I'm going to end up on some NSA watch list but ...
At some point these elected and unelected idiots in government are going to have to recognize that most of the american public (referring to US citizens) is coming to view him as a hero. And Obama, who was supposed to be "for the people, by the people" has done nothing to dismantle the programs put in place by previous administrations or to even curtail advances during the six years of his "kingship".
I love my country, but how can I not be disillusioned with my government?
and the majority disapprove of Congress, how is that working out for us?
Honestly disapproval means nothing as apparently none of the mentioned have done enough to sufficiently get people off their butts. Well the Republicans offended a lot of their conservative base to cause a splinter group, but as whole most Americans are completely satisfied as verbally only expressing disapproval.
As in, doing whatever requires no effort or the least amount of it.
What are they supposed to do? A large (in american politics terms) group of people tried really hard to get 'hope and change' elected and look at what that did?
By 'get people off their butts' what do you mean exactly? Not patronizing, just curious what you think a solution would be, other than trying to get someone you believe in elected (to president in the above case). Are you suggesting some sort of revolt or more physical action than campaigning and voting?
It seems that there really isn't much option for change as far as actual politics go... As South Park noted, you usually get the choice between A Giant Douche and A Turd Sandwich.
That's all well and good, but why do you think that an independent candidate can make a difference? Particularly in an entrenched 2 party system, that would likely marginalize them to the extreme, and can barely make progress on its own? If we could somehow vote to have more than 2 parties, I'd be all about that, but it seems highly unlikely given the current state of things.
I agree it would be a change but how can you be certain that independent 'party' person will be any better than the previous crop of Rs and Ds? Especially (and some may call this tin-foil hattery) if there is a massive surveillance regime in place that is digging up (or can dig up) dirt on any politician for blackmail?
Most of the people I talk to say things like "I would vote for this independent candidate because I believe in his ideals and his statements. But I cant vote for him because it's like throwing my vote away."
IE People in my circles generally vote against democrats or against republicans (actually Im Canadian so it's more like vote against Liberals vs against Conservatives... but you get the idea). They dont care about the person their voting for, they are voting to keep someone out.
My concern is that the two major parties are basically the same, so the dichotomy isn't rep vs dem; it's voting for what you believe in vs voting for what you don't believe in. If you vote for what you dont believe in, you are truly throwing away your vote.
There is no proof that an indy would be better than mainstream, but politics is never about proof, and always about trust. You have to trust that the person you're voting for will do whats right for you. If you get your trust broken, that's a different kettle of fish entirely.
If you truly favour one politician in the mainstream, then by all means vote for them. But if you're just voting against someone, you are throwing your vote away.
> At some point these elected and unelected idiots in government are going to have to recognize that most of the american public (referring to US citizens) is coming to view him as a hero.
At some point? Why do you think they are working so hard to destroy the image before they destroy the person? They already realized that and are actively working to counteract it.
Mike Rogers won his last election by 20 points. The unelected FBI seem to have pretty much denied his allegation. Obama's first pass at answering the outcry was pretty weak, but at least it was an acknowledgement.
No one working with computer security or research should take the allegations seriously. They have no substance, and are as believable as claims that NSA can break RSA, or that they have built some Quantum computer and can break all crypto in the world.
I would really like to hear tptacek take a scientific approach in a comment about this. Is it a likely scenario that Russia intelligence could recruit, contact and provide help to an NSA employee without NSA knowing about it? Without NSA having any trace what so ever (in contrast to Manning and his chat conversations)? If Snowden sold information, is it believable that such trade could happen without NSA finding any incriminating evidence after-the-fact?
Same goes for credibly shown any harm to persons or national security. Is NSA so incompetent that a half year later, they can't find a single documented case of a person dieing, U.S. informers having to flee, or facilities being broken in to? The number of documents is massive, so surely, if they were provided to Russia or china, some verifiable damages should have happened by now?
I ask, which side should a scientific and rational mind side with. I would pick what ever is the most probable chain of events, and leave conspiracy theories to be argued by people with political agendas.
Is it a likely scenario that Russia intelligence could recruit, contact and provide help to an NSA employee without NSA knowing about it?
Yes? Very yes? But stop assuming you know what I think about Snowden. I find the idea that Snowden was literally an FSB mole to be far-fetched. I think he did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do (I think he was probably wrong about a lot of what he did, though).
Basically, my problem is with the narrative fallacy. I find that most people's thinking about stories like these latches immediately to whatever makes the most sense as a story. "Snowden is a hero who was driven to leak exactly the right information by a system that was utterly disinterested in abuse reports and who will now lead the charge to abolish the NSA". Fiction. "Snowden is an agent of the shadow Soviet government who was charged with infiltrating the US government so he could help sabotage the world's last remaining superpower." Fiction.
Reality is almost always messy and incomprehensible. The Snowden situation has all the hallmarks of not being a clean good-versus-evil narrative.
Its nice to see, that once you talk from the point of a Software security person, you see the fiction from what it is. Fiction.
I do not think you would answer different, but your recent comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094408 showed an identical speculative narration as in this article. Speculations that portraits a good-versus-evil narrative.
Reality is indeed messy and incomprehensible, which is why it do not need all that additional speculations. Talking about Russian intelligence, China agents stealing documents, and Snowden providing wholesale access to intelligence services is simply fiction until more details is reveled. Nothing more.
We should all shut up if there is no concrete information to talk about. I agree there.
Now, if some authentic documents are leaked, those can and should be discussed if they are related to the interest of HN readers. They are after all by by definition, authentic and thus no longer speculations.
Is it a likely scenario that Russia intelligence could recruit, contact and provide help to an NSA employee without NSA knowing about it? Without NSA having any trace what so ever (in contrast to Manning and his chat conversations)?
This seems like an ahistorical assumption. Are you aware that a senior FBI agent in the Soviet/Russian counterintelligence group was a spy for the USSR/Russia for nearly 16 years before being caught? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
Since 2001 (when he arrested) NSA and surveillance technology has gone through a radical change. Society has also changed radically for the time Robert Hanssen was recruited into intelligence service, and the time Snowden started to work for the NSA. The scrutiny that existed for new employees in 1976 is nowhere similar to 2006.
I'm baffled by how you can simultaneously hold these two thoughts in your head --- that NSA surveillance has improved so much that it's impossible for foreign governments to plant moles in the giant NSA org chat, but that it's so bad a random kid can download gigs of documents to ship off to Glenn Greenwald.
It is a very hard (and well known) security design problem to make system that the system builders and maintainers themselves can't access. Its possible, but few do it even today.
Russia intelligence is an external threat, and its threat model is well know. Whistleblowers are an internal one.
So to me, its not difficult at all to see why external well know threats are today less likely to happen, while new internal ones are missed. I have the same view of Windows security, in that Russian hacker has a hard time to break in, but a Microsoft employee would have a much easier time.
Different threat models. I assume you are well familiar with the concept so I am a bit baffled by your baffledness.
side note: After they identified Robert Hanssen as a rouge entity, were the NSA unable to provide evidence after the fact? This is after all the question I originally made.
Back in 76 there would have not been contractors (who had been let go by the CIA) employed by a third party working inside the NSA - which is where the vetting fell down
Sure, and the scrutiny in 1976 was vastly improved to 1956, or twenty years before that, etc. As the saying goes, espionnage is one of the world's oldest professions.
If there wasn't a real fear of long-term moles in government, counter-intelligence wouldn't be such a huge part of what the Intelligence Community does.
Presumably the fact that Snowden took what he did and yet they still have no idea what he did take is ample evidence that the emperor is wearing no clothes and anybody could have anything by now. The security crime here was to aggregate all that info because this was an entirely inevitable outcome.
From an agnostic point of view, there is something worth noting: the whole world heard about the story.
That really does not seem "spy-ish" to me: spying is a game, the goal is information. In that mindset, since the whole world got the information, the straightforward explanation is: Snowden is playing for all of us.
In my opinion[ * ], the only plausible scenario where Snowden is a Russian spy is: the Russians did not want the intel for themselves, they wanted it public. It probably does not make much sense that it was to undermine the USA's international image or to cleanse their own; the remaining possibility would be to play on their domestic image (saying "hey, we Russians are more libertarian than Americans"), but that seems like a bit of overkill (and a lot more subtle than what Putin used us to.
[ * ] The sole alternative is: Snowden gave more info to Russia than he gave the newspapers. That would make the whole story worth becoming the next James Bond screenplay (or would have made, in a universe without Daniel Craig), and would give it a nice antique Cold-War aura; however, I fail to imagine what kind of intel could justify such a twisted plan.
“some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities. Raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go—he had a ‘go bag,’ if you will.”
Um, I have a go bag in case of emergency/natural disaster that affects my home. That does not make me an international spy; the reason I have it is I have a three year old daughter.
And no shit he was ready to go. He knew what he was up against. Snowden's been a step ahead of the gov't at all times. Read some of his writing, he's incredibly smart and eloquent. It stands in stark contrast to the sweaty mealy-mouthed denials of the bureaucrats trying feebly to discredit him.
In black and white literal terms, he's certainly a criminal. It has so little to do with right and wrong that it hasn't affected his credibility much.
I think someone who willingly hacks the NSA is likely going to be smart enough to have a go bag and a very firm "get the fuck out of dodge" plan always sitting on the back burner. What person with an IQ over 100 wouldn't?
It'd say something incredibly bad about NSA hiring practices if they hired people stupid enough to not be extremely prepared before stealing data from them... Personally I'd have been planning for situations where I couldn't even return home if I'd been in Snowden's situation (and who knows, he might have). Redundancy everywhere..
One of the greatest side effects of the internet is that statements like this never disappear. Maybe it'll help people to cut down on saying silly things.
The point of this sort of statement is not persuade or clarify, but to muddy the waters and confuse the public. All he has to do is get the statement out there, and people that aren't paying close attention will conclude that it's an open question.
If he goes too far, he can always tone it down, change his mind "based on new evidence" or even apologize if it comes to that. People that criticize him will have to acknowledge his new position. But people that aren't paying close attention won't notice, and any retractions won't connected back to his original statement. That will still be out there on the net, getting quoted, linked to, retweeted etc, doing it's job of misinforming the unwary.
> Maybe it'll help people to cut down on saying silly things.
It won't, until we figure out to fetch such information automatically in a proper context.
Elsewhere on HN there's a discussion right now about an piece of journalistic nonsense thrashing Google that was written by a person who is known to exaggerate and write falsehood in her articles. I know that because someone brought it up in the comments; what I would like to have is a small pop-up, appearing immediately as I open the article, that says: "warning, this article was written by a known liar with history of writing falsehood".
It doesn't matter if stupid statements never disappear, until we have a way for them to resurface when needed.
The problem is that most people don't want to be told the truth, they want to be told that the beliefs they already hold are correct. Say that a browser extension doing what you're suggesting existed. When you open up the Fox News site, it would say something like "this site is highly biased and often blatantly lies about political issues to give them a pro-Republican slant". Do you think that Republicans would see that as a sign that they should stop reading Fox News? No, they would just disable the extension.
He could be acting in the best interests of the FSB, with friends slightly pushed by the FSB, and still think he's working alone.
Not all spies know they are spies. Not all assets are 100% willing assets who signed on a piece of paper "I am aiding and abetting the Russians." Some of the best assets that have ever existed in intelligence thought they were working on their own and were working in their own interests.. those interests just happened to line up with the controller's interests too.
Most of these "coincidences" hint at a connection between Snowden and Wikileaks --- which is public knowledge anyway. I've seen no evidence that they're a Russian conspiracy.
The only tie to Russia directly is the claim that he chose to go there, which is false; he was connecting there to a flight out, and was trapped there when the U.S. government revoked his passport.
Snowden's own argument in this interview (and others) that Russia and China treat their spies better, if that's what he was, is a lot more persuasive than hand-waving like this.
> Snowden chose to go to Russia. He just did not plan to stay there.
He chose to go through Russia. As far as I remember, Snowden wanted to get to Ecuador. There are not many ways to get there (from Hong Kong) without landing in a country that could easily extradite him. Landing in Moscow was probably the only way.
>>>> Up until the 90s the KGB was paying hackers to hack U.S. servers of interest. This is documented in Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.
Interesting you bring this up. When I read Levy's book, "Hackers" in the late 1990's, he made it seem like Koch and his buddies were more or less thrill riding and trying to make a quick buck on the side by selling information to the KGB. I think he even mentions the stuff they gave the KGB was pretty worthless.
If I remember correctly, Levy even downplayed Stoll's book and the work he did, minimizing the importance of the arrests that followed.
There is a some controversy about how Koch died, and many think the KGB may have been involved:
"Koch was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle, Germany. The death was officially claimed to be a suicide.[2][3] However, some believe there is little evidence supporting suicide and many believe that Koch was killed in order to keep him from confessing more to the authorities. Why Koch would be targeted and not Pengo and Urmel is unknown."
> Snowden visits… China and Russia… These can all be explained away as coincidences.
I don't think visiting China and Russia was a coincidence. He simply chose countries less likely to extradite him. Finally, it was US who revoked his password while he was traveling. His plan was to continue to Ecuador.
Assange's hacker name was Mendax (nobly untruthful). Snowden's code name? Verax (truth teller).
I am not the hugest Snowden or Wikileaks fan, but how is it a coincidence that people whose mission it is to release secrets would choose screennames related to the concept of truth?
>Wikileaks released the 911 pager messages which convinced Chelsea Manning that Wikileaks was the real deal, as those messages likely came from an NSA source.
Pager messages are sent OTA in plaintext. No NSA level wizardry was needed. Just some 133/433/900mhz antennas and knowledge that could have been gleamed from 90s era 2600 'zines.
Does anyone remember that Bradley Manning went to a meet-up in Boston at some hackerspace? He was hanging out with David House.
It's NOT beyond the range of possibilities that Snowden was (loosely) affiliated with other hackers who were interested in the subject of government surveillance. It's also not beyond the range of possibilities that help was provided to him by a friendly person who Snowden HAD NO IDEA WAS providing that assistance on behalf of a foreign government.
So when Snowden insists that he was acting alone, how does he know? This sort of thing has been done before you know, and the Soviets are particularly skilled at concealing their hand when it would impact the actions of a cultivated asset.
I know that the HN crowd is all lining up to proclaim Snowden "Man of the Year" but I've learned that the "omote" is often wrong or misleading and that the "ura" is difficult or impossible to distinguish.
This isn't tinfoil-hat talking, this is just my own experience trying to discern what's REALLY happening. I've said before that just because Snowden exposed the overreach it doesn't mean that there wasn't another piece of this that we are not seeing.
there's something of a "tradition" of people who have exposed corruption / illegality in american power through the press. those people seem to form a separate group from spies who disappear or are caught. in particular, the latter group don't send things to the papers and don't try to provoke public discussion - instead they quietly ship data of to their paymasters.
do you think that "deepthroat" was a foreign-aided spy? because it seems to me that snowden is more similar to that than, say, the rosenbergs.
what motivation is there for snowden to make such a public fuss? why not simply disappear and move to russia?
Because if the goal is to get a global adversary to pull their punches, then the only way to do that is to foster an auto-immune disease and get the populace to attack it's own institutions.
I'm not defending the NSA. But I'm also not a Snowden apologist. His actions would have carried more weight had he not tried (and so far succeeded) to escape prosecution.
And "deepthroat" took great pains to stay hidden, was in a position to help himself stay hidden, and was still a suspect almost from the very start. He also never went to Russia or China.
Au contraire: I think the metaphor fits perfectly in both directions. That's why I chose it.
Ideally, your self-defense systems only attack those that are actual "invaders" but if something looks/smells/acts like an invader, it gets attacked as well, even if it's really not "harmful."
Believe me when I say I'm sympathetic to the argument that the security apparatus has started to attack "healthy tissue" (to extend the metaphor) but the alternative can't be no immune system.
It has to be better, more appropriate, more selective, and more effective.
To continue the metaphor, I believe both immune systems mentioned perform necessary functions. As a side note, the parts of said immune system responsible for investigating pollution and white collar crime could do with some strengthening.
However, states are better understood as highly symbiotic ecosystems. This is more pronounced in third world states, where the military , intelligence agencies and political leadership form distinct power blocks. In the US, some hypothetical power blocks are the military-industrial complex, the alliance of media companies pushing for maximal copyright combined with the regulatory apparatuses they've co-opted, and Fundamentalist Christians, and the various three letter agencies with their constellations of contractors.
> if the goal is to get a global adversary to pull their punches
And by 'pull their punches' you mean stop illegal abuses and basically setting up full Stasi apparatus? Frankly the KGB would be doing you a big favour in this case. It doesn't obviously serve Russian interests to put a spanner in the works of a program which is putting the US and Europe on the trail of a path blazed by the likes East Germany and North Korea.
By "pull their punches" I'm saying to roll-back their surveillance. SO yes.
But I think you're wrong in stating that is doesn't serve Russian interests. It most certainly DOES serve their interests if the NSA gets kneecapped by its own people.
The point I was making is that the NSA have lost the plot and are acting completely counter to US interests by this point. Far from trying to scale them back, any adversary's strategic interests were best served by sitting back with the popcorn while the NSA screwed up the societal infrastructure. And worse, the NSA may yet carry the day, which will embolden said adversaries in the knowledge that the systemic failure is unrecoverable. That's the clusterfuck here, not the public leak - Snowden just shined a light on it.
Snowden did a lot of things but I'd stop short of saying that the NSA has stifled American civil liberties in any meaningful sense.
What we have seen is the potential for abuse, but not any evidence of that actual abuse.
I'm a pragmatist. I don't believe that the people that work at the NSA have any interest in domestic affairs unless there is a real threat to the republic. Of course, that could change which is why we need to scale back their domestic surveillance. But I wouldn't expect miracles here.
tbh I think you're still missing the point here. It is highly unlikely that Snowden is the only person to have got his hands on that material. He's just shown up the flaw and at least some of the bad guys are highly likely to have it. The utter stupidity here is blindly following a 'collect everything' Pokemon strategy, which leaves you wide open to not only internal abuse from factions in intelligence, military, politics, business - but also organised crime and foreign actors. Even worse, that seems to be being stored in perpetuity thus causing a combinatorial explosion of those threat vectors. And if that wasn't bad enough, we learn of another multiplier where non-US countries were adding to that toxic heap of data. Great way to contribute to global stability. The individuals involved may mean well but you know what they say about the road to hell.
When the president says these leaks "shed more heat than light", he's been not being specific.
If a single person had died as a result of Snowden's actions, the US Government would trumpet the loss as the most tragic breach of national security and call Snowden a murderer.
Why on earth would the US reveal to the world that Snowden's actions have hurt the country, or an American in some way? Not the sort of thing you announce to your potential adversaries if you want to be taken seriously or be feared in any way. It's also the same reason why we don't hear of the effectiveness of the NSA's spying efforts, it's just something they're not going to ever publicly talk about as it relates directly to national security.
Two weeks after Edward Snowden's first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. "We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany," Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. "So lives have been saved."
In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.
Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe — saving real lives," Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. "This isn't a game. This is real."
...
Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
"Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?" Leahy said at the hearing. "Would you agree with that, yes or no?"
"Yes," Alexander replied, without elaborating.
I believe this has subsequently been revised to zero...
It's pretty hilarious watching various shills deliver this "Snowden gave Russia our secrets" propaganda. To believe that, you'd have to also believe that Russia's FSB is totally incompetent and failed to notice all the changes in the world of spying over the last couple decades.
There is simply no way the FSB - successors to the KGB - is that inept.
/bonus: if we are in bizzaro-world and the FSB somehow missed what their main adversaries were up to over the last decade, then must not be much of a threat and we can scale back all our expensive spy programs.
> He added, “It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.”
He's wrong, it will stick. What makes it stick is not which story is told first, its the one that's being told the most.
In the end the media will just be beating this story to absolute pulp and most Americans will probably respond with absolute apathy towards the whole thing.
In EU we're just getting a good kick out of a classic spy story, and hope the protagonist wins.
In the U.S. people are constantly drawn between two strongman caliber opinions of what it means to be a true patriot. The "traitor" thing usually ticks off a lot folks, and imho will just more quickly draws them towards that side of the argument, just to be save.
At some point these elected and unelected idiots in government are going to have to recognize that most of the american public (referring to US citizens) is coming to view him as a hero. And Obama, who was supposed to be "for the people, by the people" has done nothing to dismantle the programs put in place by previous administrations or to even curtail advances during the six years of his "kingship".
I love my country, but how can I not be disillusioned with my government?