trade our civil liberties for our security, then that should be a decision that we collectively make,"

I don't understand how the blog author can relate the use of the word "collectively" to a hint at Communism, East Germany and the Stasi. Is this generally a taboo word in the US ?

jimwise• 13 years ago

Yes. A central idea of the American experiment is that there are exchanges of liberty for security which it is not acceptable to make even if the people collectively decide to make them.

That is why certain liberties are enshrined in the Constitution, which is intentionally made hard to amend, rather than merely in law, which is relatively easy to change.

Looking at the number of totalitarian systems which started out as expressions of the collective will of their societies in the two-plus centuries since, I'd say the founders got this one right...

seren2• 13 years ago

Ok, from that point of view, it can make some sense. Even if it seems in the current debate, the issue was the trade-off was more or less made unilaterally by the executive branch, without much consultation, which is actually worse that a "collective" decision, whatever that means.

vidarh• 13 years ago

Looking at the number of totalitarian societies which started out as expressions of the collective will of their societies in the two-plus centuries since

Which ones are you talking about? I can't think of many. I can think of quite a few where authoritarian movements got substantial support, but I can't for sure name many where such regimes were anywhere near a majority, and I'd think a majority at least would be required before it becomes reasonable to talk about "expressions of the collective will of their societies".

Tloewald• 13 years ago

Collectively we can pass laws and change the constitution.

The supreme court has ruled, in Smith vs Maryland, that the government can capture message metadata from a third party when a message is conveyed by that third party without warrant. So the constitution doesn't help much here -- either we need to collectively change the constitution or collectively pass a lot of laws or collectively get different supreme court judges appointed and have the ruling overturned.

yuvadam• 13 years ago

As Matt Damon was talking about "civil liberties vs. security" it resonated with essentially every second sentence DIRNSA was saying at his public appearance at BlackHat.

This is a false dichotomy, and definitely not about some sort of tradeoff to protect us from "terrorists amongst us" (which in itself is a dubious claim.)

All these programs are about the creation of a de-facto authoritarian state serving nobody else but the powerful corporations and the decision-makers that said corporations keep in place via their accumulated wealth.

This isn't some democratic debate about civil liberties at conflict. This is a fucking plutocracy.

snitko6• 13 years ago

Your comment finally made me realize why the difference in analysis of the problem leads to difference in solutions.

Some people think that corporations are the root of all evil. They accumulate wealth, then put people in power to protect that wealth. Others think that government is the root of all evil, while corporations are either forced to cooperate or willingly abuse this system, because if they don't, then competitors will surely do it. Thus the latter group believes that businesses simply respond to incentives.

Thus it is no surprise that the first group of people usually believes we need more elaborate regulations and a good government. The second group usually sees the solution in eliminating part or all of the government as an inherently corrupt institution.

Matt Damon probably belongs to the first group, although I'm not sure.

DamnYuppie2• 13 years ago

Greed and lust for power are the root of all evil, corporations with lax oversight are simply our eras incarnation of it.

Radim• 13 years ago

In the end, it comes down to who can inflict a bigger booboo, doesn't it?

Can corporations? Governments? Does the military hold the "real" power and thus dictate this "evilness"?

Or is it, in words of a certain popular fictional character, "power resides where men believe it resides"...

euroclydon• 13 years ago

Somewhere in the Amazon jungle there's a tribesman, wearing a vine-fiber thong, who's taking a break to looking up at an airplane flying overhead, and then getting back to hording all the bone-hammers, and plotting how to sabotage that ascendant hunter who everyone is starting to like so much.

icebraining• 13 years ago

You left out (non-proprietarian) anarchists, who believe in neither solution.

saraid2168• 13 years ago

One of the essential problems with libertarian philosophy is that it starts from the premise that there are two meaningful actors: the individual and the state. This makes it extremely hard to conceptualize and introduce a third actor, like corporations, which means corporations need to be lumped in with either the individual or the state.

Libertarians who are sympathetic with corporations will tend to lump them in with the individual, talking about the state imposing itself upon them. Those less sympathetic will tend to lump them in with the state, talking about their undue influence on political theater.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Exactly.

"civil liberties vs. security"

1. To what degree do we actually have a security problem?

2. Once it's made transparent for us to see that/if there actually is a grave problem:

3. What causes the security problem? What are we doing/what have we been doing that is causing others to think it's worth the sacrifice to launch attacks, instead of living peaceful and happy lives?

Surveillance could never be more than a stupid patch to the real issue at stake. We have to get to the causes, now. Obviously, that means a lot of rich people will lose valuable contracts.

spurgu• 13 years ago

Very good points. #3 is something I rarely see discussions about, although it clearly is the root of the problem.

Xylakant3• 13 years ago

There definitely is a tradeoff between civil liberties and security. Each action of the police, warranted or not, is an invasion of privacy (civil liberty) while still being aimed at solving a (planned or alleged) crime (security). A state monopoly on firearms is another example.

The problem with the argument that DIRNSA and similar circle make is that the current invasion of civil liberties brings negligible or no improvement of security. They're exaggerating the security gains and downplay the erosion of rights. That's the dishonesty in the current debate.

I think Damon is very well on the mark here - a decision to give up civil liberties for security should not be made by the government/powers to be but rather by a well informed public. There's a major problem with that approach though: How do we educate the public in such a way, that they can make well-informed choices. That's a pretty tough nut to crack.

enry_straker• 13 years ago

Maybe in your mind. Maybe you want to think that these innocuous debates on the internet means something.

Don't be fooled by empty words by either politicians or pundits on tv or the net. Watch what the government does - at federal, state and local, the security budget keeps slowly going up. Never coming down. The supreme court rulings slowly move in one way, never another. The number of laws slowly keep going up, never coming down.

But since you are allowed to debate it to death, which none of the decision makers take note of, there is this illusion of debate.

Damon is talking a good game, but it's still within the parameters of the talking points that the pols and talking heads put out on tv.

When the budgets for security go down, When the number of prisoners in jail go down, when the number of laws go down, when the number of people working for police, fbi, cia, nsa, military go down, when the number of supreme court decisions go left, then let's talk about civil liberties.

Till then it's nothing more than an empty, peurile phrase.

spodek• 13 years ago

Though just a role in a movie (though one he co-wrote), his scene about why his character in Good Will Hunting should or shouldn't work for the NSA seems relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYteE7XGaY4

EDIT: Here's the text of it (it appears unformatted because it's one long (well-delivered) line of text).

Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, somethin' no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, cus' I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding... Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, Send in the marines to secure the area" cus' they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, cus' they were off pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, cus' he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' cus' every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.

EDIT TWO: Watching that monologue in context made the scene more relevant. The NSA guys try to entice him with the opportunity to work on cool math with brilliant people. He responds with something I can only imagine current NSA smart people haven't done but I hope they are starting to -- to consider the consequences of their actions and their responsibility. Hacker News posted a story -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6258093 -- about a math professor whom the NSA employed for a couple summers as a math undergrad in Princeton now calling on his colleagues to question their contributions and to speak up.

It raises a timeless question in science and engineering: "I can do this, but should I? ... What are the consequences?"

davidjohnstone• 13 years ago

He also wrote the script for that movie with Ben Affleck, which means that at least one of them must be familiar with these issues. (Also, the original script focussed a lot more on the FBI's attempted recruitment of Damon's character.)

AmVess2• 13 years ago

They got tons of coaching from a renowned script writer. Their original project was to be a spy movie.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

I'm sure they're both familiar with those issues, but given Matt's history of activism and activist movies he seems more invested in them.

pvdm2• 13 years ago

He is friends with the late Howard Zinn. That's how he is "familiar" with these issues from a young age.

zeckalpha• 13 years ago

He also narrated Inside Job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_%28film%29

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

I never liked that scene because it seemed like he was reading off cue cards. He may not have been, but that's the impression I got, so I didn't get that sense of amazement I was supposed to.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

I just watched this recently (out of the blue), and had completely forgotten about the NSA recruitment portion, and thought, "Jesus, how relevant and poignant." Lets not forget this movie is 16 years old. Barely anyone knew the NSA even existed at that point.

pvdm2• 13 years ago

If you were on the MIT campus, you knew about the NSA. There were big ads in the student newspaper.

bradleysmith2• 13 years ago

This scene has always spoken to me:

I got a BS (laughably, there is nothing further from science) in Global Security & Intelligence Analysis in 2009, and had decided before graduating that I didn't want to go federal for lack of control over the consequences of my actions. I didn't turn down any concrete opportunities; in fact, I could never get myself to turn in an application. Maybe I was rationalizing fear of failure with that pit in my stomach, but it felt a whole lot more like 'you really shouldn't do this' then 'you're not gonna make it'.

This was also where I found a love for hacker news and internet tech; I thought (and continue to think) that tech leaders are doing more to make the world a better place than any gov't intelligence apparatus. I say this while fully admitting that state intelligence is important, and necessary.

I ended up taking a non-tech low level sales job right out of college, and worked/learned my way into the tech world. I'm in oil & gas data now (I'm sure some think O&G is just as evil; I'm not one of them), and never been happier learning & building.

This is not to say that vanilla, non-tech analysis is comparable to crypto, or that I'm some sort of good-will-hunting character. I really like his justification though: "I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President."

Anywho, good find, thanks for posting and the transcript.

gyardley2• 13 years ago

Gee, I didn't have an opinion on Edward Snowden before, but now that I know what Matt Damon thinks...

deveac5• 13 years ago

Not the point.

He's effectively equivalent to a TV news anchor reading a a teleprompter about the topic, except his message is being delivered to a larger network than many broadcasts and the message itself is less neutral and more sympathetic.

This is good from an information dissemination perspective, which has been a massive problem for this topic in the past. It's a sign that the topic is finally starting to grab mindshare in popular culture. That is a prerequisite for many, if not all, of the possible remedies to the problems of govt illegality and overreach.

gyardley2• 13 years ago

Shucks, that's terrific. Send it to all your relatives.

Now, why is it posted here?

novalis• 13 years ago

Trying to paternalize on a subject this central isn't going to work. We are far from the era of central media control supported McCarthyism. If you want to play it like it is unimportant, you end up looking compromised by coming up with no valid counter arguments. If you don't care what others express in a smart concise way and attempt a one liner like that, why would others care about your lateral failed attempt to discredit the source. Stay well.

Jtsummers• 13 years ago

So actors are out strictly because they're actors. So whose opinions, views or insights should we consider? Knowing nothing about you I guess I shouldn't care what your views are either, clearly you couldn't possibly have any insight into any situation.

cpursley• 13 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUa5oHgYV2k

tbatterii• 13 years ago

my thoughts exactly when I read the headline.

AliEzer• 13 years ago

Could somebody please find Ja Rule so I can make sense of all this?

chjj• 13 years ago

I want some answers Ja Rule might not have right now.

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

Where is Ja!?

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

I recently read an interview with Damon that covered some of his background, which was quite left wing (his family still are) so I'm not surprised this bothers him. I hope he uses his position to try keep the conversation about what's right and fair in terms of surveillance. It's not great that we need celebrities onside to try and remind people that something is awful, but it's not a bad thing.

kilian• 13 years ago

Is this in general how reporting on 'celebrity opinions' is done in the USA? Apart from the one or two lines that directly quote Matt Damon, the rest of the article is an abomination.

I do however hope this reaches more people, there's nothing like a celebrity endorsement.

popee• 13 years ago

It is, though, a tempting and charming notion that we could all get together and decide on how much of our civil liberties we really ought to give up or not.

Is this really possible in US? Or is someone just going to explain to him that he is socialist/communist? >:-)

jfe• 13 years ago

worst writing ever.

hannibal5• 13 years ago

the actor who must know a thing or two about the covert world

and

He is being asked what he thinks of Edward Snowden. Astonishingly for someone who has been Jason Bourne and knows the danger of such things, he is answering the question.

WTF. Actor who has been playing Jason Bourne and been in Good Will hunting now is now expert?

voltagex_• 13 years ago

Although I agree with you, a lot of these movies have expert consultants (ex FBI, ex police etc). So he could have gained quite a lot of information.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

WTF. Actor who has been playing Jason Bourne and been in Good Will hunting now is now expert?

It is not like he's got a PhD in the history of surveillence, but he's going to be better educated on the topic than joe random citizen. After all, at the very least he's spent a fair amount of time thinking about the details of his roles and in this case those details have a lot of overlap with the current situation.

AmVess2• 13 years ago

IIRC, he had a really good formal education from the time he was ready to attend school to his days at Harvard.

xradionut• 13 years ago

You are assuming that because he's an actor, he isn't an intelligent, informed, politically aware human that may give a shit about people.

untog2• 13 years ago

No, I think the OP was more balking at the idea that an actor "must" know about the covert world. He may well do, but it isn't an immediate assumption just because he played a spy guy.

sigzero• 13 years ago

Really? Who cares? His opinion is not any more relevant than anyone else.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

A. Why does Matt Damon think we care what he thinks?

B. Why do we care what Matt Damon thinks?

javajosh• 13 years ago

I care because, based on interviews I've read, as a person he is unusually thoughtful and intelligent. He is clearly a person of principle who is troubled by the goings on in the world around him, and who is articulate about what those troubles are and that it's important to address them.

BlackDeath3• 13 years ago

For the same reasons that anybody should (or should not) care about what you think, I would imagine.

cjdrake• 13 years ago

Finally! I have been waiting in anticipation, not unlike a pre-pubescent girl at a Justin Bieber concert, for Matt Damon to make a statement. Oh thank you, great actor whose day job is to read what other people tell you to say, for telling me what to think. I would be lost without his voice, guiding me like a compass towards the truth.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Chris Matyszczyk sounded a bit condescending. But I had to laugh at his last line, "However, can we truly trust ourselves? We are, after all, the bright sparks who voted in the current Congress."

I would extend that line of questioning to include:

1) Can we trust ourselves given that we elected several Presidents who were - a) Obviously oblivious frat boys who were better at campaigning than governing (GW Bush and Clinton 2nd term); b) Ex-CIA (GHW Bush -- actually he was DCI, don't believe he was ever an agent); 3) Someone who campaigned on a progressive platform but quickly abandoned most of it upon election (Obama).

2) Can we trust ourselves given that we find a Matt Damon snark piece on Cnet so damned fascinating?

jongraehl• 13 years ago

Author suggests we should consider Damon an expert on whether someone is acting. That's rather silly. Why aren't we using actors instead of torture, then?

Matt Damon: Edward Snowden did a great thing

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