delightfullyherald

Karma: 7

delightfullyherald 5 Nov 2025 18:18 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistleblower Guide
I also think you’re trying to wash your own personal opinion of who is a traitor, for everyone’s opinion of who is a traitor.

I wasn’t making a claim about “everyone’s opinion.” A lot of useful idiots would think that you were a big hero.

I’m pointing out which countries are most likely to actually grant you asylum, as opposed to deport you back to the US where you will be imprisoned.
You’re pointing out enemies of democracy who would be happy to recruit intelligence assets from democratic countries in order to undermine global stability so that they can conquer more of eastern Europe and kill lots of innocent people.
A lawyer will be risking imprisonment themselves if they actively help you at this stage.
This is not true. It’s true that there are things a lawyer could do to “actively help” you that would be crimes—obviously they couldn’t help you by going out and buying you explosives so that you could bomb a post office. But a lawyer can absolutely advise you as to your best course of action without risking imprisonment. Glenn Greenwald was never charged with a crime in the U.S. Knowing how far they can go without breaking the law is part of the lawyer’s job; if they can’t help you in a certain way, they’ll tell you that. They will not have any legal obligation to turn you in.

delightfullyherald 5 Nov 2025 16:05 UTC
7 points
1
on: US Govt Whistleblower Guide
If you are an American citizen who is in possession of highly sensitive classified information, and you fly to Russia for “asylum,” you should expect to be debriefed by Russian military intelligence. You will tell them everything you know. Snowden was debriefed by Russian military intelligence, and he told them everything he knew. Everybody knows this.
The previous draft of this reply said some not-kind things about the author’s motivations; I deleted that and I’ll avoid speculating. But the idea that the Russian government has a “good track record” of helping whistleblowers is absurd.
If you become aware of bad things that the U.S. government is doing, and you want to become a whistleblower, talk to a trusted lawyer in the U.S. Do not fly to Russia and then talk to a lawyer. Russia does not have an independent court system and they don’t care about international law except to the extent that they can use it as a weapon. If you work for the NSA or something and you have access to a bunch of TS/SCI information and you take all of it to Russia because 3% of it (or even 30% of it!) involved the U.S. government doing bad things, you are a traitor to your country and to the free world and fair-minded people will not praise you as a hero.

delightfullyherald 23 Apr 2024 19:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: RTFB: On the New Proposed CAIP AI Bill
The rulemaking authority procedures are anything but “standard issue boilerplate.” They’re novel and extremely unusual, like a lot of other things in the draft bill.

Section 6, for example, creates a sort of one-way ratchet for rulemaking where the agency has basically unlimited authority to make rules or promulgate definitions that make it harder to get a permit, but has to make findings to make it easier. That is not how regulation usually works.

The abbreviated notice period is also really wild.

I think the draft bill introduces a lot of interesting ideas, and that’s valuable, but as actual proposed legislative language I think it’s highly unrealistic and would almost certainly do more harm than good if anyone seriously tried to enact it.

For every “wow, this has never been done before in the history of federal legislation” measure in the bill—and there are at least 50 or so—there’s almost certainly going to be a pretty good reason why it hasn’t been done before. In my opinion, it’s not wise to try and do 50 incredibly daring new things at once in a single piece of legislation, because it creates far too many failure points. It’s like following a baking recipe—if you try to make one or two tweaks to the recipe that seem like good ideas, you can then observe the effect on the finished product and draw conclusions from the results you get. If you try to write your own recipe from scratch, and you’ve never written a recipe before, you’re going to end up with a soggy mess and no real lessons will have been learned about any of the individual elements that you tried out.