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Edward Snowden Profile picture
Edward Snowden
@Snowden
I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public.
198 subscribers
Mar 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Look, I've been in the "controversial interview" seat. What @DonLemon came after @ElonMusk with felt like malice. Elon—in clear discomfort—opens up in good faith about intensely private struggles; Lemon picks precisely that moment to begin emptying an entire drawer of knives. 1/ @donlemon @elonmusk That's a dick move, sure, but it's Lemon's right. It comes with the territory of being a partisan football, and Musk should have expected it. The real loss is that it's a huge waste of an interview, because Lemon exhibits zero curiosity or interest in anything beyond posturing.
Jan 10 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children in modern history, only 2 headlines out of over 1,100 in the study (of the biggest US mainstream news outlets' coverage) mention Gaza's children." "While the war on Gaza has been one of the deadliest in modern history for journalists—overwhelmingly Palestinians—the word “journalists” (and its iterations such as “reporters” and “photojournalists”) only appear in 9 headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied." theintercept.com/2024/01/09/new…
Aug 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
After hitting topping the iTunes list and tweeting like this, the FBI will be making space for him another kind of list, too.

Think I'm kidding? The FBI had a file on John Denver for attending *one* anti-war protest.

They're gonna keep making lists — until they're made to stop. Image
Jan 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today, an "anti-fake news" outlet (@InsiderEng) falsely claimed that I lived in a KGB safehouse. They even know which floor I'm on! What a scoop!

The problem? It's a lie. I don't cooperate with spies or live in a safe house, much less 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘒 𝘌𝘮𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘺! 🤦 @InsiderEng Bonus points for those who notice the absolutely massive train station and shopping complex full of cameras *directly behind* these knuckleheads' "safe house," which definitely sounds like a plausible place for a hunted whistleblower to live.

Deeply embarrassed for these people.
Nov 2, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The obsession with platforms prostrating themselves before advertisers has always been misplaced, because on any scale longer than one bad news cycle, advertisers go where the audience is.

Optimize platforms for people, not brands, because people have a choice. Brands don't. The entire point of advertisers is to carry out watering-hole attacks on human attention. If you keep enough attention, they're always going to be there -- right behind the tall grass.
Feb 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3AM, I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility. I want to see an end to the conflict in Ukraine, and frankly, I think all reasonable people share that position. The question nobody seems to want to contend with is whether amplifying official claims made without evidence are reducing hostilities, or are in fact provoking them.
Jan 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Nobody has stronger opinions about Joe Rogan than people who have never listened to Joe Rogan.
Jan 9, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
@tomcoates 1) With respect, the point is that people have become so poisoned by prevailing cultures that they can no longer evaluate such examples without inferring ulterior motives, and, if true, reflecting on where that leads. @tomcoates 2) Beyond the point lies the purpose, which is for you, the collective Dear Reader, to consider if it IS true. To evaluate if you, independent of others', and author's, self-interest, can identify the kind of examples you're requesting.
Dec 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Julian Assange is one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the western world. Every level of the case against him has been shot through with corruption and the abuse of process.

People justify it by reciting memes to demonstrate their allegiance.

This is dystopia. "Not a journalist," chants the mob, unwittingly lobbying for the rights to speak and publish to be afforded only to a class of corporate media businesses consecrated by the state.

It doesn't matter if Assange is a hobo on a soapbox: the First Amendment protects everyone equally.
Oct 23, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
With respect, the docs say the "sequencer nodes" save the hashes (identifiers) produced by scanning people's eyes to your database.

Apple does not, IIRC, catalog raw bio hashes—they're encrypted on-device (via enclave).

The result of Worldcoin's "Phase 1" is an eyeball catalog. Image The privacy techniques come into play in Phase 2. While they're clever and appreciated (ZKPs!), they can't address the trust problem of somebody snarfing biometrics.

Maybe you don't save timestamps. Maybe you don't correlate bluetooth/wifi/whatever w enrollment.

But you could.
Oct 23, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people's iris scans (for "fairness"), and waves away the implications by saying "we deleted the scans!"

Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.

Don't catalogue eyeballs. Don't use biometrics for anti-fraud.

In fact, don't use biometrics for anything.
Oct 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The Lord of the Rings: a story where the social elite coerce a trust-fund kid's hard-working gardener into shouldering global risks.

Before it's over, he has to physically carry his useless employer (and their jewelry collection) up an active volcano.

Ahead of its time, really. You think Sam got time and a half? Hazard pay?

Did Sam even get Dental?
Sep 4, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
yes yes this is an excellent point what has *checks notes* edward snowden ever done to reveal the misbehavior of facebook and google, especially in the last 10 years en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(su…
Jun 15, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
(Thread:) This is the reality of the fully commercialized mainstream internet: an indigestible mass of shortest-form opinions, purposefully selected by algorithms to agitate us on platforms that are designed to record and memorialize our most agitated, reflexive responses. These responses are, in turn, elevated in proportion to their controversy to the attention — and prejudice — of the crowd. In the resulting zero-sum blood sport that public reputation requires, combatants are incentivized to occupy the most conventionally defensible positions...
May 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
@TheBlueMatt Public speaking is hard, but my intended point was not opaque: neither Taproot nor Lightning come even *close* to addressing Bitcoin's privacy problems -- and in fact even provoke arguments for how they hurt it (at least short term). That's not to say they're worthless... @TheBlueMatt ...but they're not addressing the high severity problem confronting the ordinary bitcoin users who don't even notice fancysig faffery exists (beyond eventually reduced tx sizes). The thing is, I want to be wrong. But proving me wrong doesn't happen on Twitter. It happens on-chain
May 8, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The worst part of cryptocurrency transforming into dragon-level wealth is witnessing good people emotionally devolve into dragons themselves: so intellectually paralyzed by the fear that everyone they see threatens their hoard that they lose sight of the world beyond their cave. 1) This is such a profoundly misleading TL;DR of a privacy-focused talk that it's hard to call it anything but intentionally deceptive.

2) To the extent I own crypto (unless and until it has been lost in boating accidents), I own more bitcoin than anything else—but
Jan 14, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Laura Poitras, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who was the first to work on the top secret NSA mass surveillance story, has been fired by @TheIntercept in retaliation for speaking to the media about their mishandling of the Reality Winner case. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/medi… This is Laura's statement: praxisfilms.org/open-letter-fr…
Nov 12, 2019 • 14 tweets • 11 min read
The Chinese edition of my new book, #PermanentRecord, has just been censored. This violates the publishing agreement, so I'm going to resist it the way I know best: it's time to blow the whistle. You can help. Here's how: (THREAD) I asked to see a copy of censored passages, and was given a list of a few of the worst examples. I'm going to post them right here on Twitter, and we're going to translate them and expose exactly what the censors were trying to hide. Let's use Twitter for something good.
Oct 3, 2019 • 4 tweets • 6 min read
@AlecMuffett @jenvalentino @runasand @nytimes @gabrieldance @SteveBellovin Solid point. Much reporting on LE access demands (or "concerns") overlooks that the powers they have today are unprecedented and abnormal in a way our constitutional system does not anticipate. Status quo "should" be presumptively undesirable, yet editorial tone implies otherwise @AlecMuffett @jenvalentino @runasand @nytimes @gabrieldance @SteveBellovin From a human rights perspective, a global reduction in mass surveillance capability is a desirable reversion to the mean. It is astonishing, and I would argue discrediting, for those claiming a public safety interest advocating for any new means of surveillance "at scale."
Oct 3, 2019 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
@jenvalentino @AlecMuffett @nytimes @gabrieldance While I do appreciate the reporting on this issue, not to mention your much longer history of work, which I have long followed with interest, but I have to agree with Alec that the editorial tone in this particular article is dangerously unskeptical. To cite a quick example: @jenvalentino @AlecMuffett @nytimes @gabrieldance "It was unclear whether photos and videos of abuse were actually more prevalent on Facebook or were just being detected at a high rate." This is a rather breezy dismissal of what is the overwhelmingly clear explanation for the figures the pro-surveillance folks are citing here.
Sep 30, 2019 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
If you read only one thing about my memoir, #PermanentRecord, make it the cover story in this month's New York Review of Books. It is an extraordinary piece. @nybooks nybooks.com/articles/2019/… With Permanent Record suddenly considered among the year's best books, I again must thank the many who made it possible, from those mentioned in the text and acknowledgements to the countless hidden hands behind every timeless story.