Edward Snowden is back in the news for his document cache, allegedly now in the hands of the Russians and Chinese.
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.
Snowden downloaded more than 1.7 million secret files from security agencies in the United States and Britain in 2013, and leaked details about mass surveillance of phone and internet communications.
The United States wants Snowden to stand trial after he leaked classified documents, fled the country and was eventually granted asylum in Moscow in 2013.
He went to Russia via Hong Kong, and although he claimed in 2013 that the encrypted files remained secure, Britain believed both Russia and China had cracked documents which contain details that could allow British and American spies to be identified, the newspaper said, citing officials.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Snowden had done a huge amount of damage to the West’s ability to protect its citizens.
Team Greenwald calls bullshit on the allegations.
Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article depends – more on those in a minute – the entire report is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quickly whip up in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.
Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden “have blood on his hands” if there is “no evidence of anyone being harmed?” As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed: “There’s no evidence anyone’s been harmed but we’d like the phrase ‘blood on his hands’ somewhere in the piece.”
The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!
The truth I suspect is somewhere in the middle. Of course Greenwald will deny everything vehemently and his permanent, self-serving outrage mode is grating as hell (and no, the NSA is not reading every single e-mail in America), but Britain has a surveillance regime that makes the Patriot Act look like child’s play, and they’re not above actually using the scare tactics Greenwald is accusing them of using this time.
Where that truth is, well, I don’t know. Neither side benefits from telling it, it seems.
Hash it out below.
Raenelle
The truth is somewhere in the middle? Is this akin to both-sides-ism? Greenwald may grate on some, but has he ever been caught lying? Has he ever been caught in a huge error? OTOH, of course, we know the government and the press are here to help us, and they never lie or cover up. So, it is a puzzle.
japa21
Jeez, was Greenwald actually talking about one of his own articles? What he says could have been applied to just about any of them.
Punchy
Did Snowden really believe he’d go to Russia with a mother lode of secrets and NOT have them break the code 2 years later? I’m surprised it took this long. Computer nerds are smart and savvy, especially in countries where the options are likely “crack the code or be permenantly transferred to eastern Siberia”.
Not to mention….how can spy operations that Snowden jumped ship with still be in place several years later? I was under the impression that spies and their snooping operations have very short half-lives.
Gin & Tonic
If Snowden was careful (which he certainly gives every indication of having been) about correctly encrypting whatever it was that the Brits are talking about (and it’s unclear to me how something could be “top-secret” and yet “leaked” simultaneously) and if the Russians and the Chinese have actually decrypted it, then the Times has buried the lede, which should be that both the Russians and the Chinese have apparently simultaneously made sufficiently revolutionary advances in either mathematics or computation that render all contemporary data encryption and secure communications worthless.
redshirt
And the Teabaggers cheered – take that, Obummer!
Schlemazel
@Punchy:
Snowden was a naive naff without the brains of a goose. Yes, he thought he had those files encrypted – as if any encryption is safe from any nation that wants to spend the time and effort. People will die because of his actions, even if they have not yet done so. If not directly because agents are given away certainly because of the loss of resources from removing compromised agents. This is not different that Darth Cheney giving up one of our top nuclear agents. Everyone that had contact with the people named will be looked at & some number will die because it is assumed they were too friendly. Future contacts will view the assurances of their handlers will a lot of skepticism. Whatever good Snowden did (was there any? was anyone so stupid as to not know what was going on? If so they wanted to be stupid) it is outweighed by the damage he did.
The questions are the same now as it was then: What are we going to do about the over collection of private information? How do we assure the information collected is not misused? How do we even know if they are lying about any of what they have or do with it?
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Any sufficiently large nation can crack any currently available encryption if they have the time & the desire to do so. ANY, ANY.
Given what was put in their hands both countries could have been willing and able. Yes, the US can and does do the same thing. There are tricks to make it more difficult and what the goal is now is to make it difficult enough that by the time it is cracked the value of the data is near zero.
WereBear
Greenwald is not a trustworthy source. Ever since I, wanting to support his “work” bought a book and received a pamphlet, I realize he’s a media outrage machine, not a crusading journalist.
Schlemazel
@Schlemazel:
Anyone remember 60 Minutes report on room 641A? That was a long time before Snowden. It was on a major TV network in prime time. It was mentioned in all the papers, you might have read about it. People could easily have understood what was happening if they wanted to.
FlipYrWhig
@Schlemazel:
I’d like to see someone push for something like a “bill of rights” for digital privacy. The way privacy was understood in the pen and landline era feels inadequate to now. It’ll obviously be difficult to hash out. But, ya know, that’s what we have a government–three whole branches!–for.
Snarki, child of Loki
Other reports says that Snowden gave ALL his files to press contacts before leaving Hong Kong, so did not have “encrypted files” for the Russians and Chinese to crack.
Greenwald and Snowden have been putting their names on their claims, vs. “anonymous sources”. So believe whoever you want, but be clear that you’re probably just expressing a reflex prejudice, one way or the other.
Ryan
As much as I dislike Greenwald’s style, and to some extent what Snowden has done, being repeatedly lied to during the last administration and to a lesser extent, the current, forgive me if I need a hell of a lot more than anonymous government sources to find their position credible.
Joey Maloney
@Gin & Tonic: IF it is the case that the document cache has been decrypted, for more likely than some game-changing breakthrough in the science is simple poor opsec – they were able to steal the key from one of the people who possesses a copy. Given the clowns running this circus I don’t find that at all unlikely.
FlipYrWhig
I think the worst thing for which Snowden bears responsibility is that twerpy and pointless hacker character on House of Cards.
gvg
@Gin & Tonic: I think it was already the case that all encryption can be broken. Evidence, all the security breaches that keep happening in all the countries I read news about, both government and private. Its also been in the news for years that the Chinese are really really doing a massive amount of stealing of data, mostly what is known is inducstrial secret stealing. Stories unrelated to Snowden have been ongoing and predate his drama. So in the end I find the people who say that he was too cocky to be believed when he claimed his files were unbreakable is what I find most likely.
We are hearing about it now, but that doesn’t mean it just happened.
the stories don’t say Russia and China did this independantly or in cooperation. Quite possibly nobody on our side knows for sure and I don’t see how they could find out.
I just find it hard to believe that one guy, no matter how well trained could make something unbreakable if a big government committed enough resources to it.
I am not myself technical enough to really judge, but about the Greenwald lies thing, he seems to not be himself very good at tech and he has reportably misunderstood files he had. Overstated things frequently. the training of a lawyer is not nessesarily the best for reporting precise science and technology. I am not sure but I think this is very possible too. I don’t know that I could do better if someone brought me files like those…however I can see that I don’t know. Greenwald’s ego won’t let him admit not knowing or mistakes, which is part of how his personality ends up being part of the story.
The current story would make more sense if it was reporting now things that happened when the defection came out. Lots of people should have been moved then. On the other hand if you weren’t sure what he took and thought some agents were not comprimised that you had spent a lot of time getting into place…maybe you would wait for more info.
On the other other hand unsourced reports might just be someone scapegoating Snowden for something just screwed up that would reflect badly on them.
I wish I thought we were putting more effort into more secure data.
EZSmirkzz
Information, like beer, wants to be free
We can only trust anonymous sources in the government that are quoted by traditional media outlets. – Anonymous Coward
We are doomed! Doomed, I tell ya! Doomed.
Meanwhile back at rancho dinero …
Remfin
@Raenelle: His first two “revelations” that caused the Internet to completely freak were gross re-imaginings of the content of a PowerPoint he had but wouldn’t let anyone see for 6+ months. And when we finally saw them, it was obvious if anyone with even a modicum of technical understanding had seen them they would have understood they were nothing at all.
That’s not an argument for trusting anonymous government sources, but Greenwald isn’t any good here either.
Belafon
@Raenelle: Greenwald’s known for headlines saying “THE WORLD’S GOING TO END!” and then buried about 3/4 of the way down a paragraph that reads “The world’s not actually going to end, but sources continue to doubt that.”
Schlemazel
@FlipYrWhig:
That would help but you saw what happened with the bill to just sorta-kinda control the collection so there are 2 of the 3 branches pretending there is no problem. Neither HRC nor Bernie are going to change this. Certainly none of the clown car posse (not even Ayn Paul) will lift a finger to bring them to heel. Until the voters stop being a bunch of pants-wetting infants wanting big daddy to make them all safe, the agencies are going to have free run. IF that ever changes we will still have the issue of verification. Given my always sunny, positive, outlook I do not think the pants-wetters change before some wacko gets elected that will use the power to ensure they stay in power.
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: Any sufficiently large nation can crack any currently available encryption if they have the time & the desire to do so. ANY, ANY.
You know this for a fact? Then please tell me which nations have the computational capability to crack 4096-bit RSA keys in meaningful time.
skjellyfetti
Wow. Just wow. As yourself if anywhere this passes the smell test. The likelihood that any of these documents actually containing even vaguely identifiable information regarding any operative is nil. And if the CIA was stupid enough to have the covert IDs of NOCs located on a server essentially accessible by even the lowest level employee–which Snowden was with the CIA–or contractor–which he was Snowden with Booz-Allen-Hamilton–then they deserve this sort of breach.
Lastly, when Snowden left Hong Kong, he had none of the documents on him at all–they had all been handed over to Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman. He did this solely so that they wouldn’t fall into the hands of either the Chinese or the Russians.
Gin & Tonic
@gvg: Evidence, all the security breaches that keep happening in all the countries I read news about, both government and private.
As Joey Maloney alludes to above, this is not due to weaknesses in mathematics, but in human stupidity (“poor opsec”)
boatboy_srq
@Punchy:
His first stop on the road to Moscow was Hong Kong – because of their commitment to free speech and individual rights (IIRC). So yes it’s quite plausible that he did believe that.
Belafon
@skjellyfetti:
Remember, there was a protocol failure where he worked: Other employees were giving him access to computers he shouldn’t have had access to. So, his low-level-employee status isn’t a good counterpoint.
There can be multiple copies of electronic data. He had a laptop with information on it; it was his “passport”.
rikyrah
Eddie needs to come back in shackles, because that’s what should happen to traitors.
Asked in a thread a couple of days ago how many people had been compromised and /or killed because of his actions.
But, if this traitor is the hill some of you want to die on, oh well.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Yes, that can be assumed as fact given what I know about cracking encryption (I work in IT security & did a short consulting gig with the NSA back in 2000-2001. I can’t do the math but I have met people who can and are doing the math). It takes huge computing power (assuming the key was not available in which case it takes pocket calculator power – I have no confidence in Snowden or the job he did) but there is plenty of that in many nations. It takes time, which they certainly have had. It was not that long ago that RSA 2048 was uncrackable. What you want to use depends on what you are trying to protect & how long the information might be valuable for.
Schlemazel
@skjellyfetti:
He had encrypted laptops with him that both the Chinese & Russians had access to. Copying a hard drive is trivial. I have never read what he claims was on those drives but my guess is it was important enough that he felt the need to encrypt it.
Steve from Antioch
And your default mode is what?
bcw
The commenters might try reading the entire Greenwald column instead of reflexively posting based on the excerpt. And read the Daily Sun article and try to find one verifiable assertion. Snowden handed over his files to journalists specifically so that he could rebut expected smear campaigns like this and his belief that journalists should vet and select what was published, not him. Snowdon was trying to get to Ecuador which had offered asylum using a flight path through non-US aligned countries when the US revoked his passport, trapping him in Russia. The Sun article tries to claim Snowdon had files by claiming his husband was detained with files from Snowdon, despite the easily proven fact that his husband hand gone to France, not Moscow.
The recent massive security breaches in the US had nothing to do with Snowdon or encryption but rather internet security problems in government networks. One issue with the NSA is that it fails to protect American computers and networks because it wants flaws to allow it to enter and spy. In addition to failing to inform companies about code flaws the NSA has deliberately introduced holes into encryption and networks which the Chinese are starting to find and exploit. The most recent breaches included millions of files of information collected from potential security-cleared government employees as part of the vetting process, exactly the kind of information needed to blackmail a government employee.
serge
Smoke and mirrors bullshit, brought to us by the trustworthy folks at MI6. The MI6 that technically never existed (much like Israeli nukes) wants us now to believe them and their story – this time really, no kidding, it really happened, you’ve got to believe us…
If I’m ever forced to choose, between Glenn Greenwald and MI6/CIA/Mossad, et al, as to who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, I will choose Greenwald. We’re asked to believe and trust our governments, and we are consistently fed by them a surfeit of cow shit. I would care, tremendously even, but for the fact that we are all so screwed anyway.
Knowbody
So fresh from your debacle on TPP, you then make an idiot out of yourself over Snowden. I knew you weren’t too bright, but this is bordering on abject stupidity. Even beginning the process of equating Edward Snowden to the fascist Cameron government and its draconian, Orwellian permanent surveillance regime is ridiculous in every conceivable way.
You have no credibility at Balloon Juice left to lose however, so that won’t stop you from beclowning yourself I see.
jibeaux
Snowden ain’t no Ellsburg.
Splitting Image
What bugs me about the Snowden circus is that two years after the leaks, we have yet to see a discussion about the security risks involved in outsourcing and privatization.
Outsourcing the U.S. government’s data collection to a private contractor is one reason Snowden was able to get his hands on so much data and outsourcing the vetting of employees to a different private contractor is another. There is no meaningful chain of responsibility anymore. The government blames its contractors when things go wrong and companies supplying the government with data blame the government. This negatively affects the willingness of every organization involved – government or corporation – to overreach in their own data collection and their ability to protect data that they need to keep secret.
Knowbody
@Steve from Antioch: Zandar is by far the worst front pager here. He’s an embarrassment to the rest of the crew and should do us all a favor and vanish for another year or so like he did previously.
He was not missed.
jibeaux
@Knowbody: the hell are you?
Lihtox
Wait, did Snowden encrypt the files, or did the NSA? If the former, then it’s not so surprising that Russia or China cracked it; If the latter, then the NSA did a piss-poor job at encryption for a secretive government agency (in addition to the piss-poor job they did letting Snowden get away with the data to begin with.)
FlipYrWhig
@Schlemazel:
I know, I know. But it would be an exciting debate. Especially if there was a way to address the tracking performed by private enterprise at the same time. And that’s the kind of thing that Glenn Greenwald would be valuable on: I think he’s an exaggeration-prone, thin-skinned bully, but he’s pretty good at drawing eyeballs. Some kind of Greenwald/EFF campaign, with politicos like Wyden (and maybe even Rand Paul) attached, might bear fruit. Get privacy issues into the primary debate questions, that sort of thing.
taylormattd
Love the folks talking about credibility who reflexively defend the man who claimed ABL would cheer a nun being raped live on TV
Chris
@Splitting Image:
In fact the most common proposed solution to the NSA’s program as I understand it is supposed to be letting private entities store all the data collected. And no one, outside of blogs like this one, seems to think that’s worthy of concern.
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: “can be assumed as fact” is not the same as “fact.” Do you have evidence that RSA-2048 can be cracked? How much more time would it take to do 4096?
japa21
Count of days without an inane comment by Knowbody has been reset to zero.
boatboy_srq
@jibeaux: Troll. Not to be fed or teased.
@bcw:
Because unlike Big Gummint, journalists are always honest and trustworthy. (/snark)
Schlemazel
@jibeaux:
and, “why the hell are you here” should have been added.
boatboy_srq
@Splitting Image: There’s no way to have that discussion without revisiting outsourcing in general, which in turn requires a functioning budget process. We can’t discuss rationally what the GOTea refuses to pay for, and until we get past the ODS endemic in the Reichwing we won’t be able to engage in practical planning. Until the GOTea overcomes its allergy to taxation and government spending, there’s no good way to accommodate the conversation of how to spend dollars the Reichwing won’t allocate for headcount the Reichwing won’t approve.
Schlemazel
@FlipYrWhig:
We need to have that debate but it will not happen until the voters want an honest debate. Look what happened with the reauthorization debate. There was a lot of heat but no light. Ayn’s filibuster was only to make headlines not actually change the bill. The usual suspects lined up to either pretend they were making a real change or to fear-monger that any change was just opening the door for the next 9/11. The media played their part perfectly and the voters believed whatever the hell it was they wanted to believe in the first place.
TheHalfrican
1) Story written and published by a Murdoch organ. Yeah. I’m gonna take a shot in the dark and guess the outrage is a wee bit warranted this time. We have seen this playbook before. Yes, they really did have the balls to quietly delete a claim in the online article w/o retraction. Again, MURDOCH.
2) Is it plausible to triangulate the identity of some MI6 agents by sifting through secret US intelligence data? Probably. Would MI6 not take any chances and extract some assets as a precaution? *c’mon son gif*
3) Does any of this mean that America’s surveillance-industrial complex/budding police state isn’t a bad thing that we need to fight while we still can? Fuuuuck no.
lol
I think the assumption that they cracked (via sloppy opsec or whatever) the encryption is a generous one. Why not assume Snowden voluntarily handed over the keys when he setup shop in Russia?
In other hacking news, it’s looking like OPM got compromised using information from private contractors. So yay for privatization.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Some things I know, others I can know. You shouldn’t expect NSA or their counterparts in other countries to post blog entries about their ability to crack encryption. Its been 2 years, how long do you think it would take?
I should add that this debate is separate to the whole Snowden thing. I believe he provided Russia and China access to stuff that was important & did so by pointing out what the important stuff was in a sea of encrypted crap. But I couldn’t care less about him or what he did. What I would like to see is a better debate about this collection effort – something he did nothing to bring about.
lol
@boatboy_srq:
Or competent.
That’s how all the files Manning stole ended up on the Internet completely unredacted.
Belafon
@japa21: The resolution on that counter should be minutes, not days.
NCSteve
@Punchy: The fake corporation that was Valerie Plame’s foreign cover had been in business for years and was still in business years after she left. Until Cheney and Libby and Judy blew her cover out of pique at her husband, at which point they had to fold the whole thing and rush people out of country. Most spying, and most of the intel gathered, is far more prosaic than most people think, but no less important for being prosaic.
@Raenelle: Greenwald is the master of writing in such a way as to lead the reader to draw inferences that he doesn’t explicitly make and that are not supported by the source documents he cites, but which the reader thereafter believes with all his heart Greenwald actually said. But if anyone ever claims he did say it, he goes into Greenwald Outrage Attack Mode, quotes what he said and goes “see? Lying liars are lying about me even though I Am A Journalist and beyond reproach!” But if you publicly deconstruct what he actually said, to show he didn’t say as much as he seemed to in a clear attempt to generate misplaced outrage that is moves his agenda forward, he calls it a character attack.
rikyrah
UK’s David Cameron fact-checks Scott Walker
06/15/15 08:40 AM
By Steve Benen
At major gatherings of world leaders, President Obama tends to be one of the more popular, sought-after figures on the global stage. This has been common throughout Obama’s presidency – he may be seen as a divisive leader domestically, but internationally, Obama is generally a towering figure.
Republicans are heavily invested in believing the opposite. Indeed, one of the more common GOP criticisms of the president is that Obama simply isn’t respected abroad. Republicans routinely insist that, behind the scenes, international officials voice their deep disappointment with the U.S. president, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) actually got specific on this point on Friday, saying that British Prime Minister David Cameron told the far-right governor directly that he’s unsatisfied with American leadership. Time reported:
Walker, who has taken several trips overseas in recent months to study up on foreign policy in preparation for an all-but-certain presidential bid, told a roomful of Republican donors Friday that world leaders, including Cameron, are worried about the U.S. stepping back in the world. […]
“I heard that from David Cameron back in February earlier when we were over at 10 Downing,” Walker said. “I heard it from other leaders around the world. They’re looking around realizing this lead from behind mentality just doesn’t work. It’s just not working.”
If true, this would be a break with diplomatic protocol and a legitimately big deal. It’s unpersuasive when GOP leaders run around telling voters, “Lots of foreign leaders don’t like Obama; we just can’t actually name any.” But here’s Walker saying the British prime minister personally told him that he’s unsatisfied with Obama’s leadership.
The problem, not surprisingly, is that Cameron quickly pushed back, suggesting the Wisconsinite, who’s repeatedly struggled with foreign policy, has no idea what he’s talking about.
“The Prime Minister did not say that and does not think that,” a Cameron spokesperson told Time.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/uks-david-cameron-fact-checks-scott-walker
Sloegin
Greenwald vs anonymous sources quoting agencies who’s whole mission statement is based around deception.
Digby’s take on it is worth checking out.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Bingo!
@jibeaux:
Double bingo!
Chris
@rikyrah:
Well, if “foreigners” means Bibi, Obama is the most unpopular president in history.
LT
@Raenelle:
Zander is Bob Cesca Lite on this issue. I appreciate John inviting different voices here – if it grates sometimes – but fuck. This is horrible. This is fucking PowerLine-worthy.
debbie
@Chris:
Don’t forget Putin. Putin doesn’t like Obama. And we know how much the GOP slobbers over the Shirtless One.
AxelFoley
*sits back and chills with some popcorn and fruit punch*
Welp, you gets what you pays for.
Can’t wait to see Snowden and GiGi frog marched back to the U.S. in orange jumpsuits.
different-church-lady
Well, I am firmly of my opinion in this matter, so the rest of you can pound sand.
Mike in NC
Who cares about Snowden when they went and killed off Jon Snow!?!
Roger Moore
@Chris:
That’s only been proposed for the phone metadata program, where it makes considerable sense. The phone companies need to collect that data anyway, so there’s no real privacy downside to having them continue to store it rather than the NSA.
boatboy_srq
@AxelFoley: I can’t help this is a result of paying a premium for “consulting services” after a somewhat-lesser rate for a federal FTE was deemed “excessive spending” and cut from the budget.
Knowbody
@LT: what did you expect? He’s a bullshit hack who actually makes Cesca and Tommy Christopher over there look competent by comparison.
Cacti
@Punchy:
Yes.
SATSQ.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mike in NC: Now, now. It’s GoT and there’s his dire wolf right there. I have hope.
Botsplainer
I’m going to offer an IT solution that is, as they say, the shizzle. Customer data stays only on hardwired intranets. Same for taxpayer data, cached secure intelligence and diplomatic stuff. The intranet computers get peripheral. hardware configured to “read only”, and the IT managers vetted, routinely security audited and paid well.
On the commercial side, I’m thinking to suggest that the payment and shipment data goes to a separate set of servers and computers that aren’t used by ANY employee to access any part of the Internet that isn’t required for the payment or shipment function.
Knowbody
@Roger Moore: no, the phone companies do not “need to collect” that metadata more than any company needs your metadata for any purpose.
“better these companies than the NSA”‘ is the ultimate false choice too.
The pro-fascist side here does not have any valid arguments here as to why this data must be collected. It’s a violation of privacy and civil rights. There is no argument here.
LT
@Knowbody:
That’s just nonsense. Very simple prrof: If you got a bill for calls and texts you supposedly made that you knew you didn’t make – only phone company records could back you up.
You want to argue about depth of records, and length of time they keep them – fine. But try not to just be stupid. We have enough of that from the post itself on through.
Patricia Kayden
@boatboy_srq: Why not teased? I love the comments here. They actually make me laugh out loud.
@Splitting Image: Too true. It’s scary how contractors have so much access to sensitve information. This needs to change.
D58826
Well I don’t know if Snowden is all that big of a security risk given that Chinese hackers seems to have free reign in getting into US Govt. databases. They might not need the info that Snowden has. Of course embarrassment is not the same thing as security risk except to the red-faced beureacrats
Knowbody
@LT: no, they don’t need those records. Until there’s safeguards in place to make sure these records are regularly destroyed, the collection shouldn’t be allowed at all.
Unless you’re naive and moronic enough to count on the good graces of companies like Verizon and ATT.
Belafon
@Splitting Image: Oh, believe me, we’ve had this discussion where I work, and it’s caused some very painful changes in the way we do things.
Bobby Thomson
@Iowa Old Lady: Ghost was locked up
durimg the attack in the book. It was don’t-go-in-the-house implausible.
Book 5 wasn’t very good generally. Too much going back to the well on reviving characters and other tropes. Despite how long it took to write, it felt slapped together. HBO generally makes a hash out of adaptations, but at least they will finish the story. If Martin ever does, it will be rushed and full of holes.
Belafon
@Knowbody: Why are you even on the internet if you’re that paranoid. Do you ever look up when you walk outside?
LT
@Knowbody: You just did what I said – argued about “length of time” those records are kept – without noticing that. Thanks for that, I guess.
Frankensteinbeck
@Knowbody:
Given that those records are needed to calculate bills under most modern billing systems, they probably need those records. I mean, I’d love a system where they just flat cover you for everything, but for a long, long time they’ve based billing systems on counting text messages, charging more for long distance, and per minute called, and so on. That’s the metadata.
Cacti
@Knowbody:
I’ll put this as simply as I can.
The Fourth Amendment does not apply to private actors, and there is no protected privacy interest under the Fourth Amendment concerning your telephone company and the metadata of your calls. Privacy statutes prevent your telephone company from listening to the contents of your calls. That’s it.
Tommy
@Splitting Image: In my previous life I did a ton of work for some of the largest defense contractors in the world. I didn’t have a security clearance so I got no inside info. But I do speak federal procurement speak and we outsource everything. Why we can’t seem to have a conversation about if this is a good idea is beyond me.
LT
@Splitting Image:
And that’s exactly because that would put the focus on the NSA and government in general – and we all know we must focus on Snowden and his pure evil.
#zander
P.S. Balloon Juice. Balloon Juice is helping spread this now pretty much universally-nut-crunched Sunday Times piece. Woo Hoo! Next up: Fronter-pager John Schindler!
srv
@Roger Moore: People always say phone companies, but it’s quite worse than that.
Billing/CRM serves are largely outsourced now – there’s only a little bit of call meta they don’t need, and I doubt the phone companies would even bother to filter that out (tower/gps info). Presumably web/app info isn’t all passed, but…
Am sure no intelligence service will ever think of exploiting that.
Bill Arnold
@Gin & Tonic:
Or, they acquired the keys via some means other than cryptanalysis (including key exhaustion).
Roger Moore
@LT:
It’s not just that. It’s also that civil liberties types are most focused on stopping NSA from collecting data in the first place, not on making sure that it doesn’t let it leak once they have it. If anything, they’re happier with a leaky NSA, since it gives them both evidence of the NSA’s wrongdoing and proof that it can’t be trusted.
Belafon
@LT: There have been times over the past few years where this blog has talked about outsourcing the security stuff. Guess what, everyone here agrees it’s a bad idea. How many conversations are you going to have when everyone agrees.
As for a larger discussion, it’ll be confined to Congress and the places involved. As I said above, my job has gone through a number of changes because of Snowden, mostly involving that you can’t do much by yourself anymore (luckily, bathrooms are excluded). Are news people ever going to discuss this? No, for two reasons: 1) They won’t have access to places that are affected and 2) it would be boring TV.
Marc McKenzie
@Schlemazel: Data collection by whom–the government or the big tech companies? Because while there are rules in regards to the government–and they can be changed–the tech industry has no rules, no regulations.
And yet some will defend the tech industry by claiming that we “give” our information to them of our own free will. Bullshit.
Also–fuck Snowden and Greenwald. They are not heroes but Libertarian shitbags. Just my 2-cents.
Tommy
@Marc McKenzie: I will forever be stunned how much many here dislike Greenwald. I’ve read him almost daily since he had a site on Blogger and I am not sure he has ever been wrong on any given topic. Does he often say things that make me uncomfortable, sure. But I am not sure that is a bad thing.
Bobby Thomson
@Cacti: for someone who says the things about Zandar that he does, knowbody is really fucking stupid.
Knowbody
@LT: That’s something we should demand of these companies. We’re not doing that.
Oh, and Schindler (and other “conservative national security wonks” like Tom Nichols, etc) at least write coherent arguments.
Zandar is a fucking moron.
Tommy
@Bill Arnold: Well if you talk to defense contractors, and again I didn’t have a security clearance when I did a lot of work for them, it isn’t even a hidden secret our government has a “backdoor” into all the major security products on the market.
It isn’t surprising to me other governments might have gained access to this info via blackmail or money (or both). But maybe I read to many Tom Clancy novels :)!
srv
You people really don’t appreciate what Zandar does – Win-the-Morning trolling for white people issues.
Yes, he could be more subtle like Elon was when he carried that baton, but it’s not like John Cole is going to get up early and do it himself anymore. John is a true believer, but can only take so much berating on drones, courtesy bombs and being called GG’s bromancer.
Your hate has had consequences.
Knowbody
@Bobby Thomson: really?
Because Zandar’s the one with the credibility problem.
piratedan
@Tommy: considering his history with the use of sockpuppetry, his constant use of hyperbole and sensationalism plus a constant disregard for folks that disagree with him, I find that the use of the word “wrong” here strangely ironic. He’ll use a headline as clickbait, bury the kernel of truth in paragraph 7 indicating that he’s only speculating on the interpretation of a single nugget and then get pissed off when folks accuse him of burying his lede. He decries the institution of the US government and all of our abuses and then lives in Brazil, which is not exactly known for their own stellar civil rights program.
Other than that tendency, I’m sure he’s swell.
There are ways to report government abuses, Snowden should have been aware of them. Heck, he could have even given what he knew to a staunch defender of civil liberties, like Rand Paul, because he has that right. Instead GG gave him the advice he did and it’s been awesome thus far, right?
Archon
If you truly believe Snowden helped prevent or at least shed light on our glide path into becoming some Orwellian police state why would you care that a few covert agents got outed in the process?
Am I missing something here?
Knowbody
@srv: the larger question is if we all pretty much agree that Zandar has nothing substantive to say every day other than bullshit trolling, why do you keep falling for it?
Chyron HR
@LT:
Maybe Snowden should deliver another televised Christmas Day address to his subjects where he emphasizes that it’s not about him.
Cacti
@Chyron HR:
Good thing he doesn’t have a messianic complex or anything.
Belafon
@Knowbody: Gotta love a troll being trolled. All that’s left is for you to be rickrolled.
muddy
@NCSteve:
I know a glibertarian asshole who does this shit all the time. He thinks it’s really smart. If I call the house looking for his wife or his son, he says he is taking the message. If I don’t hear back, I call again, and he will say,”I have your number written right here!”
But did you tell the person?
“I said, Your number is right here,.”
Yes, but did you tell the person that I had called.
“Your number is right here.”
But did you tell the person that you have it written right there?
“I have another call, I have to go.”
Then when you can get ahold of the person you want to reach, they have never gotten the message. Confront phone controlling asshole – then it’s all, “I only said I wrote it down, you can’t call me a liar because I just *forgot* to tell them” – even though I have been calling 10 times in 3 days. Yeah, all an innocent misunderstanding. That happens every.single.time someone calls that he disapproves of.
So fucking childish.
Professor
@Knowbody: This is very silly. Why are you picking on Zandar? Why don’t you make a coherent argument and move the discussion forward?
Botsplainer
@Knowbody:
Show me on the doll where Zandar touched you…
muddy
@Knowbody: What we all pretty much agree upon is that you are an asshole, a one-note whiny annoying little bitch asshole at that.
“Mommy, Mommy, I showed up at some random party where no one likes me and they didn’t serve me my favorite flavor of cake! Waah!”
Knowbody
@Professor: The question is when it’s been proven that the Obama administration was running illegal data collection on tens of millions of Americans why we tolerate it, and why anyone (Zandar and his ilk) would defend the indefensible.
Please answer me that.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@boatboy_srq:
And any more competent with safeguarding data. One hopes that all those files are on media that have never been mounted on a machine with a live network connection. If not, then I can almost guarantee those files got out into the wild, encrypted or not.
Chris
@Tommy:
I am not a techie, but I’ve pretty much always assumed that the U.S. government could hack into pretty much anything I owned – simply because, aren’t they up to their eyeballs in the development of all these kinds of things (up to and including, if you go far back enough, the Internet?) So I always kind of figured that most of what got released on the open market was stuff that the NSA already knew how to crack, or could figure out without too much trouble.
Thanks to Roger Moore for the explanation on telephone metadata, too. (Sorry to have inadvertently triggered that little war).
LWA (Liberal With Attitude)
I’m just not buying this whole “we can’t tell you any details or quote anything on the record, but trust us, this is BAAAAAD” stuff.
Sometimes liars do tell the truth, but the smart bet is to think they’re lying.
sharl
@Professor: This is just Zandar’s stalker-troll – someone who knows him in real life, and (if I recall correctly) feels he was screwed out of something at work – position, promotion, whatever, I don’t know – in favor of Zandar. He originally showed up here as “knockabout” 4-5 years ago. If things follow their usually pattern, at some point he’ll go too far, get banned, then come back with a new nym.
Lucky us…
Fair Economist
A widely used, very high security, public-source, and free encryption system, Truecrypt, was withdrawn last fall because of supposed security flaws. Given Snowden’s predilections for libertarian stuff and Truecrypt’s high reputation, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he used it, which would make the Brit story very plausible. Of course he’s still got better security than the NSA, which was cracked by a subcontractor with pretty ordinary computer skills (specifically, him).
Of course the Brits might be lying too – and to some extent, my response is “If they’d been acting even half-morally in the first place Snowden would never had done this.”
Tommy
@Archon: Well I wouldn’t what somebody “outed.” My father worked at high levels within the DoD, but not a spy. But when I lived in DC I had a co-worker and her husband worked at the State Department. Pretty sure he didn’t work at the State Department. Spent most of his time in the Middle East. Clearly I wouldn’t want him outed or any harm to come to him or thousands like him.
Mandalay
From the actual Sunday Times article (not behind their paywall), these are all the sources used in the article:
– “according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services”
– “Western intelligence agencies say”
– “Senior government sources confirmed”
– “One senior Home Office official”
– “the security services have reported”
– “David Cameron’s aides confirmed”
– “A senior Downing Street source”
– “a senior Home Office source”
– “A US intelligence source said”
The reporter could have written that article from their sofa. Anyone who swallows that drivel is a complete moron.
different-church-lady
Next up: why the electric company should not be allowed to know your address, because then the government might get that information!
Amir Khalid
@sharl:
I thought he was just recently banned under this nym. Or is it so similar to the last one?
Tommy
@Chris: Yes they are. AT&T was one of my clients. Head to their offices on K Street in DC and a few of the floors are restricted. About half the people working there are wearing military uniforms. They are developing the things you will buy in 5 to 10 years.
Villago Delenda Est
This is an authentic case of both sides are lying assholes, basically. The Brits are absolutely the worst about this sort of thing…they lie to themselves all the time because they have this paranoid fear of ever being wrong about anything. Greenwald has a franchise to protect now, and he’s going to protect it, and if there’s some collateral damage (that is, Snowden forever in Moscow) well, them there are the breaks, kid.
different-church-lady
@Belafon:
Oh, well what fun is that?
Tommy
@Villago Delenda Est: I am a huge fan of Greenwald but he does have a franchise to protect. You are correct in saying that. He can say he has all the editorial freedom he has at First Look but I am sorry, you don’t get 250M without a few strings attached.
But where I disagree with you is Snowden outed himself. Greenwald didn’t. He is stuck in Russia not because of Greenwald but because of it own direct actions.
sharl
@Mandalay: Yep, I’m sorry to see so many pixels being spilled on Snowden and Greenwald, and so few spilled on the extremely shitty “journalism” – actually, it would be more accurately called stenography – that was exhibited by the Sunday Times.
Apparently they already quietly deleted a key passage (IMO) without stating they did so: this was the assertion in the original version that data was handed over in Moscow. You can believe or not believe that happened, but this question had been dealt with years ago. Real reporting would have cited those earlier reports. Note that such a citation would not have to be an endorsement of the old assertion – in fact, if you really wanted to, you could include skeptical viewpoints along with the citation of that assertion – but to not do that due diligence on what you DAMN WELL KNOW is going to be a big story suggests that you never intended to do real journalism in the first place, but rather stenography.
Higher standards in journamalism, pleeeez!
Mandalay
More drivel from the Sunday Times article:
These options are presented factually, as the only two possibilities: either the data was stolen by Russia and China, or Snowden handed it over voluntarily. Yet Snowden states that he had specifically relinquished everything to reporters in Hong Kong, before anyone knew who he was, or what he had done. Once his cover was blown he personally held nothing that Russsia or China could steal.
Anyone is free to have an opinion on whether Snowden actually did what he claims, but an article which deliberately ignores that as a possibility can hardly be taken seriously.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: Eh, you may be right. I was trying – obviously unsuccessfully – to remember the ensuing nyms when typing in my comment.
Archon
@Tommy:
I just find it strange that Snowden/Greenwald defenders are so sensitive about the possibility that some agents might have got compromised because of Snowden’s actions.
If what he did was so important for our liberty that he deserves a pardon and a peace prize why should we care that some American/British agents had to be recalled in the process?
different-church-lady
@Knowbody: Do you have a pet name for that alternate universe you live in?
Tim in SF (iPad)
Claims require evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Greenwald, et. al. claim there is no evidence. I see nothing to prove otherwise.
different-church-lady
@Fair Economist:
That’s because he bio-cracked it, instead of techo-cracked.
Bobby Thomson
@Knowbody: dude, it’s painfully obvious what those “credibility issues” are to you. But this ain’t a CCC meeting.
LT
@Roger Moore:
“Civil liberities types”? Really? You’re not one of those? And does that include the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals?
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
Not quite. The developers behind Truecrypt suddenly announced that the were ceasing development without stating a reason, but they made the source code available for anyone who wanted to look at it. A group of apparently competent reviewers gave it thorough scrutiny and found at most minor problems. The suspicion has now shifted to a belief that the developers were bullied into giving up development.
Tommy
@Archon:
It is a hard thing to explain honestly. I think it is clear I am a raging liberal. But I am also a military brat. Many people I know have served. Sometimes I think in a covert manner, although I really don’t know. Those folks should not be outed. As my father used to say “I serve at the pleasure of the President.” Lives are actually at stake if they are outed and I kind of care about that.
LT
@Tommy:
Is there a decade in the future we won’t have to deal with such craptastic moments in these discussions?
Knowbody
@different-church-lady: The one where you exhibit enough intelligence to answer my questions about our privacy being violated daily and why we tolerate it?
Oh, that is a fantasy realm I guess.
Mandalay
@sharl:
Exactly so. The very sources which leaked (if the journalists are to believed at all) were challenged by the Guardian on their allegations, and gave these responses:
So these organizations consider themselves to be free to secretly leak allegations, but then clam up when confonted about their leaking.
You have to be a very special level of stupid to find such leaks credible.
some guy
Zandar never fails to exhumed the rotting corpse of Broder, but today’s emission is a top notch example of this effort. Bravo brava, both sides do it.
different-church-lady
@Knowbody: No, I was talking about the one where everyone agrees with you.
Tommy
@different-church-lady: It is what most people don’t understand. The worst security breaches happen via a human and social engineering. Not a brute force hack.
LT
@Tommy:
Worst *but* clause ever. (Being a military brat, or a military non-brat, or just plain military – needs a but clause regarding being a liberal only if you have a very weird, stunted view of being a liberal.)
See last comment, burnish with this turd. Plus: this makes you special somehow?
Ow.
Also: babies should now be punched in the face. And puppies are nice.
Is your father a Hollywood actor? Cuz I’m pretty sure he should have been.
Wankerifficly wonderful. (Now please explain what this has to do with Snowden.)
max
@Gin & Tonic: If Snowden was careful (which he certainly gives every indication of having been) about correctly encrypting whatever it was that the Brits are talking about (and it’s unclear to me how something could be “top-secret” and yet “leaked” simultaneously) and if the Russians and the Chinese have actually decrypted it, then the Times has buried the lede, which should be that both the Russians and the Chinese have apparently simultaneously made sufficiently revolutionary advances in either mathematics or computation that render all contemporary data encryption and secure communications worthless.
Or the tools used for ‘strong’ encryption are weak when enough computing power is applied.
However, the kicker in the story is that MI6 is saying that Snowden had access to all the data on MI6 ops… that he retrieved from the NSA? Which got them from GCHQ (the actual British sigint service)?
In that event, MI6 was clearly performing utterly terribly at security, as compartmentalization would dictate that GCHQ not know anything about the details of MI6 ops (or MI5 ops for that matter). (Acquiring details from internal NSA records on the Five Eyes surveillance sharing would give Snowden some stuff about GCHQ, but not MI6. Or it shouldn’t have been accessible.)
There have a bunch of official reveals from this thing so far, and every last damn one of them actually that Western intelligence agencies are run by a bunch of fucking idiots. Which begs the question of just how a bunch of fucking idiots are supposed to be that effective.
max
[‘The other alternative is that Western intelligence agencies were lying before and continue to lie now, which doesn’t preclude them from being a bunch of fucking idiots.’]
Chris
@Tommy:
From John Rogers (“Leverage”) again:
“[whatever] is the toughest security system in the universe, the multiverse, whatever!”
“I’m a grifter. If I’m doing my job right, the mark just turns off the alarm for me.”
cokane
Why does Greenwald say quoting anonymous government sources is bad, while usually citing zero sources in his own articles? The guy doesn’t interview anybody. But likes to regularly take a shit all over any journalist who does any legwork of their own for not going far enough.
Tommy
@LT: I hope I am wrong in saying what I said but fear I am not. When you can set up a major media organization or buy the Washington Post for $250M, which is like a rounding error on Bezos income statement, how are there not some strings attached.
Knowbody
@some guy: again, Zandar’s sole mission is to get away with the shit troll posts that Elon/ABL used to make and that Cole is now smart enough to stay away from.
Everyone else sticks with their areas of knowledge and actually contributes to the place.
Mark B.
@different-church-lady: It’s reasonable to assume that Snowden gave the keys to several individuals, and any of these could have provided the keys to the Russians, either voluntarily or by any number of dumb mistakes, like putting the key onto a device that has cloud storage. Then they would only have to crack the relatively weak security of the cloud vendor.
Or Snowden could have provided the keys to the Russians himself. Early on in this drama, there were stories written about how Snowden would cover up with a blanket while typing his password on his laptop so nobody could shoulder surf it from him. I’m not sure how effective that would be against a high tech attack with unlimited resources.
The guy seemed pretty naive from the beginning, and falling into the clutches of Greenwald and then the Russians was pretty unfortunate for him. He did end up revealing the massive scope of intelligence collection against the American people, but I would contend that it was already known to most tech savvy people in the US already.
Tommy
@LT: We will have to agree to disagree because your comments about my comment are so far apart I see no other option.
LT
@Tommy: You’re wrong on facts. I know the likes of Cesca and others say thing slike that all the time, but you are fundamentally wrong on this.
1) Show us an instant where you can back up that he (and the rest of those at The Intercept) have displayed lack of editorial freedom.
2) a) It wasn’t $250 million.
b) It is lazy and part of a regualr smear to say Greenwald got $250 million (or any such amount) himself.
Is it too much to ask that such lazy smears stop?
Mandalay
@Schlemazel:
Get back to us when you can show that anyone knows how to readily factor the product of two very large primes.
If anyone ever figures that out then a ton of computer security shit will be broken, and the documents Snowden took will be a completely irrelevant sideshow. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Roger Moore
@LT:
I would say that the loudest people in the whole Snowden affair have been people who are either extremely attached to national security issues or to civil liberties issues, with relatively little- or relatively quiet- discussion by people who fall somewhere in the middle. When I said “civil liberties types”, I meant people who see the affair exclusively through a lens of civil liberties, with no legitimate role for government surveillance.
I see at least some merit in both directions. I don’t want the government spying on me, but I also acknowledge that the government does occasionally have legitimate reasons- both for national security and ordinary criminal law- to do so. Because of that, I support the government having the technical capacity to spy; I think it’s part of their legitimate function. At the same time, I think that means it’s vitally important to have strong procedural safeguards. One of the things I find most frustrating about Greenwald’s reporting on the issue is that he’s largely focused on the technical capabilities while ignoring the procedural protections.
LT
@Roger Moore:
” I would say that the loudest people in the whole Snowden affair have been people who are either extremely attached to national security issues or to civil liberties issues, with relatively little- or relatively quiet- discussion by people who fall somewhere in the middle. When I said “civil liberties types”, I meant people who see the affair exclusively through a lens of civil liberties, with no legitimate role for government surveillance. ”
But that’s just nonsense – made most spectularly obvious by the 2nd Circuit Court ruling.
Gin & Tonic
@Chris: So I always kind of figured that most of what got released on the open market was stuff that the NSA already knew how to crack,
Without providing a treatise on encryption, the mathematics behind it are actually pretty clear and unambiguous. Think of it this way: multiplying 69127 and 72211 is computationally simple; determining the prime factors of 4929224437 is computationally much more difficult. Encryption takes advantage of this asymmetry. So while you can throw more and more computing power at a problem, and you can possibly develop more sophisticated mathematical tools to help you factor the number, factoring a multi-hundred-digit number is difficult. As in hundreds or thousands of years of compute-time on special super-fast computers difficult. Eventually that can be tens of years instead of hundreds, as more power is thrown at the problem.
Tommy
@LT: Look I am a HUGE Greenwald fan. As to the investment:
I got no inside info that there is a lack of editorial freedom. I hope there isn’t. But it is just basic logic. I don’t know a single person that invests millions and doesn’t have a few things they want.
Again I am a huge Greenwald fan. I will defend him 24/7. I’ve been reading him daily since he has a site on Blogger. But I’d think it might be cool with me questioning him a little.
Chris
@Mark B.:
I am emphatically not tech-savvy, but this is what’s had me wondering “what the hell is the news here?” ever since the story broke a couple years ago. I already knew that the NSA was performing warrantless wiretapping on American citizens. Not because I’m cynical and not because I’m tech-savvy, but because I remember that story breaking all the way back in the mid-2000s (by the New York Times, I believe). The technical details of how it’s done don’t really matter – we knew it was happening, and since the reaction of all Washington back then was basically to grunt, roll over and go back to sleep, it seemed reasonable to assume that the program had continued ever since.
ruemara
@Chris: you guys are the only ones talking about the real problem. And the dudebros are fine with companies violating your privacy but think governments shouldn’t have secrets.
Tommy
@Chris: James Bamford wrote about it years ago in The Shadow Factory. Wired Magazine covered the NSA tapping directly into AT&Ts network in San Fran. Other than Snowden gave us “offical” government documents, the news isn’t really “new.”
Keith
@lol:
Though, that hypothetical does not marry well with the narrative being sold to the Sunday fish wraps in Blighty.
The tale being told is one of urgent withdrawal of International Men of Mystery – because the erstwhile commie threat nations finally cracked the information treasure trove Edward Snowden bestowed upon them.
Had the keys been handed over wouldn’t that mass exeunt Moscow (or Shanghai or any other exotic locale), stage left, have happened somewhat sooner than 2 years later?
Of course, the hypothetical is no more full of holes than the story told to the papers – which is likely par for the course when the quoted sources are from the invisible department.
Belafon
@Gin & Tonic: That same math issue also applies to why the NSA having ALL THE METADATA doesn’t in itself help them much. Search even a sparsely connected graph that grows by the amount of phone calls that everyone in this country makes every day for something like “Find the bad things happening” is a problem that makes Computer Scientists drool and shake with fear at the same time.
LT
@Tommy: But then why would you say that he “got” $250 million? You have to know how often that’s been used as a smear, since you claim to be a reader of his and a fan. (And now you admit you knew it was $50 million? WTF?) And:
As much as you might want to gloss over that now, that’s an accusation that he’s been compromised editorially. You should be up front about that – as it’s a very powerful accusation for a journalist.
And, as per usual with these kinds of smears, intentional or not, it never includes others who are in the same position as Greenwald, whether its other news orgs doing essentially the same reporting, or, in this case, others at The Intercept. Are you accusing the other two Intercept founders – Laur Poitras and Jeremy Scahill – of compromising their ethics for money? And what about the many reporters and editors there: Betsy Reed, Ryan Deveraux, Lilian Segura… Are they suspect, too? Because their frankly incredible reporting over the months says a fucking lot otherwise.
J R in WV
@Knowbody:
Know…
Stop and think here for a minute.
How is Verizon going to bill anyone (not on all calls everywhere in the world are free plan) accurately if they don’t track the data on all calls made, when, for how long, to whom?
They can’t. Your thinking is like wanting the hospital to bill you accurately for your operation without knowing anything about your health care needs or insurance benefits and payments – it can’t be done!
People providing you with services for a fee have to track the details of the services they provide, that’s how business is done. And they have to keep them at least until you can no longer dispute a bill, so as to be able to discuss what was provided for what fees.
Geez!
Mandalay
@Roger Moore:
Sure, and what has really pissed some people off is the lack of accountability of our security services, and Snowden brutally exposed that despite all the Monday morning quarterbacks here claiming that they knew all along.
It’s daming that some of Snowden’s major revelations were not know even by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And that is because the Committee had been guilty in the past of giving the agencies a free pass, and rubberstamping their conduct. It all came to a head when Clapper contemptuously lied to their faces on camera, but the real damage had been done long before that; our craven Congress really failed the country after 9/11.
srv
@max:
Why would the Brits be any different, post tearing down “Gorelick’s Wall?”
Not that there was a wall, but it’s pretty clear from Snowden’s performance that compartimentalization is one of those extinct 80’s buzzwords.
Tommy
@LT: I was wrong about the amount of the investment. I am not perfect and when I went to Google I saw it was $50M. I didn’t hide that. There are few if any web sites I trust more than The Intercept. I just asked a question and made a statement if you invest a ton of money you might want something in return. I think that is true 99% of the time. Maybe The Intercept is the one percent.
Mandalay
@Knowbody:
You do realize that phone companies have always captured this information, right? And if they didn’t, how on earth could they bill you?
LT
@Tommy: That doesn’t begin to address the “Greenwald got $20 m” thing. Do you actually still not understand that? Do you, like a lot of people say, honestly or dishonestly, think that Greenwald got $250 m, or $50 million, or any such number related to *Omidyar’s investiment* – from Omidyar? Cuz honestly – it’s so fucking stupid.
And when such things have been said *over and over and over* – without a shred of evidence – as smears, it’s hard to listen to them as just innocent musings.
LT
@Mandalay: That’s too much deep thinking for these fucksticks.
Andrey
@Belafon: No, the same math issue doesn’t apply to metadata collection and analysis. Breaking encryption is mathematically hard because you have to use precise math; if any of your numbers is off by a single digit, you get complete gibberish with no connection to the original message. Doing search and filtering on metadata and network graphs can be done with heuristics. Just being willing to accept 99.99% accuracy instead of 100% turns an exponential-time problem into a polynomial-time problem. From there, lose a few more percentage points of accuracy and you speed up your analysis by several orders of magnitude.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: The problem is that the alternative to outsourcing is additional headcount for the agency currently outsourcing the work. Approving the budget as it stands has proven difficult enough, with the GOTea shrieking about “record-level deficits” (that don’t exist BTW) and refusing to fund anything at all. The sequester – the chief policy villain – was approved with defense cuts matching the remainder of the budget’s reduction at the GOP’s request because the negotiators thought that reducing the DoD/DHS budgets was an adequate stick to get their members to the table. If we can’t get the Teahad on board with the idea that spending cuts are not always good, persuading them that actually hiring federal employees to do the work that should be solely in the federal sector is never going to happen. We’ll need to see a Kansas/Florida/Louisiana-grade budget meltdown before the folly of “drown-it-in-a-bathtub” government becomes apparent to them.
Lavocat
I see you have your Greenwald-hate jammed all the way up to 11 as per usual.
Quite tiresome, to say the least.
Tommy
@LT: I never said Greenwald got $20M. Of course he didn’t. It costs a lot of money to run a media site and that is where the money went. Building out a news organization. By all accounts a first rate one.
LT
@Tommy:
That shouldhave been $250 million – but that was my typo.
In any case. Your words:
You didn’t mean those words?
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: All that is true for public key cryptography, but my understanding is that the PK method is used to encrypt the symmetric key for a much faster cypher (like AES) for the rest of the message, and to ease key exchange.
PK is far too unwieldy to encrypt an entire large message – I think you need about as many bits in the key as the size of the message.
I also suspect that almost all Key exchange for the NSA, embassies, DOD, and the CIA, is done by courier – not public key.
Joey Maloney
@Roger Moore:
Add to that the fact that his technical knowledge – or, I’ll be generous, his ability to explain technical matters – is extremely limited, while his confidence in both are extremely high.
Belafon
@Andrey: And what is your heuristic? What heuristic do you use to find “something bad’s going on”?
In the work I’ve done for searching through data for detecting cancer sequence development, the heuristics are 3rd and 4th order simplifications of the real problem, and we know we’re looking for a sequence that is not self-regulating.
Not having a decent heuristic is also the problem. And once again, what heuristic do you use to find EVIL in a metadata graph?
EDIT: Yes, you can find a heuristic that allows you to not have to look at every connection. But to determine the heuristic, you might have to look at each application of the heuristic on an order roughly the size of the graph.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq: Well we are paying the money anyway. One of my good friends in DC worked for Unisys. He walked in each day not at Unisys but at the ATF running their help desk. How does that make sense?
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
all you need is a wrench.
Tommy
@LT: I was WRONG. It was $20M not $250M. Could I not be more clear about this in my last comment?
LT
@Tommy: Holy fuck.
1) I said the $20 m thing was my typo.
2) It was not about those numbers. YOU SAID:
You said there that Greenwald got [get] $250 m. Do you actually deny that that’s what that says? (And it doesn’t matter if it’s $250m, $50m, $20m or what. Greenwald didn’t GET that money. Do you NOT get this?)
Cacti
@Mandalay:
I think the real question is, how many times and how many ways does the above have to be told to Knowbody for him to comprehend it.
catclub
@gvg:
one time pad. the random key is the same size as the entire cyphertext. The problem is keeping the one-time pad safe from prying eyes, but retaining access to it one self.
In that case enough resources is pliers to pluck fingernails until the one guy tells you the algorithm to generate the one-time pad.
Tommy
@LT: Yes I said that and I was wrong. The initial investment was said to be $250M and it was only $50M. I was wrong. Do I need to say it again, I was wrong.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
The problem with encryption is that actual encryption keys that are powerful enough to stymie the kind of computing power a government can throw at them are too long for ordinary people to remember and type in. Instead, they use a password or passphrase that’s used either to generate the encryption key itself or to encrypt the encryption key. No matter how good your encryption is, that passphrase is going to be a lot weaker.
It’s going to be especially weak if somebody can monitor you when you’re typing it in. They don’t necessarily need to be able to see you to get a lot of information. There are all kinds of published works on narrowing the guessing space based on things like the timing between keystrokes when it’s being typed in (determinable by listening), monitoring the computer’s accelerometers, etc. And that’s assuming they can’t use a keylogger.
catclub
@Belafon:
Is the evil bit turned on?
Joey Maloney
@Cacti: Polynomial time, or exponential time? Countably infinite, or uncountably infinite?
LT
@Tommy: Now you’re just trolling. We have already acknowledged that it was $50m, not $250m. DONE. Never speak of $250m again. You have acknowledged THAT error. Good for you. Thank you.
Greenwald didn’t GET that $50 million. Do I need to point out your atual worse error again? The GET? Are you actually this thick?
catclub
@chopper: I took more words to get at this idea.
Mandalay
@Mark B.:
No, it’s not reasonable to “assume” any of that. You just made all that stuff up.
Snowden states that he gave all the NSA data away to reporters in Hong Kong before his cover was blown, and that he possessed no NSA data after that. From his perspective that approach makes a lot of sense. How do you knows that what he says isn’t true?
Zandar
“I don’t believe that either side is telling the full truth” does not equal “I think both sides are equally responsible for this surveillance mess” but I wouldn’t want people here to start throwing around nuance, or to have an actual discussion that doesn’t devolve into “YOU HATE GREENWALD” or “YOU HATE CIVIL LIBERTIES” after a couple dozen comments or so.
But like I said, hash it out.
chopper
@bcw:
then why choose greenwald? he’s neither a journalist nor knowledgable at all about information technology.
Tommy
@LT: I look at Glenn as the head. He didn’t get that money. The organization did. You say I am trolling but I get most here will think the other way.
Belafon
@catclub: LOL.
catclub
@lol:
Another thing that Ronald Reagan started in a big way. Contractors are MUCH less likely to be unionized.
chopper
@Mandalay:
phone service, like information, wants to be free, man.
cahuenga
So Snowden made a sitting establishment dem look like a tool and Anonymous Source says some crap that doesn’t even pass the smell test.
I have to think many of the reactions here go along with the comment here last week pointing out that nobody enjoys a good hippie punching more than a Reagan conservative. Except for centrist dems, that is.
Mark B.
@Mandalay:
That’s why I said ‘assume’. It also makes a lot of sense that he would have handed over the keys when he handed over the encrypted data, but not necessarily to the same individuals.
It’s a lot easier to use human stupidity, fear, and/or greed to crack security than pure mathematics, and it’s reasonable to assume that the Russians would have used those techniques to acquire and decrypt the data. If you don’t think they’ve tried to do that, you’re naive. The only unknown is whether they succeeded or not. It seems highly likely to me that they did, because it wouldn’t have been that hard for them to get to it.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I don’t think unionization is the big thing. The really big thing is that contracting stuff out provides far more scope for private profit than keeping it within the government.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: In Reichwingland it makes perfect sense: the service is being provided by the private sector, not Big Gummint™. For reasons known only to Reichwingnuts this is ideal because it means Real Job-Creating Businesses™ are doing the work. It’s also perceived as a win because the contractors don’t cost so much in the long term: pensions, healthcare and other perks all add up, and contractors look less expensive on those counts (it often doesn’t work that way, but on paper and in wingnuts’ heads the math looks better). That Booz Allen, Unisys, Lockheed, HP and other “vendors” are actually performing the labor that ATF, DEA, FBI, FDIC et al are tasked with, and who are able to retain significant lobbying presences inside the Beltway, is (apparently) unrelated.
I get why contractors are occasionally preferable to FTEs: public sector employment once obtained is pretty difficult to lose, so there’s strong attraction to employing a labor force that can be expanded or reduced more rapidly than FTEs as technology grows and changes. That’s not a reason to grow the agencies’ consulting services GLs and shrink the payroll, though.
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
Yep.
It’s all about public money subsidizing private profits.
Hence the Republican pipe dream of privatizing Social Security. Turn it into a 401k type program where the beneficiary bears all the risk, and the investment banks and financial management firms reap most of the rewards.
japa21
To all the Zandar haters out there (all three or so of you) please read what Zandar has said in this post:
his document cache, allegedly now in the hands of the Russians and Chinese
The truth I suspect is somewhere in the middle
Britain has a surveillance regime that makes the Patriot Act look like child’s play, and they’re not above actually using the scare tactics Greenwald is accusing them of using this time.
So, Knowbody, suck a moldy lemon.
catclub
@Roger Moore: @Cacti:
I agree with those. But the first motivator they list – not necessarily the real one – is getting government smaller. Smaller headcount, greater cost, loss of knowledge within government.
boatboy_srq
@Cacti: So, according to the GOTea, Snowden’s massive data breach is Good™ because it means more ca$h for (more and different) contractors to come in and clean up the mess? Sounds about right.
Mandalay
@Mark B.:
Get what from where? Snowden explicitly said that he relinquished all NSA data to journalists before Russia or China even knew what he had done. Given his job, it is also reasonable to think that he would have given them good advice on how to ensure that they didn’t inadvertently make the data accessible to anyone else.
Anything is possible, but you are concocting a highly implausible scenario…so implausible that it reeks of an agenda.
Bill Arnold
@Mark B.:
Yes, this is a possibility too. If one assumes that the British did in fact pull out some agents, they could have been acting on a precautionary suspicion that the Russians and Chinese manged to somehow decrypt the document trove. Maybe someone known to have keys had an encounter (coincidence?) with a known Russian agent for example. Maybe some vulnerability was found in the procedures used by the people who held the keys to the encrypted document trove.
Or the rathole could be deeper, e.g. a counter intelligence operation to convince the Brits that they are/might be compromised.
sharl
@chopper:
My Google-fu is weak at the moment; I cannot find where Greenwald himself addressed this. But an idea of Snowden’s thinking at the time can be found in this Q&A he did with The Guardian, and here is something from a guy who helped facilitate that Hong Kong meeting, who is now (or was, at the time of that post) a colleague of Greenwald’s at Omidyar’s media shop.
Mark B.
@Mandalay: I got no agenda, I’m just expressing my opinion on how likely it is that professional intelligence organizations have been able to acquire the information and keys, based on my experience working in IT. You can impugn my motives if you want to. Whatever.
Knowbody
@Zandar: Fuck you and your high Broderism bullshit. there is no nuance in your position at all. Your irrational hatred of Snowden and Greenwald is well documented.
Go fuck yourself.
sharl
@sharl: Here’s a bit more behind the story of why Snowden went with Greenwald. Apparently he originally wanted to go with WaPo, at least in part, so official Washington would be sure to see what he had to say. But it sounds like he wasn’t satisfied with WaPo in the end.
This stuff is probably addressed in that Citizen Four movie that came out about this, but I haven’t seen it, so that’s just a guess.
MomSense
@sharl:
Barton Gellman wrote about this. Snowden offered it to him exclusively if he published the entire power point in 72 hours and a cryptographic key he could provide to a foreign embassy to prove he was the source of the leaks. Because Gellman refused, Snowden said he would not be exclusive with WaPo.
I think Greenwald may have said this wasn’t true because Snowden went to him before but I gave my last fucks about this a year ago.
Howlin Wolfe
@Schlemazel: I don’t buy that line that the revelations contained in Snowden’s leaked document were already known. That’s absurd on its face. I’m also pretty sure you didn’t know what was in them. And, yes, most people “knew” that surveillance was happening but it wasn’t documented.
Andrey
@Belafon: They’re not looking for “evil”. They’re looking for much simpler, more specific things, like “find nodes connected to suspected terrorist X.”
sharl
@MomSense: Yeah, I saw that Gellman-vs-Greenwald thing during my Google-facilitated trip down Dreary Memories Lane.
The final part of your end sentence makes an excellent point. I don’t know that it dawned on Snowden that so few people in the U.S. care before John Oliver pounded it home for him (in the latter’s usual tragicomic fashion). That’s the downside of being cut off from the world and left with only an inner circle comprised solely of fans and allies; it can seriously distort one’s perception.
J R in WV
@Knowbody:
“Everyone else sticks with their areas of knowledge and actually contributes to the place. ”
‘Cept you, maybe…
Roger Moore
@catclub:
The problem is that they aren’t actually making government smaller in any meaningful sense. They’re just outsourcing it’s key functions.
catclub
@Roger Moore: I agree. But headcount is something they can point to with pride when they say they have made government smaller.
chopper
@Knowbody:
yeah, he’s the irrational hater.
J R in WV
@LT:
The closest noun to the phrase “you don’t get $nnn million…” is not Greenwald, it is First Look, who actually did get the $nnn millions of dollars, I think. Not that this is all complicated.
But you are obviously more interested in hammering Tommy, who’s usage is sometimes less than perfect (no offense, Tommy) but in this case is correct on the issue you are pounding the hardest.
“You said there that Greenwald got [get] $250 m…” but no, he didn’t, he said that First Look got that money, and you jumped on Greenwald instantly. Bad! don’t do that!
Not that I love Greenwald, but you shouldn’t be pounding Tommy over stuff he didn’t say. And enjoying making the distortion, too.
J R in WV
@Knowbody:
And here is the first explosion of “Go fuck yourself” on comment 198. Fuck was used lots of times as an adjective up above, but as vituperation, this is the first spot I see.
Although with your trooling [sic, joke on drooling] skills you have angered lots of regulars and deserve any castigation anyone cares to type into the thread.
I’ll cheerfully admit I wanted to tell you to fuck off right away, but held back for a little while, just to see how long it would take you to go off the rails. This long, that’s how long.
LT
@J R in WV: You also misunderstand this.
And who *owns* First Look? It ain’t Greenwald. He’s an employee, with a contract, and a salary, the amount of which I nor you have any idea of, although we can guess it’s healthy. The thing that “got” $nnn million from Omidyar – is Omidyar’s First Look. That people don’t get this – still – is just weird.
And Tommy did exactly say what you said he didnt:
There’s nothing unambiguous about that. The “you” is Greenwald. If we’re supposed to magically understand that “get” doesn’t mean “get”there – well – wtf? What problem do you have with language? And it’s made more obvious with the implication that Greenwald had to do something – “strings attached” – to “get” the $250 million – otherwise why would he do it if he weren’t “getting” it?
If you want to make the argument that Greenwald wil sacrifice standards because *what he actually does get from Omidyar* – go right ahead. But please be sure you say it about Schahill, Poitras, and every other big name in journalism – including at the NYT, WaPo, etc – because they get big freaking bucks too. At least show that you’re consistent, and not just doing your GG wankfest.
Sloegin
News Corp has filed a DMCA takedown notice against Greenwald’s reply to the Sunday Times.
Heliopause
OK, I’m stumped. What exactly is the “middle” of these two positions? Is it anything like being “a little bit pregnant”?
sharl
@Sloegin: I figured you had been punked by a parody site, but OMG, it’s true!.
Maaaan-o-man, yet more favorable PR for #Brand Greenwald. Talk about a guy fortunate* in the enemies he has accumulated! [*For Snowden, alas, not so much…]
Barney
Someone I trust more than either British spies, the Sunday Times, or Glenn Greenwald, is Shami Chakrabarti, head of ‘Liberty’, roughly the British equivalent of the ACLU. Here’s her take, and it’s far closer to Greenwald than the Sunday Times:
Larv
@Mandalay:
I’m perplexed at the insistence of Snowden’s most ardent supporters that while the government should be assumed to be saying whatever will best serve its interests, Snowden’s claims on this should be taken at face value. Why wouldn’t he say whatever he thinks will portray him in the best light or increase his chances of someday returning to the US sans handcuffs? Everybody lies, and the more you think you have to gain/lose the greater the incentive to do so.
If you want to talk implausible scenarios, I find the idea of Snowden heading off to an uncertain exile without retaining something of real value to be very implausible. He also strikes me as the right combination of naive/confident to believe he could keep those potential bargaining chips secure and/or unknown to his hosts.
Marc
We have Glenn’s toady LT and Zandars’ stalker Knowbody here. Troll house is almost full; my only question is whether LT is Glenn, his partner, or someone deeply invested in Glenn being right all of the time, because that’s his bit. Knowbody is the guy who had a fight with Zandar at work in meatspace and has been harassing him every time that he writes anything.
There is no reason to engage either of ’em.
Gravenstone
@Knowbody: Looks like somebody’s stalker wriggled out from under the ban hammer. Begone, mindless fuck knob.
Carolinus
@Raenelle:
Sure. There’s lots of inconsistencies and intentionally misleading claims in his “reporting”. It’s usually a result of his over-the-top advocacy for his colleague Snowden and the hyperbole / exaggeration that follows. One example, Snowden’s so-called “dead man’s switch,” which, if real, could have some bearing on this story since it involved encrypted copies of his archive spread about the globe. Snowden essentially denies such a thing exists or ever existed. This directly contradicts Greenwald, who has repeatedly wielded the claim as a threat, and said it came directly from Snowden. It’s not actually that interesting that such inconsistencies exist, what’s truly of note is that Greenwald, who’s surely aware of them, never bothers to pursue them and pin down the truth. That’s what a journalist would feel compelled to do, whereas an advocate essentially operating as a member of a person’s PR team would try and pretend it never happened, or try and paper it over.
Snowden’s Gellman interview:
Greenwald’s La Nación interview:
GG’s AP interview:
GG’s Daily Beast interview:
GG’s Rolling Stone interview:
GG’s Guardian column:
LT
@Carolinus:
Hello darkness my old friend…
Carolinus
@Carolinus:
Almost forgot. If you look at Greenwald’s Intercept defense of Snowden you can see why GG’s previous, month’s long “deadman’s switch” campaign may be relevant. From the Intercept editorial:
Well, how about from all those “insurance” copies of the files Greenwald had previously claimed had been seeded about the globe? Unsurprisingly Greenwald never mentions them (or, for that matter, all the copies of the full archive or partial archive that more and more media outfits have gained access to: Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum, Gellman, Gallagher, Pro Publica, NYT, Guardian, FLM, etc).
different-church-lady
@LT:
You’re not the boss of me.
Davebo
One thing you have to give it to Snowden/Greenwalk..
They generate page clicks like nobody’s business!
Pornhub is probably jealous by now.
LT
@different-church-lady: Did I actually right “now”? God i hate my fingers.
different-church-lady
@J R in WV:
But isn’t that exactly how the current US health care system operates?
different-church-lady
@LT: I hadn’t even noticed the typo, but by god if it doesn’t just make it all the more amusing that way…
different-church-lady
@LT: I, for one, believe that Greenwald would still behave exactly as he does even for free.
different-church-lady
@Cacti:
Divide by zero. You get the same results.
different-church-lady
@Tommy:
What I don’t understand is why you won’t just admit you were wrong.
LT
@LT:
Arg – see? See?!
Write – not “right”!!!
different-church-lady
@Zandar:
Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself.
LT
@different-church-lady: Let’s not get carried away. He’d need at least change for acid-flavored breath mints.
different-church-lady
@sharl:
Q: How do you know a computer geek is an extrovert?
A: He stares at your shoes.
different-church-lady
@LT: It’s good that you made him needlessly repeat his admission six or seven dozen times. Really really drove it home for the hopeless imbeciles in the audience.
different-church-lady
@J R in WV: Oh I dunno, ‘idiocy’ seems to be his area of knowledge, and he’s sticking to it like gum on a sidewalk.
different-church-lady
@J R in WV: Pssst: less Clarence Darrow , more Groucho.
LT
@different-church-lady:
1) The “breath mints” comment was in reply to your comment about Greenwald- not Tommy.
2) Tommy never admitted the dumbass error he made. He kept repeating the “I said it was $50 million already!!!” – which I acknowledged again and again – and which was not the error I was pointing to. (It was the “Greenwald got $X million!”fuckery.)
3) Try harderer.
different-church-lady
@LT:
Thanks for clearing that up. I still have no idea what it means, but thanks for clearing it up.
LT
@different-church-lady: Oy – it’s 11:30 here, and you’re making me work?I NEVER blog during wine hours…
You said:
I replied:
Are we clear now?And about Tommy’s dumbassery? Good. Enjoy that steak.
different-church-lady
@LT: What I don’t understand is why you won’t just admit you were wrong.
LT
@different-church-lady: Wrong should have to admit it’s wrong, man. It’s like asking Superman to admit the super part.
LT
@LT: shouldN’T
God i suck
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: Rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
DiTurno
@Raenelle: Hey, what do you know: it turns out Greenwald was right and the Times was just committing stenography!
I really hate the term Obot, but if you trust an anonymous and evidence-free article in a Murdoch owned paper, you’re either a conservative or an Obot.
taylormattd
@Knowbody: BLACKETY BLACKETY BLACK BLACK BLACK
Kerry Reid
Not even 300 comments yet. The magic is gone!
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@chopper: The hover-text is required reading, as always. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
DiTurno
@Punchy: The comments here are no different from Powerline: irrational Snowden/Greenwald hatred, complete gullibility, and a sickening deference to power.
The story is wholly unsupported by anything resembling evidence, and the only sources are anonymous. It’s also in a Murdoch-owned rag. Snowden, as he has repeatedly said, brought no documents to Moscow.
It’s all BS, and a good chunk of you bought it. Go join the Tea Party and get it over with.
LAC
@DiTurno: the well thought out arguments of the snowden / greenwald fanboy base: a noun, a verb, and the rest of the sentence being garbled while burying your hypocritical faces in their crotches.
Danny
@Schlemazel: If he encrypted the files properly, it could take a thousand years before they get lucky. Regardless of your stint with a IT dept or at the NSA, you need to read and understand how it works. Unless he was careless (snowden123), they will not crack the encryption in this lifetime. Your statements have no backing to them at all.