No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot

I keep seeing this Gizmodo piece entitled “Snowden is a fucking idiot”. I understand the appeal of the piece. The hero worship of Edward Snowden is getting old. But the piece itself is garbage.

The author, Matt Novak, is of the new wave of hard-core leftists intolerant of those who disagree with them. His position is that everyone is an idiot who doesn’t agree with his views: Libertarians, Republicans, moderate voters who chose Trump, and even fellow left-wingers that aren’t as hard-core.

If you carefully read his piece, you’ll see that Novak doesn’t actually prove Snowden is wrong. Novak doesn’t show how Snowden disagrees with facts, but only how Snowden disagrees with the left-wing view of the world, "libertarian garbage" as Novak puts it. It’s only through deduction that we come to the conclusion: those who aren’t left-wing are idiots, Snowden is not left-wing, therefore Snowden is an idiot.

The question under debate in the piece is:

technology is more important than policy as a way to protect our liberties

In other words, if you don’t want the government spying on you, then focus on using encryption (use Signal) rather than trying to change the laws so they can’t spy on you.

On a factual basis (rather than political), Snowden is right. If you live in Germany and don’t want the NSA spying on you there is little policy-wise that you can do about it, short of convincing Germany to go to war against the United States to get the US to stop spying.

Likewise, for all those dissenters in countries with repressive regimes, technology precedes policy. You can’t effect change until you first can protect yourselves from the state police who throws you in jail for dissenting. Use Signal.

In our own country, Snowden is right about “politics”. Snowden’s leak showed how the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records to stop terrorism. Privacy organizations like the EFF supported the reform bill, the USA FREEDOM ACT. But rather than stopping the practice, the “reform” opened up the phone records to all law enforcement (FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, etc.) for normal law enforcement purposes.

Imagine the protestors out there opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. The FBI is shooting down their drones and blasting them with water cannons. Now, because of the efforts of the EFF and other privacy activists, using the USA FREEDOM ACT, the FBI is also grabbing everyone’s phone records in the area. Ask yourself who is the fucking idiot here: the guy telling you to use Signal, or the guy telling you to focus on “politics” to stop this surveillance.

Novak repeats the hard-left version of the creation of the Internet:

The internet has always been monitored by the state. It was created by the fucking US military and has been monitored from day one. Surveillance of the internet wasn’t invented after September 11, 2001, no matter how many people would like to believe that to be the case.

No, the Internet was not created by the US military. Sure, the military contributed to the Internet, but the majority of contributions came from corporations, universities, and researchers. The left-wing claim that the government/military created the Internet involves highlighting their contributions while ignoring everyone else’s.

The Internet was not “monitored from day one”, because until the 1990s, it wasn’t even an important enough network to monitor. As late as 1993, the Internet was dwarfed in size and importance by numerous other computer networks – until the web took off that year, the Internet was considered a temporary research project. Those like Novak writing the history of the Internet are astonishingly ignorant of the competing networks of those years. They miss XNS, AppleTalk, GOSIP, SNA, Novel, DECnet, Bitnet, Uunet, Fidonet, X.25, Telenet, and all the other things that were really important during those years.

And, mass Internet surveillance did indeed come only after 9/11. The NSA’s focus before that was on signals and telephone lines, because that’s where all the information was.  When 9/11 happened, they were still trying to catch up to the recent growth of the Internet. Virtually everything Snowden documents came after 9/11. Sure, they had programs like FAIRVIEW that were originally created to get telephone information in the 1970s, but these programs only started delivering mass Internet information after 9/11. Sure, the NSA occasionally got emails before 9/11, but nothing like the enormous increase in collection afterwards.

What I’ve shown here is that Matt Novak is a fucking idiot. He gets basic facts wrong about how the Internet works. He doesn’t prove Snowden’s actually wrong by citing evidence, only that Snowden is wrong because he disagrees with what leftists like Novak believe to be right. All the actual evidence supports Snowden in this case.

It doesn't mean we should avoid politics. Technology and politics are different things, it's not either-or. Whether we do one has no impact on deciding to do the other. But if you are a DAP protester, use Signal instead of unencrypted messaging or phone, instead of waiting for activists to pass legislation.