
Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete' - passepartout
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/20/edward-snowden-files-nsa-gchq-luke-harding/print
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thaumaturgy
This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a
conspiracy forum.

1\. Keyboards don't beep.

2\. There are _lots_ of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted
than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly
obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads
caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my part),
a glitchy keyboard controller -- we've seen all of these in our shop.

3\. In Rio, "a tall American" immediately meets a fellow Westerner and
"accosts" him -- by suggesting they go out and see the city? He's a spook
because he dressed neatly and was in good shape? Hell, that makes me a spook
too.

4\. Choose one of the two following explanations for the iPhone behavior: one,
a well-funded and resourceful state agency is hiring people to track a
journalist writing a book about the biggest intelligence leak in recent
history, and the people they're hiring are juvenile enough to use methods
straight out of Hollywood to play a prank on their target's iPhone when he
sends a text with possibly the most milquetoast insult about their methods in
the history of ever; or, two, the iPhone crashed. (Your answer might be used
to gauge your sanity.)

5\. The hotel safe -- if it weren't for everything else he'd written, I might
be willing to buy that this was a botched job. But in the context of the rest
of the article, I think the more reasonable explanation is that it was a
crappy safe, it never did work correctly, and he only noticed that part way
through his stay in the room.

~~~
poopsintub
Windows beeps when you're pressing keys at the same time or just holding them
down. I don't know the exact situations but I remember a "hot keys"
notification popping up.

Let's consider the article is true and words were being deleted as he wrote
them. How ridiculous is that? A. disconnect from the internet. B. The whole
manuscript could be deleted with a few keystrokes if wanted. Why would someone
sit there and delete out the "bad" parts while they know the writer is
actually working and typing in the document? This makes absolutely no sense.
PR stunt imo.

~~~
Robelius
The Windows beep is usually from a speaker connected to your motherboard.
There is no speaker located on the majority of keyboards, meaning no beeps.

It's not ridiculous to think words would begin to get deleted, but it is
ridiculous to say some government organization would sit there and watch him
type to remove some content. Why would any organization spying on him make it
so obvious, and pointless. If he wanted to hide it from them he would just go
to another computer.

I run into this self'deleting in words once a month. I have no idea how I
activate it, but when i type it deletes what's in front of it. It's a
frustrating feature that I haven't defeated, but I don't think the government
is watching my computer, seeing what I type on Hacker News.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I'm pretty sure the government is watching your computer (internet traffic,
and maybe your webcam). They probably don't have you targeted for surveillance
by an agent, which is what I think you meant.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
We haven't yet been marketed a reason to constantly steam our webcams to the
cloud. For this reason remote activation would be required in many cases, and
that would be expensive on a mass scale.

Steps toward cloud services like this might include the Kinect, or face
recognition login services. We'll see how it plays out. :^)

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suprgeek
Is it now a sign of times that where previously most ppl (including me) would
have dismissed this piece as

1) Does not understand technology so is committing some basic error leading to
this

2) Making this sh$t up

3) Has a prankster who is close by.

Instead now I am almost betting that it was the NSA/GCHQ/Five Eyes/CIA who is
behind these shenanigans?

Thank you Edward Snowden (for the hundredth time) for giving us hard evidence
of the illegal and ineffective behavior on the Govt's part. You have also
(unfortunately) fundamentally raised the bar on tin-foil hat debunking.

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mixmax
_The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words
vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing
and bleeping._

To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly
deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.

~~~
mpyne
More to the point, "keyboards flashing and beeping" is pretty much the polar
opposite of what a professional organization like NSA would do. They would
shred/unlink the file _after_ its closed so that you'd never be the wiser.

But on the other hand, they wouldn't be in _this_ guy's computer anyways
because even if NSA were out to oppress him, he's pretty far back at the end
of the ol' pri. queue. "Oh, no, not a _manuscript_ , OMG, get Gen. Alexander
on the STE-III!"

~~~
vinceguidry
It actually sounds a lot more like a CIA intimidation tactic.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
If this _were_ an operation, it'd be more likely to be GCHQ. Keep in mind,
GCHQ sent the NSA the Yahoo webcam photos, for use in XKEYSCORE. The two are
close allies.

The CIA on the other hand, competes with the NSA for resources and
jurisdiction.

Right now the NSA's budget dwarfs that of the CIA, since data collection and
SIGINT have been prioritized over HUMINT. Technology advances and cost
reductions might have encouraged this.

What types of intelligence and which agencies will be more relevant in the
21st century? The Snowden revelations and ongoing saga will play a large part
in affecting future views, and answers to that question.

It might be more beneficial for the CIA to actually step back.

Plus, a lot of people want to see mass surveillance fail. It's pretty
obviously a threat to democracy waiting to happen, and most people in service
are dedicating their life to protecting democracy.

~~~
vinceguidry
Except that the CIA does have an office in Rio, whose station chief is known
for these kinds of tactics, as is written in the article.

I think also you're overstating how much the CIA might be competing with the
NSA. Sure, at the highest levels, this might be true, but in the trenches,
operatives share everything. I doubt anyone in the CIA truly resents the NSA
and they'd happily help each other out like this.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
He experienced the deletions after returning to his home, in the UK.

I certainly might be. It's interesting to consider though.

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LVB
I smell NSA involvement. They've clearly hacked the site and posted this piece
to make Luke Harding and The Guardian look ridiculous.

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vfclists
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean 'they' are not out to get you!!

If the events happened as described 'they' were trying to spook him or 'psych'
him out.

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denova
I completely understand all the criticism toward this piece, and I don't think
I would ever publish anything like this without at least some hard evidence,
but I also wouldn't be surprised if he were completely right about his
assumptions. Thinking skeptically about everything is a good habit, but
sometimes the consequence of thinking like an intelligent reasonable person is
that you forget how bafflingly stupid the world can really be.

Are all of the author's suspicions totally unfounded? Yeah, probably, because
he has no good evidence to back them up. Do they lead to a narrative that is
completely unreasonable and absurd? Absolutely. But it's also possible that
the people who are spying on him are behaving in a way that is completely
unreasonable and absurd, and are just competent enough to cover their tracks
so a layperson won't have any evidence on them.

I don't have a ton of confidence in what I'm saying right now, but uh... I
just don't blame him too much, is all. I definitely wouldn't dismiss him as a
bad journalist or anything.

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siegecraft
Let's play "spot the spook" in this thread..

~~~
artichokeheart
That's my favourite game to play on Hacker News. I wish there was a Hacker
News Enhancement Suite so I could keep track of them.

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atmosx
The article is 99% full of BS. I believe that too, however it made an impact:
didn't knew there was a book[1]. I will read it and post a review. The amazon
reviews look promising...

[http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-
ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-
ebook/dp/B00HU8Z3Z2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-
text&ie=UTF8&qid=1393803014&sr=1-1&keywords=the+snowden+files)

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serf
The paragraph began to self-delete..

BOFH excuse #114:

electro-magnetic pulses from French above ground nuke testing.

at least it makes as much sense as the 'Russian hacker' assertion they made.

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dynjo
So a 'professional journalist' with an iPhone didn't think to make a video of
the self deleting, or take a photo of the tall American?

I call BS.

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vacri
Why on earth would a malicious party manually delete characters while the
author is watching? If you don't care about being observed - as the author
suggests - then in order to destroy his work, you'd just delete the truecrypt
partition.

~~~
specialist
We used to do this for giggles. PC-Anywhere era.

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lupinglade
Wow. Yeah, generally that's the US people's image of the US government in a
nutshell. Conspiracy theories are getting old, old, old. Being overly
suspicious is not productive in any way. Wake up and help your country be
successful.

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fallinghawks
What he doesn't say is that the keyboard stopped flashing and beeping after he
threw a biscuit at his cat.

I saw this a couple days ago. I thought it was rather silly.

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superpatosainz
This is exactly the time when you'd want to write about such a topic in pen
and paper.

