{"id":258893,"date":"2015-06-05T16:46:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T21:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258893"},"modified":"2024-11-26T16:07:21","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T21:07:21","slug":"marc-andreessen-on-edward-snowden-acts-of-treason-mass-surveillance-and-silicon-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2015\/06\/05\/marc-andreessen-on-edward-snowden-acts-of-treason-mass-surveillance-and-silicon-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Andreessen on Edward Snowden, acts of treason, mass surveillance and Silicon Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"
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While freedom-of-information advocates and critics of the U.S. government\u2019s policies on mass surveillance were busy celebrating the 1st anniversary<\/a> of Edward Snowden\u2019s massive NSA leaks, venture capitalist and former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was pushing a somewhat different message. In his view, Snowden is a traitor whose acts<\/a> \u2014 along with the resulting confusion they have created about what the NSA is doing \u2014 have endangered U.S. foreign relations and U.S. companies, and therefore he shouldn\u2019t be celebrated as a hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreessen made some of his remarks in a video interview<\/a> with Andrew Ross Sorkin for the CNBC show Squawk Box (which is embedded below), and then followed up later with a discussion on Twitter, which I have edited into a Storify module<\/a> and also embedded below. In the video, which is also embedded below, Andreessen says Snowden is clearly a traitor for leaking the NSA documents to then-Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald and his partner, filmmaker Laura Poitras:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Obviously he\u2019s a traitor \u2014 if you look up in the encyclopedia \u2018traitor,\u2019 there\u2019s a picture of Edward Snowden. He\u2019s like a textbook traitor, they don\u2019t get much more traitor than that\u2026 Why? Because he stole national security secrets and gave them to everyone on the planet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not clear whether Andreessen is right about the open-and-shut nature of Snowden\u2019s case, however: as a number of legal experts pointed out<\/a> during the Twitter discussion, treason typically requires that the accused gives aid or military secrets directly to the enemy, whereas Snowden gave his information to the media (this issue of \u201caiding the enemy\u201d<\/a> and whether it includes the media came up in the trial of Chelsea Manning for leaking documents to WikiLeaks).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreessen also says in the video that he found the shock with which most people greeted the NSA revelations to be surprising, since spying is what the organization was designed to do from the very beginning:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you actually followed the NSA, if you actually read the books and the articles and understood the history of the NSA, I think you\u2019d generally assume that they were doing pretty much everything that has come out\u2026 I thought they were spying, I mean that was my impression\u2026 I thought everyone knew that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Following the interview (which Gawker Media suggested was designed primarily<\/a> to bolster the value of the giant technology companies that Andreessen either invests in and\/or partners with), the Netscape founder was questioned on a number of points by veteran technology journalist Dan Gillmor<\/a>, as well as Tow Center fellow Alexander Howard<\/a> and a number of others, including me. Gillmor began by asking whether Andreessen was more upset that U.S. companies were hacked, or that this was revealed to the world by the Snowden documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Puzzled by your logic, @pmarca<\/a> \u2014 are you more upset that US is hacking US-based companies to spy or that it was revealed to the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) June 5, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In the discussion that followed, Andreessen argued that the understanding of what the NSA does was warped by the initial reporting on the Snowden slides, which suggested that companies were voluntarily providing carte-blanche access to their servers. Subsequent reports have said that companies like Google and Facebook only provide the information that is required under government orders, although the exact process by which this occurs<\/a> remains somewhat murky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreessen also argued that much of what Snowden did involved the surveillance of non-U.S. citizens, and that in his view this is exactly what the NSA is supposed to be doing, and therefore not the kind of illegal or even immoral behavior that would justify a whistleblower like Snowden revealing the information in the way he did:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone agrees, however: Howard, for example, noted that mass surveillance of any kind raises free-speech and human rights issues<\/a>, and others noted that the behavior of the U.S. government was of interest to its people regardless of who exactly was being spied on. Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation called<\/a> Andreessen\u2019s views \u201cabhorrent,\u201d while Greenwald argued that<\/a> by the same reasoning, disclosures about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison shouldn\u2019t qualify as whistleblowing because the victims involved weren\u2019t U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreessen said that the issues raised by the NSA\u2019s behavior were complicated<\/a> \u2014 since recording the phone calls or other activity of foreign agents often involves capturing the behavior of American citizens as well \u2014 and that collecting and storing \u201cmetadata\u201d about online behavior was also not a black-and-white question. The Netscape founder also pointed out that his company, the first browser maker, was a vocal advocate<\/a> of strong encryption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, as one user pointed out, the question of whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero \u2014 that is, whether his leaking of the NSA documents was justified because of the behavior it revealed on the part of the government \u2014 is largely a side issue<\/a>: ultimately, the important question is whether snooping en masse on U.S. citizens is wrong, and if so what should be done about it. And that question has yet to be answered, by either Marc Andreessen or anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen<\/a><\/em> and All Things D<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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While freedom-of-information advocates and critics of the U.S. government\u2019s policies on mass surveillance were busy celebrating the 1st anniversary of Edward Snowden\u2019s massive NSA leaks, venture capitalist and former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was pushing a somewhat different message. In his view, Snowden is a traitor whose acts \u2014 along with the resulting confusion they have created about what … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Marc Andreessen on Edward Snowden, acts of treason, mass surveillance and Silicon Valley”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258893"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269437,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258893\/revisions\/269437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}