5.8.1.7. Snowden (斯诺登)

Censoring anyone who says "my president is shit", which is what China does, is much, much more serious than censoring intelligence leaks.

The problem with dictatorships, is that they make every information that makes them look bad a "state secret". Including any information that hundreds of thousands of people have witnessed, or economic performance metrics! See also: Internal censorship is necessary to prevent fake USA accounts from creating harmful propaganda (内部审查是必要的,以防止虚假的美国账户制造有害宣传).

The level of unknown surveillance that Snowden uncovered is a bad thing about the US.

Snowden’s prosecution was inevitable. Countries need secret services. Secret services need laws that prevent leaking classified information that was produced by government officials.

Ciro Santilli (三西猴, anti-CCP fanatic, 反中共狂热, stupid cunt, 傻屄, CIA agent, CIA特工, 肏你妈的) has never and will never criticize China or any other country for spying or prosecuting spies.

If Snowden were Chinese, the Chinese government would ban talking about him or anything he uncovered. A keyword attack with "Snowden" in the West has no effect.

It is obvious that the level of surveillance in any dictatorship will be infinitely higher, since the Government has much more power and no-one can criticize.

On the West however, the debate Snowden sparked cannot be censored, and has helped to control excessive and secret state power.

Ultimately, Ciro thinks camera surveillance is somewhat inevitable, because people will always want to fight crime and terrorism and surveillance technology keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

He is however strictly against the ban of cryptography.

He also believes that a good solution to balance out government power is the Second amendment (美國憲法第二修正案). It is better to have more school shootings and less full-blown dictatorship led genocides / mass human rights violations.

In 2019 China amusingly censored passages Snowden’s "Permanent Record" autobiography book, which Snowden then published on Twitter:

I don’t think they understand that what Snowden stands for is completely the opposite of what the Chinese gov is lol

Snowden then later released the entire Chinese version of the book for free online with the censored parts underlined: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/10/snowden_china_censorship (archive), link to the book: https://a.temporaryrecord.com/Permanent_Record_-_CN_edition_with_underlined_redactions.pdf (archive). One wonders why he didn’t just do that in the first place for all versions, maybe he needed to pay the writer that helped him?

Snowden
Figure 35. Snowden highlighted defects on abuses of power in a Western democracy, and the discussion he sparked helped to control such abuses. To obey is to betray comes to mind. Source.

https://youtu.be/MhJldILZhJ8?t=138 "A matter of internal security: the age old cry of the oppressor". Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation s03e11 "The Hunted". video::MhJldILZhJ8[youtube,height=400,width=600,time=138]