British spying operations have allegedly been disrupted because the Russians and Chinese cracked codes contained in documents leaked by Edward Snowden:
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in “hostile countries” after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported.
Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services…
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Snowden had done a huge amount of damage to the West’s ability to protect its citizens.
Others find the timing of these revelations suspicious:
The revelations about the impact of Snowden on intelligence operations comes days after Britain’s terrorism law watchdog said the rules governing the security services’ abilities to spy on the public needed to be overhauled.
Conservative lawmaker and former minister Andrew Mitchell said the timing of the report was “no accident”.
“There is a big debate going on,” he told BBC radio. “We are going to have legislation bought back to parliament (…) about the way in which individual liberty and privacy is invaded in the interest of collective national security.
According to Cameron’s office, there’s no evidence anyone has actually been hurt. But that’s not stopping people from saying Snowden has blood on his hands — and right after his victory lap in the wake of the “USA Freedom Act,” another occasion for partisans to bludgeon each other with nerf clubs and launch marshmallow fusillades.
Looks like the facts and framing of the issue in the UK are as subject to manipulation for political gain as they are here. I’ve finally learned to wait and see before giving credence to any revelations, but feel free to speculate wildly!
Botsplainer
Edward Snowden is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
And Glenn Greenwald is his Prophet…
Trentrunner
The story is total bullshit.
Can we just give Snowden his Nobel Peace Prize already?
Corner Stone
Hmmm…hmmm…
AxelFoley
Weeeeelllll, Snowden fans…what you got to say now?
BBA
The Sunday Times is a Murdoch rag. Less awful than others, maybe, more of a Wall Street Journal than a New York Post, but it’s still Murdoch.
Corner Stone
That Reuters article reads like a govt press release for the most part.
“Snowden downloaded more than 1.7 million secret files from security agencies in the United States and Britain”
Why do they keep repeating this when official US sources still say they don’t know what or how many Snowden actually had? And security agencies in Britain? I must’ve missed something.
“but nobody should be in any doubt that Edward Snowden has caused immense damage,” he told Sky News.
“A British intelligence source said Snowden had done “incalculable damage”.
Baud
I love reading stories where the only good guy is me.
donnah
Any time you’re dealing with national and international security issues, there will be that nebulous gray area between good and bad. And there will be absolute dark areas that never see the light of day. Snowden is a hero and a villain, hung up in the middle of everything.
I’m with you, Betty. There’s more to be told and we may never sort it all out. Maybe time will tell.
MattF
All I see here is a large number of reasons to stay out of this argument.
Amir Khalid
If Edward Snowden sees Daniel Craig following him, he should run!
Botsplainer
@Trentrunner:
Because Snowjob’s revelations have done so very special much for everybody out there. They made wealth equalize, police act respectfully toward people of color, people of means realized the worth of labor and sought to scale health outcomes via single payer, tax rates on wealthy people increased…
Or was it just that asshole supremacists got to scream about the tyranny inherent in Government having the ability to foil racist terror or that dudebros can whine about the sanctity of their porn stashes?
Baud
You’ll have to forfeit your blogging license if you keep that up, Betty.
Hunter Gathers
Am I the only one who thinks that Snowden should have sought better legal advice? He’s currently hanging out in Moscow, waiting to get whacked, while Greenwald signs movie deals. For someone of supposed intelligence, he’s really fucking naive. He’s going to spend the rest of his life getting accused of shit like this, and Greenwald’s only going to get richer off of his involvement. Edward Snowden is possible one of the most naive people I’ve ever seen.
raven
@Hunter Gathers: I, for one, don’t give a fuck.
Baud
If someone were to get hurt, I wonder if that would change anything for anybody.
Baud
@raven:
I always appreciate a new thread after several hours with an old one.
Villago Delenda Est
@MattF: Aye.
There are no good guys in this story. At all. Least of which is attention whore Glenn Greenwald.
Corner Stone
@Hunter Gathers: He may possibly be. It’s also possible that you fail to grasp any part of his motives for the actions he undertook.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: It’s possible that his stated motives are not his actual ones, too.
As He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named once said, “Such lies, Edward.”
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est:
That sounds suspiciously close to it’s kissing cousin “both sides do it!” inoculation.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s difficult to conceive that money was ever one of them, based on observable outcomes.
And, no, I personally do not believe he thought he would be free to travel after revealing what he revealed.
chopper
as with all things snowden i’m a give this a few days to see.
Germy Shoemangler
A 19th-century fable from Ambrose Bierce:
Cacti
While I don’t doubt that such a thing is very possible and that Snowden’s assurance of “zero possibility” of anything falling into the hands of China or Russia comes from a guy who’s certain nobody could be smarter than him…
There’s really no way to prove or disprove that covert operatives needed to be moved.
Cacti
@Hunter Gathers:
Notice that did you?
GG gets paid, while all of his associates end up twisting in the wind when it’s time to pay the piper.
Pretty sweet set up he’s got going.
raven
@Baud: And that is the only reason to care!
Comrade Dread
Makes sense. Snowden can claim his encryption can never be cracked, but there’s always someone better. Or he could have given up the key under duress or coercion. Who knows?
Wouldn’t surprise me though if this happened months ago and the government sat on it until it was politically advantageous to reveal it.
Hunter Gathers
@Corner Stone: I completely grasp his motives. If he thought that running was going to make his punishment less severe, then he’s fucking stupid. There is no possible scenario where he gets off scott free after doing what he did. Whether or not you think what he did was a crime or not is beside the point. What he did was illegal, and he was going to do time one way or the other. Whether or nor that’s fair is also beside the point. If he had sought better legal advice, he could have dumped all of the documents he took all at once, and probably be out of jail by now. There’s no way that the trial would not have been a media circus, and any defense lawyer worth his salt would have made him out out to be A Hero for what he did, and gotten a reduced sentence due to a sympathetic jury. And gotten better reforms out of it to boot.
But he didn’t do that. He took the advice of an attention whore, ran, pissed off practically everyone that he could, and is now a worldwide pariah who will spend the rest of his life waiting for that bullet to the back of the head. His only congressional ally is the bigot who calls himself Rand Paul, and that dead tribble wearing shitstain only raised objections during the Patriot Act renewal in order to raise money for his Quixotic presidential campaign. Snowden is Fucked For Life.
He’s neither a Pariot, nor a Traitor. He’s a naive man-child, who thought running would make it all go away. And the people who are his supposed ‘friends’ are getting fat checks by exploiting him. I don’t admire him. I feel sorry for him. He tried to do the right thing, and everyone involved fucked him over. He should have gotten a better lawyer.
Tommy
@Hunter Gathers: Not sure there was better legal advice. When I went to my father’s retirement there were folks with M16s guarding safes. Our government takes their secrets pretty seriously. Take those secrets, and I am a huge Snowden fan, and they will pound you into the ground.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone: Why don’t Snowden and his chief handler Greenwald reveal exactly how many files they have. They way info has been fed to Murdoch owned sources is suspicious, and Cameron has been overly zealous about the need to sacrifice all for security.
I don’t think that any of the players in this little spy game are entirely reputable.
ruemara
Look, Snowden admitted to taking documents he hadn’t read. He admitted to taking the Boze Allen job just to get natsec documents. He said he left all documents with GG & Poitras and didn’t take them to Russia or China. That’s his statements. Asking me to take it on GG’s word that everything the government says is all crap is like asking me to take everything the government says is true. There aren’t good actors in this and most of the pro-Snowden “Snowden has saved us” is nonsense akin to religious fervor. It’s like a healthy dose of skepticism is not allowed about all the people involved in this farce. And yes, taking national security documents abroad and allowing them to get into the hands of people we are actively competing with, that’s hella bad. Even if you think you’re an uber god of encryption.
Comrade Dread
@Tommy: The kid could have picked Bosnia, Macedonia, or the Maldives to go and hide. They don’t have extradition treaties with the US and they’re probably a bit less interested in cracking US espionage secrets.
Botsplainer
@Hunter Gathers:
I keep picturing Griftwald as Otter in Animal House, grinning while telling Special Ed “hey, you fucked up. You trusted us!”
Thing is, Glenn never was much of a lawyer. His thing was to run a radical right/white supremacist clientele as the “principled” civil libertarian. Wasn’t successful at it, either.
Corner Stone
@Hunter Gathers:
[cut ridiculously hilarious rant]
Yes. Yes, it is quite clear that you *completely* grasp his motives.
Your ridiculous suggestion that “better” legal advice would have been to dump everything somewhere at once and take jail time, is the man-child naivete you so strenuously project onto Snowden.
If he had taken your version of better advice no one would know who the fuck you were talking about if you made a remark about that guy who leaked that stuff one time, that Eric Snow fella?
Nothing would have happened, no debates would have been started and no laws would be held up to scrutiny and/or possibly revised. They would have buried him and kicked all the info about programs into obscurity after a very brief sturm und drang and much hand waving-off by govt officials denying everything. There certainly would never have been a court finding that the NSA’s activities were held to be illegal.
Talk about fucking naive. The only reason any of this matters at all is because Snowden stayed out of prison and was free to communicate with the world.
Corner Stone
@Brachiator: I think so far the intent has been to give govt enough rope to hang itself. And it certainly has tripped over its own joint a few times in heavy handed denials it later had proven false. So maybe they don’t have any interest in giving the govt any info to assist.
Tommy
@Comrade Dread: Well he ended up in Russia because that was kind of where his plane was going when he was trying to get elsewhere. I get people here don’t like Glenn Greenwald and maybe Snowden as a result. I am huge fans of both. But by US laws the guy broke many of them. There is not a chance he is coming back here in my lifetime. I find that sad but true!
Tree With Water
A fascinating dynamic is in play. Digital communication enables swift reactions to the most sophisticated smears by agencies of government. Even Richard Nixon, the 20th century’s master practitioner of dirty politicking American-style, would have a tough time slinging mud under the jaundiced eye of wide awake journalists nowadays. Which is not to say mud doesn’t stick anymore.. but why this smear, now? The congressional vote a week or so ago to roll back surveillance is my first thought. What was it Kissinger said about Chile? Something about the irresponsibility inherent in democratic decision making, when decisions are made that run counter to the perceived interests of the United States. That’s the breed of cat now feeding these lies to We The People, and kudos to the Guardian (et.al.) for calling them out.
fuckwit
i smell bullshit
Howard Beale IV
@Tree With Water:
FTFY
Sasha Goldberg
Snowden is living off the beneficence of the Russian government. Does it surprise anyone that he needs to pay his rent? Seriously, is it even remotely possible that the Russian Government’s willingness to provide him with a safe haven isn’t dependent on his being of use to them? Because, I think it’s incredibly naive to think otherwise.
Botsplainer
I’m still trying to figure out how the Snowjob revelations are going to do anything to make my life better by one iota, but am drawing complete blanks.
Tommy
@Botsplainer: Our government lied to us. Will this make your life better. Not sure. I don’t do illegal shit so if the government is watching my every move they are wasting their time. But like to know about it.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid: We had a Bond movie called Skyfall. Snowfallout would be a great sequel.
BobS
@AxelFoley: That you’re still the dumbest fuck on the internet.
different-church-lady
@Tommy:
Yes, but then again so did Snowden and Greenwald. And the media. Where that leaves us I don’t know.
Tommy
@different-church-lady: How did Snowden and Greenwald lie to us? I do not mind being wrong. I like to learn shit. How did they lie to us?
Brachiator
@Corner Stone: That’s my problem with this thing. Greenwald and Snowden make noises about citizens needing to be mindful of privacy issues, but then install themselves as privacy czars catching the government out, with no accountability to anything other than their own sense of moral superiority.
And it bothers me that they have a clutch of US and Western secrets, but nothing of say, Russian and Chinese secrets.
PurpleGirl
@Botsplainer: I wonder how Richard Condon felt about that particular phrase from The Manchurian Candidate becoming so culturally iconic.
Emma
@Tommy: Assumption the first: All governments lie to their constituencies. It’s the nature of the beast. Assumption the second: All governments think they do it for good and sufficient reasons. Assumption the third: 75% of the time they are wrong.
What amuses me about this whole thing is that so many people are running around Chicken Littling for all they’re worth about the government learning what we’re doing while Amazon, Google, and others probably know if you’re banging your sister-in-law and the color of her underwear.And if you believe all their promises about standing up to the big bad government wolf when they come looking, I have a bridge to sell you. Good luck collecting tolls.
Tommy
@Brachiator: So Snowden should have worked for a Chinese firm and got their secrets. You are going there.
Corner Stone
@Brachiator:
I haven’t read every installment The Intercept has put out but it is my understanding that they continue a series of researched revelations from the documents. So IMO it doesn’t seem like they are crouched down waiting to pounce on a slip up. I’ll leave projecting motives to others.
John Cole
One more time- if they took two fucking years to protect their assets in the field, let alone 24 hours, this is on them and not Snowden.
Total bullshit.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone:
I think you are projecting motives here.
@Tommy: No, I am saying that I might view this thing more positively if it were a band of hackers revealing every major government’s dirty laundry.
RandomMonster
It’s actually possible to praise Snowden’s whistleblowing motive, criticize him for not vetting the information he released, rebuke him for putting himself at the mercy of foreign powers and not safeguarding the information, and recognize that Glenn Greenwald is a blowhard worthy of mockery. All of these things can be done concurrently and without contradiction.
Tree With Water
@Emma: Consumer protection laws can nip information gathering in the bud anytime voters get serious. The discussion at hand entails a more sinister situation, if only because the intelligence community disregards the rule of law.
Corner Stone
@Brachiator: I consider it to be more of a personal opinion based on observable information to date, and used the words “I think” for a reason.
White Trash Liberal
This story isn’t a good one. The sources are all anonymous and have that stink of character assassination.
I’m still stuck on Snowden’s original giveaway to Chinese state media, when he outlined what businesses are under NSA surveillance and their methods. This was straight up espionage as a quid pro quo to retain protection while in Hong Kong. This was not a fairy tale. Greenwald himself acknowledged that Snowden revealed state secrets to the Chinese government.
I’m also stuck on the sheer volume of stories released from the Snowden docs mainly undermining US diplomacy and statecraft. Very little was pertinent to the original revealed overreach of domestic authority, but that reveal was used as a shield to justify dozens of stories that only served to hurt the United States.
I’m also stuck on Greenwald lying on several occasions about how whistleblowers are routinely dumped in a supermax for all time. That has been has go-to justification for Snowden’s civil disobedience. You can hear Corner Stone echoing this lie in this thread. I’m further stuck on the routine threats Greebwald has leveled at the UK and US governments with the powers his information grants him.
This has been an ugly, nasty story from the getgo. And should have been handled in a more ethical, less sociopathic manner.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal:
Go fuck yourself. It is certainly not a lie that he would not have been available to discuss this issue while in prison.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal:
Link?
Heliopause
No need to speculate, the story contains basic factual errors, obvious absurdities, and even if accepted at face value contains nothing more than bald assertions.
Tree With Water
@White Trash Liberal: “I’m still stuck on Snowden’s original giveaway to Chinese state media, when he outlined what businesses are under NSA surveillance and their methods”.
My guess is the Wily Chinese don’t need much (if any) help in dealing with western intelligence agencies- they’ve been doing it since their own 4th of July sixty-odd years ago. And if the information was so damned important, why was a cipher clerk granted access to it in the first place?
White Trash Liberal
@Tree With Water: @Corner Stone:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html
?
White Trash Liberal
@Tree With Water: @Corner Stone:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Your response to Hunter was bullshit on Melba toast. You have no idea what would have actually happened had Snowden used internal channels. What you and I both know is that he deliberately took the job at Booz to steal documents, and that he lied about ever e-mailing the inspector General about his qualms.
All your Orwellian Fantasia can’t mask his shitty choices. Go fuck yourself.
Cacti
@White Trash Liberal:
While other aspects of the story are up for debate, one basic, incontrovertible fact of it is as you describe:
Edward Snowden took a job under fraudulent circumstances, for the specific purpose of committing theft of classified materials. His intent at the outset was criminal.
rikyrah
@raven:
me either.
White Trash Liberal
@Tree With Water:
So, because the Chinese are wily, it was perfectly ok that Snowden detailed NSA surveillance practices to their state media as an “act of ingratiation”?
mike with a mic
Heh, I work in IT, security at that! High end encryption and data loss protection is what I do for part of the day. I’m the Nazi of the IT department to some.
Here’s the deal with encryption, doesn’t really work. ALL encryption can be cracked, it’s just a matter of time. And now and then huge technological leaps (multicore CPUs with better effciancy per watt, GPU computing) happen that blow past assumptions out of the water. Encryption is at best a delaying tactic, it will take x hours/years/millions of years to crack Y. But then something comes along that does it thousands of times faster.
And that’s when it works! But as we’ve with multiple incidents lately (apple, SSL, and more!) it often doesn’t. And that’s not always due to NSA actively undermining it, it’s that people fuck up and make mistakes. That’s life, no system or machine you can build is immune to design flaws and bugs. You shrug your shoulders, accept, deal with it, learn from it, and build a better one.
So the default assumption you make is this! My encryption can be cracked, and probably faster a few years out if the attacker has enough money and resources for it. Beyond that, there’s always a chance the fucking thing don’t work! So, anything that someone can physically get their hands on, is already compromised by default and should be treated as such. So anything that is of value, should be kept on corporate/government servers only. And all VPN or VPN type connections into home have to have limited access that is physically separated at the physical/electrical layer from the good stuff. If this is not the case, assume you are compromised.
And FYI I consider Edward Snowden a fucking traitor. We’re about the same age, both grew up in the greater DC area with parents who had clearances. Both joined the military, both came out to work for private defense contracting jobs (I worked out of the Pentagon and off K Street). There is no fucking way on earth he does not know what I know about this sort of shit. And that’s why I’ll have no problem when he does get whacked. The biggest danger to any system is insiders, IT people (especially those of us who have to get cleared) go through fucking hell at times. All because we have the ability to fuck up EVERYTHING. There are always, ALWAYS channels for reporting information you bump into that is criminal or illegal. Granted, doesn’t always end up the way you like. But that doesn’t mean you compromise the entire fucking system and launch an insider fucking attack!
You’re own personal moral and values can NEVER be part of the judgement calls. For every good guy with access, there’s someone who’s an asshole. You don’t use your administrator rights to launch political crusades. You check that shit at the fucking door. I’ve had gripes with bosses, workers, companies, hell the Navy at times. But I realized that I have access to private information, and above all my job is to protect it. Because if we all make our own calls, well then everything is out there. And when you’ve worked in areas where clearances range from secret to ts/sci and a few yankeewhite types floating around, or have master access to a system that controls payroll and medical information, you realize fast this is not yours or a toy.
Again, there is no way Snowden does not know this. And that’s what horrifies me. If he was just some shmuck and not in IT, I could buy the stupidity of it all. Or if he was say a senator or NSA director, I could possibly buy him having the stature and depth of experience and knowledge to do it. But as a fucking systems administrator? He had all the technical and defense/intelligence background to know how fucking insane this was, he can’t claim ignorance, and none of the moral or trusted stature to stand on.
Nobody looks good in all of this, maybe something good will come of it though. But Snowden is a fucking scumbag on every level and Greenwald is a giant jackass. Having a problem your with plumbing is not a reason to burn down the house on your family.
fuckwit
@RandomMonster: Yep, such is the nature of a complex world. It’s not a cartoon or an action movie. All the characters are very flawed and motives never pure or even clear– possibly not even to themselves. It’s all muddled. We’re all in the dark. Nobody knows what the hell is REALLY going on, in much of life and politics, and when you get to working with massive state-sponsored intelligence agencies, the fog gets even thicker.
I learned a new term the other day “wicked problems”. It’s not Boston slang for a cool problem. It means, deep, impossible, no-win, serious, untestable/unsimulatable problems which you don’t have enough information to solve and may never be able to actually have enough information to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem Very many of the problems we face today, from surveillance, technology, global warming, institutionalized racism/sexism, globalization/trade, wars/religions, income inequality, ethnic conflicts, the aftermath of colonial state borders, etc, are wicked problems.
We all have to get more comfortable with dealing with them. When things like TPP, Snowden, etc, get discussed here, tempers flare and patience wears thin, because, these are particularly wicked problems in which all the information we’re receiving from all sides is probably bullshit, makes it very hard to even discuss let alone argue effectively.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: That link doesn’t say anything like what you purport it does. GFY.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Bullshit. We know he tried multiple times to go through internal channels and got nowhere. You can keep lying and posting links that don’t backup the shit you spew and you can also go fuck yourself.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Yes, it does, dumbass. Greenwald acknowledges that Snowden gave information about NSA surveillance methods to the Chinese state media, says he would not have published that info, but defends Snowden as doing so as an act of ingratiation… Which is quid pro quo.
I’m sure you read things differently through your gamma ray vision, but it’s pretty explicit to my eyes. Maybe I should just defer to your dizzying intellect on this one. Lol.
satby
@mike with a mic: Nice explanation. I was in IT security for a while back when it was much simpler, and I pretty much agree with everything you said.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Everything you are asserting came from the basis of a post out of the South China Morning Post. There is simply no independent confirmation that anything in that report is confirmed or accurate. Just repeated in other reports.
So now we’re going to use “Chinese state media” as reliable sources, with no independent verification or on the record affirmation? That’s pretty convenient when they are the bad guy 99.99% of the time but the Gospel of Jesus when you want them to be.
“Asked if his decision to take the job had been a calculated move designed to give him access to secret information, Mr Snowden reportedly replied: “Correct on Booz.”
Please note the use of the word “reportedly”. That’s because they can’t independently verify any part of that account by “Chinese state media”.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal:
Or you could stop lying. Maybe give that a try?
Corner Stone
Snowden: I never gave any information to Chinese or Russian governments
That’s a direct statement on the record from the principal involved.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
This graf states outright that Snowden released NSA methods, which is a crime, but justifies it through the lawyerly frame of ingratiation. Regardless of his rationale, and ingratiation is flimsy, he broke a law as a means to an end.
But like I said, I’ll defer to CS’ extraordinary powers of analysis to somehow make my interpretation wrong.
And I would like a link proving that Snowden went through multiple legal whistleblowing channels before his act of theft.
lawguy
@mike with a mic: Well if your own personal judgment system doesn’t count, what does? I mean do you check your conscience at the door and pick up a government issued one?
Wasn’t that one of those little things the Nirenberg Trials were about?
Southern Goth
@mike with a mic:
The major problem with IT security is that 98 percent of it is geared around preventing someone (usually an employee) doing something malicious to disrupt operations.
The idea that the data itself might be the target seems to be an afterthought. Especially since it’s the customer’s information that’s all too often being stolen and so far the only culpability is a disclosure and egg on the company’s face.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Greenwald provided independent confirmation of the South China Post story. Right there in that quoted graf. Your sophistry on this is appalling.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Your lying continues unabated I see. I would suggest you go back and re-read but you’re obviously too supid to get that what you are stating is a lie.
If you want to take South China Post as your early morning read, then good for you I guess.
mike with a mic
@Southern Goth:
Not where I work! We have to follow the full DOD recommendations and the data is an issue. Because I’m ex military and have worked for the same sort of contractors and sub contractors that Snowden did. This shit is set by DOD/NSA/DOE/CMS/ect. He got the same lectures I did. We both swore oaths and signed our names to shit. There is no fucking way he did not know this.
And again, that is the FUCKING PROBLEM. He was someone who damn well knew what he was doing, he damn well knows his stupid encrypted files can be decrypted, and he damn well knows Greenwald is a technical retard and can’t protect it. And anybody who thinks this isn’t the exact situation he created is either a fucking liar or doesn’t know shit about IT.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Lol Greenwald confirms that Snowden leaked state secrets to Chinese state media as an act of ingratiation, but I’m lying by quoting it. My bad. I forget that for Xtreme Progressives, the Gingrich Rules apply to Snowden and Greenwald.
I’ll stop drinking your milkshake. Banana isn’t my favorite favor.
Corner Stone
A transcript of the Brian Williams NBC interview. Andrea Mitchell later confirmed the NSA had an email raising these concerns from Snowden.
“BW: When the president and others have made the point that you should have gone through channels, become a whistleblower, and not pursued the route you did. What’s your response?
ES: I actually did go through channels, and that these documents – the NSA has records they have copies of emails, right now to their Office of General Counsel to their oversight and compliance folks, from me, raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities. Now I had raised these complaints not just officially, in writing, through email to these officers and and these individuals
but to my supervisors, to my colleagues in more than one office I did it in Fort Meade, I did in Hawaii and many, many of these individuals were shocked by these programs they never seen them themselves, and the ones who had went: “you know you’re right, these are things that are really concerning, and these aren’t things that we should be doing, and maybe we’re going too far here, but
if you say something about this, they’re going to destroy you. Do you know what happens to people who stand up and talk about this?”
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: It’s based off the South China Morning Post. Get that through your imaginary brain freeze.
Fucking lying moran.
ETA, the article I linked to in #75 is an interview by GG on ES!
lawguy
@lawguy: Sigh, Nuremberg (never trust spell check).
Emma
@Tree With Water: Enjoy your paradise. The rest of us don’t live there.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Greenwald confirmed the South China Morning Post story. Confirmed it was a leak, and offered a rationale. I choose to believe him. You keep making this about the veracity of the Post and ignoring Greenwald’s admission that Snowden did in fact leak that information to the Chinese. I’m not the idiot in this argument.
And I have seen that one e-mail sent to General Counsel, and it was piffle. Not even a fig leaf. His question had zero to do with anything he stole. It was a clarification of policy.
You are disingenuous on this topic. And I’m pretty sure you know it, but keep calling me a liar, and have a good night.
Bob Munck
It’s remarkably easy to encrypt something such that it would take every computer in the world a trillion years to decrypt it. Given what I know of Snowden’s technical skills, I’d be very, very surprised if he was so careless as to use a breakable encryption.
And note that it’s not a matter of “someone else being better than he is.” High-quality encryption involves telling everybody else how you did it. The things you keep secret from them are the encryption keys: random bit strings containing tens of thousands of bits, often broken into pieces and stored separately by different people and institutions. You can’t “guess” an encryption key. The algorithms used to do the encryption have been discussed, analyzed, and gone through many times by a large number of experts, looking for a trick (back door) that can be used to break them.
In other words, I think it’s likely that the British government is just flat-out lying about this, in the belief that the Russians and Chinese will find it in their best interests not to bust them. It gives everybody someone to blame for all their mistakes, for a very long time.
Southern Goth
@mike with a mic:
You say that and, yet somehow despite all your acronyms, Snowden was able to hoover up a lot of classified docs using a downloaded web crawler against internal websites. (Supposedly.)
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
In that quoted interview, only that one tangential e-mail to the Office of General Counsel was ever corroborated. All the other claims he made have not been backed up by documentation.
It’s ironic you attack the poorly sourced Times article, and hand wave the story by the Post, but use an interview with Snowden as tantamount to gospel. I think your objectivity in this matter is a touch faulty.
mike with a mic
@Corner Stone:
That isn’t a good defense for what he did. Again, first rule of IT is you do not leak the information you are granted access to. I can’t state this enough. You want your IT staff to have privacy values and rules on the level of lawyers, priests, and doctors. It’s not just “national security secrets” we have access to. Our counter parts in banking, medicine, healthcare, dating sites, facebook, google, have access to more information than your brain can process.
You don’t compromise shit, end of story. Because, again, your IT staff are human beings. We range from hippie coders, brogrammers, ex-military, randians, rabid progressives, to more. None of us agree on shit when it comes to personal values, so you check your political crusade at the door and go to work.
Snowden is a Randian twat with emotional problems that made him forget to check his stupid at the door.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Of course it’s about the veracity of the South China Morning Post! No where does ES himself say he did what that post claims, and GG is commenting off the post in SCMP, not any statements from ES. This isn’t hard. If the source material can’t be trusted then anything derivative from that tainted source must be looked at sceptically.
I’m not the one lying here repeatedly, so you can go fuck yourself.
Corner Stone
@mike with a mic: Keep your nutjob ass lecture to yourself. I don’t need some twit like you to tell me about “The Rules for IT”.
You’re an authoritarian asshole and post after post here back that up.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: The NSA stated for months that they had NO contact or emails from ES on this issue. Then months later they produce this one teensy email.
Now, I understand you’re stupid, but it must be amusing to be you and believe the NSA for all that time, then when this “piffling” email evidence is acknowledged still wipe the drool from your mouth and go back to believing the NSA – that’s ALL they have.
mike with a mic
@Southern Goth:
First, “internal websites” is moron speak. You want intranet. That means you’re already on the network, which goes back to what I said about “if you have physical access” consider it compromised.
In basic speak, there is external, WAN, LAN, SAN. The LAN is internal, if you are physically on the LAN than you have electrical level access to anything on that circuit. This is why you root up every IT workers ass with a flash light before you hire them. Because with a decent amount of administrative credentials and circuit level access they own it. This is also why physically separating networks with certain information happens, you don’t want admin rights bleed and you want to keep access as minimal as possible.
But if someone has physical access, admin rights, access to logging/control/admin/sec/bi systems they pretty much own it. There isn’t a damn thing you can do about them and if they aren’t idiotic you can’t catch them. Most people have no earthly idea the power a sysadmin or netadmin has.
Which is why most of us take our job and your data rather seriously.
lawguy
@mike with a mic: Your argument is that only them there government officials in positions of authority know what the people should know. Secrets must be kept, mainly from the people who are arguably their bosses. We are not discussing what people who work for banks or hospitals should be releasing. That is a red herring. We are talking about people who work for the government in a (theoretical) democracy.
As I said earlier (misspelled though it may have been), that is supposed to be one of the major lessons of Nuremberg. You do not obey unjust laws.
mike with a mic
@Corner Stone:
Your idea that people with access to information should just leak it if they feel like it is fucking nuts. Should conservative contractors on the ACA website leak data? I’d assume you’d want people who swear oaths and sign contracts to protect data to actually mean it!
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
He wasn’t just commenting off the post. He confirmed the leak and said he did it to ingratiate himself. He wasn’t theorizing. He wasn’t being skeptical. When Glenn is being skeptical, he is very direct. Calls people liars, authoritarians. He would have called the story bullshit, not extemporized on Snowden’s motivation. He confirmed the story.
Jesus, you Glennbots. Worse than Bible thumpers when it comes to apologetics.
mike with a mic
@lawguy:
Not really. My argument is that sysadmins (and FYI that’s part of my job title) should not leak the information of the systems they guard. And that your IT guy, is not a fucking moral authority to decide corporate or government ethics. And if he has a problem, there is always a system to deal with it. And finally, as an ex-military, ex-private contractor, private sector person with a somewhat similar background to ES, he knows full fucking well what he did and I actually understand the depth of the problem. And I also see through the bullshit on some of his claims.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
The e-mail in question does not pertain to metadata, PRISM, or anything associated with what he stole. Snowden’s claim was that he contacted multiple agencies, and this one tangential e-mail is all that has been provided. Not just the NSA, but Booz as well, whose interests would actually be served by demonstrating their employee’s commitment to trying all available legal channels.
I know that distrusting the government is the trump card you fucking Glennbots play at every opportunity, but you neglect in turn the veracity of these claims. Lord knows if I was stealing documents as an act of civil disobedience, I would have copies of all my e-mail and document traffic with plenty of cc and bcc for others to see. This is part of any advice given to anyone looking to make a formal complaint: document your actions and those with whom you are aggrieved. But he makes a claim, the NSA turns up a non sequitur, and this is proof of their perfidy and not his?
By limiting the scope of his claim to just the NSA, it allows you to squirt conspiracy ink into the discussion and call me stupid for trusting the Man.
lawguy
@mike with a mic: That is exactly what you are saying: “You must obey those in authority because they must be obeyed because they are in authority.” Nothing else. That is the mantra of one who has a totalitarian world view.
Second, he did try to take it through the system.
LAC
@raven: and I second you on the fucks given about snowden. He can spend his traitorous ass in Russia for the rest of his life.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal:
Speaking of ink squirting, the claim in the interview was several emails to NSA and superiors in the NSA. The fact that NSA claimed for months they did not have any emails from ES but then this one email was miraculously found somehow defines what he sent?
Fascinating.
And trusting The Man is fine, but after they have been documented lying to us as well as their congressional oversight? I think some scepticism is called for. You, obviously, do not.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: He was just commenting off the post. That is exactly what he was doing. No where in TDB article does he say, “ES told me”. He’s commenting off the SCMP report.
GG does an entire article interview with ES where ES explicitly denies providing info to state govt.
Here, look. “I confirm that WTL is a filthy raccoon fucker. He’s doing it to get in good with the chickens so he can fuck them one day.”
Corner Stone
@mike with a mic:
If you can find anywhere I have actually said that very thing I will give you a cookie.
But you can’t, so I guess you enjoy eating all the straw you have lying around.
Southern Goth
@mike with a mic:
As someone who has written a web crawler for more banal and benign purposes and done other web automation, I assure you that I don’t care about the physical topology of the network and don’t need electrical level access to collect information.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Your analogy makes no sense. Allow me to retort.
An article comes out from WND that claims Corner Stone enjoys glory holes and gave a demonstration on glory hole etiquette to a local chapter of the Elks Lodge. Corner Stone’s publicist does an interview with WaPo and says:
I would not have published any stories about glory hole etiquette. Corner Stone’s demonstration was a means of ingratiation with the Elks.
Now later, Corner Stone can have an interview denying the WND story, and frankly, WND is a rag. But in the aftermath of this alleged demonstration, the publicist did not call WND’s story a fabrication.
At that point, you have a discrepancy. I’m inclined to believe the first admission, because it gave a motive and created distance between the publicist and Corner Stone. Plus, this publicist has an established track record of attacking all negative stories as lies and character assassination attempts. I always believe first admissions and not future public relations stunts.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Did I ever go on record stating I enjoy glory holes? Did I subsequently go on record stating unambiguously I do not enjoy glory holes? Does this “publicist” state I said I enjoy glory holes, or WND should not have published info about enjoying glory holes.
Your use of the word publicist is also interesting.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: Listen, you’re the type of clown that should never have the word “liberal” anywhere near their handle. You take SCMP and LGF as Gospel. You’re an asshole and a liar that accepts bullshit because it fits your lying asshole way of looking at life.
You refuse to be sceptical when it’s called for and rather swallow pablum from your authoritarian betters and fellow lying asshole travelers.
I guess the word liberal has survived lying assholes such as yourself for decades, so I’m sure it can shrug your authoritarian lying asshole self off as well.
Donald
I’ve never understood “liberals” who side with the national security state. We’ve got a government which tortured people and lied about it and won’t prosecute the torturers and yet they are outraged about Snowden? Well, I expect that from apparatchiks–let me know when we have a government that is willing to investigate and prosecute its own war criminals and then maybe I will believe them when they say that Snowden did grave damage to national security.
White Trash Liberal
@Corner Stone:
Actually, fucktard, I am taking Greenwald as gospel in this instance. Not my fault he admitted the SCMP story was legit and that Snowden had motivation to release state secrets to China.
I’m the kind of liberal who applies skepticism in every direction as merited. I was not aware that liberalism was tethered to believing in the inherent nobility of Snowden. I was not aware that you are some kind of gatekeeper for what a true liberal is, especially since your routine revolves around a kind of casual verbal cruelty more in line with freepers.
Just about every institution in western civilization has been corrupted, often to the point that deceit is the lingua franca. I do my best to try and separate the deceit from truth. Sometimes, I screw up. I have followed this story, heck I have followed Greenwald for years. Closely. At a certain point, I realized that he is a cipher for interests that do not align with my own. In your expert eyes, that disqualifies me from the liberal club. So be it. I’ll note your opinion on my soul’s ledger.
JDM
I believe everything and anything unnamed government officials tell me.
Chris
@Donald:
This is gonna blow your mind, but it’s possible for someone to loudly object to Iran-contra, Vietnam, J. Edgar Hoover, the coups everywhere from Iran to Chile, and, really, the entire Cold War at least as it ended up being executed… and yet still believe that Aldrich Ames and Robert Hannssen were big steaming piles of treasonous shit.
If you think Snowden had nobler motives than them, or that the service he’s given the privacy advocates outweighs the way he did it, or simply don’t believe the Chinese or Russians got anything from him, well, argue away. But the fact that a guy who leaks a ton of intelligence information and then jumps ship for Russia is getting shit from liberals as well as others really shouldn’t make you incredulous.
Corner Stone
@Chris:
You’re right. That level of strawman bullshit will most likely blow lots of people’s minds. That was an amazing attempt. God bless.
Corner Stone
@Donald:
“Liberals” like White Trash Liberal really don’t give much of a shit about anything, at least as long as it’s their guy doing it. That’s it. That’s pretty much it.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal: No you’re not. You’re the type of fucktard that believes in the authority and power and legitimacy of the state as long as it’s your guy holding the power. During GWB you would have been one of those “liberals” that held GG up as first past the post criticism of govt overreach. Now, however, it’s your guy taking executive action.
Boom! Totes different scenario, y’all!
Corner Stone
@JDM: May I interest you in a set of commemorative dinner plates detailing how surveillance by the current admin really isn’t all that bad?
Chris
@Corner Stone:
*snerk
Remind me again where all you sanctimonious little shits were back when “our guy” tried to close Gitmo at the beginning of his term and ran into a wall of bipartisan opposition? Off crying about what a fascist he was for not throwing in a Department Of Peace?
LAC
I see that Corner Drunk is making friends for life again.
Corner Stone
@LAC: And you’re ankle biting again. Try doing something in the thread for a change, you chump.
Corner Stone
@Chris: Or maybe where anyone was after the courts ruled the NSA collections illegal and he then went on to ask it be continued because reasons.
Don’t try and tar me with that bullshit brush, friend.
Corner Stone
@Chris: Sanctimony. Hmmm, doesn’t seem to mean what you think it does, friend.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
You responded to an attempt to stop torture with a stance on a metadata issue that wouldn’t erupt for years? Most impressive.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
I’m not your friend, guy.
Corner Stone
@Chris: Ah, so do you know what sarcasm means, then, friend?
Corner Stone
@Chris: You are all over the place in your demands for purity, friend.
Or maybe I should say adherence.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
Is that what that was?
Corner Stone
@Chris: Then I guess you don’t know what a lot of words in English mean, friend.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
I asked one specific question. About one specific issue – which I’ll grant doesn’t have much to do with metadata collection, but hey, I’m not the one who introduced it: the “friend” you were responding to earlier was. Interesting definition of “all over the place” you’ve got.
(Friend).
Chris
@Corner Stone:
All of us are as maggots before your profound wisdom. Friend.
LAC
@Corner Stone: try finishing up your vat of wine and give it a rest, twit.
Corner Stone
@Chris: Your question was shit and didn’t deserve an actual response, friend. You, friend, can go fuck yourself.
Corner Stone
@Chris: Try keeping up, friend.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
Ah. Well, now that I have your permission. Friend.
Corner Stone
@LAC: Keeping up your nightly conversations with kitchen tables are you? Glad to see you’re staying in your lane, ankle biter.
Corner Stone
@Chris: It’s carte blanche for you to go fuck yourself any time you are able to. Feel free, friend!
Chris
@Corner Stone:
Thank you, my friend.
LAC
@Corner Stone: if anyone bit your your ankle, they would have to check into the Betty ford clinic. You are a fucking drunk bully who is under the delusion that your opinion rules this place, as usual and as always.
Corner Stone
@LAC: For some reason you seem to be deluded that calling me drunk, or calling me a bully means something to anyone here. There are literally hundreds of commenters here who exist and comment all the time who never once bother to say a damn thing about me. It’s amazing how non-fixated on me they are.
Just because you have an issue you, for whatever reason, can’t quite get past doesn’t mean that your fixation is accurate.
I swear that I, for one, have never once mentioned you or your name when you haven’t first bit on my ankles. Maybe it’s your loneliness? Or just simple jealousy that I contribute across a spectrum of topics and no one seems to give a shit if you ever post another comment here.
LAC
@Corner Stone: lol!! I can’t even with your first sentence. You are nothing but a lightning rod of douchery seeped in vodka that so many numerous people loathe. How you would think that anyone would be jealous of a person like you is almost as funny as you thinking you offer anything to this blog other than blind Hillary cheerleading and fauxgressive twattery. People do offer interesting opinions here. It is just too bad you have to stomp in here like Godzilla and crush it.
Corner Stone
@LAC: So you’re too stupid to understand plain English? That seems about right.
You evoke nothing from anyone except for the pathetic ankle biting you continually try on. Who here gives a shit about anything you have to say?
No one. I find you pathetic, and the fact that no one has ever responded to you beyond, “Heh, indeedy” terms on this blog should give you perspective for how useless your commentary here is. You’re nothing.
LAC
@Corner Stone: if I am nothing, heiffa, than shoo, fly. Quit getting your courage from a bottle and lecturing me. This blog is called ” balloon juice” and not “the corner drunk”. You are nothing …but a speed bump for opinions worth reading. You don’t run the show here, so the fuck I give about you is none. Ok?
Corner Stone
@LAC: Nothing.
Chris
God damn, LAC, for being “nothing” you’re certainly getting a hell of a lot of written about you.