
Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey - piratebroadcast
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/16/gordon-humphrey-email-edward-snowden
======
pvnick
"Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to
compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported
in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to
keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat
counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China).

You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information,
even under torture."

I am _very_ interested to hear some of his anti-intelligence efforts. I assume
he's either talking about the Defense Intelligence Agency [1], or that this is
a typo for CIA?

Also, everytime I hear from Snowden, I can't help but "fist pump" and cheer
for the guy.

[1] [http://www.dia.mil/](http://www.dia.mil/)

~~~
untog
To offer an opposing view:

 _I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture._

That is a huge claim. I do not imagine that his training involved being
tortured to make sure. If he's wrong, there could be dire consequences for the
US.

You might even say his ego is writing checks his body can't cash.

~~~
phaus
Such training does not exist anywhere on this planet.

Edit:

I already mentioned SERE training in a higher level post. It's pretty intense,
but still, the most valuable lesson you learn is that everyone will end up
talking.

I was simply commenting on the possibility of a person resisting torture. If
that person has some sort of safety mechanism in place, the torturer might not
be able to get the information he wants, but that's not because the victim has
resisted, because he won't.

~~~
lifeformed
The training is right here:

1) Write some software that destroys your data if you don't login every x
hours.

2) Under duress, stall for x hours.

~~~
phaus
If they abduct and torture you immediately, the chances of you stalling for x
hours is pretty much non-existent. Snowden is in Russia. Arguably, no nation
on the planet is better at torturing people than they are, and unlike the U.S.
Russia doesn't really give a shit if the rest of the world doesn't like their
methods. His interrogation would likely take minutes, not hours.

~~~
lifeformed
Well, my point is that there are alternate ways of ensuring the data doesn't
get out, not just by being really good at resisting torture.

Other methods:

A) Alternate password that destroys the data.

B) Cyanide capsule in tooth.

------
tokenadult
It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the
press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word,
and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the
interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's
current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the
time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and a lot of callow bravado in
much of what he is saying. I hope he is correct that the information that he
claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against
his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence.
That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. Some
aspects of Snowden's story do NOT look like a thoughtful plan to defend
freedom and fair play around the world, but rather a haphazard rash move by
Snowden to see what he can get away with. The high degree of cooperation many
countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have
Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite
a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to
represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in
his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law.

P.S. Remember, I was one of the rather few HN members to go out in public to
protest the NSA on Restore the Fourth evening here in the United States. I can
be appalled by some of what I read about the NSA without agreeing that Snowden
is taking the best approach to doing something about that.

~~~
fragsworth
> the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be
> extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in
> the absence of evidence.

It's not difficult - if you haven't seen all the data. You encrypt the data
with a large, randomly generated password, and give pieces of the password
(without looking at it) to several people in different countries. You also
tell them that they need to be 100% certain you're not being tortured to get
the passwords from them.

If you're tortured, then you actually _cannot_ reveal the data. You can reveal
who has the password pieces, but if they're all in different countries it will
be nearly impossible to get them. It would be easier to get the data directly
from the U.S. government.

~~~
ReidZB
If you're generating some truly-random "password", I'd call it a key instead.
Just a minor terminological note.

Anyway, while that split-the-key scheme _works_ , I wouldn't use it over one
of the real secret sharing schemes cryptographers have developed, e.g.
Shamir's secret sharing scheme [1]. If you just split a key and give pieces to
different people, the more pieces of the key an enemy can collect, the easier
time they will have when brute-forcing it.

On the other hand, Shamir's secret sharing scheme is an information-
theoretically secure threshold scheme. That is, a key is broken up into _n_
pieces and _t_ of those pieces are required to reconstruct the secret. In
Shamir's scheme, the enemy can collect _t-1_ pieces of the secret and still
have no chance in reconstructing the password; it simply is impossible.

The scheme works off of the idea that an _m_ -degree polynomial is uniquely
defined by _m+1_ points. For example, here's a point from a 1-degree
polynomial (line), which would model a _t=2_ scheme: (1,4). Can you figure out
the y-intercept? (Actually, Shamir's scheme uses finite fields, but I think
asking this question drives the point home.)

So, generate a key, split it up into a bunch of pieces, and require a
threshold of those pieces to be present. Coercion-free and even if an
intelligence agency can compromise many pieces, they still can't do anything
until they've hit the threshold. Also, if you want to require all pieces
present, just set _t=n_.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing)

~~~
gngeal
Funny thing is, when he suggested splitting the key, I assumed that this is
what he had in mind.

~~~
ReidZB
Maybe he did! I have no idea. But just in case he didn't, or someone else had
the interpretation I had, I just wanted to clarify that a real secret-sharing
scheme has some pretty nifty properties.

------
Osmium
Completely off-topic, but oh-my-god if the Guardian mobile website doesn't
look so much better on a desktop browser than their non-mobile website... I
thought they'd had a redesign for a moment.

~~~
Demiurge
Wow, it's night and day. One is a clean usable site where I can clearly read a
column of text for which this page exists. The other is a junked up
ad/link/box mess and I have no idea what I'm looking at.

~~~
untog
And one makes the Guardian considerably more money than the other. It's not a
mystery.

~~~
scrumper
While we're off topic, let's run with that thought. What does that mean for
the mobile web when the majority of their page views come from mobile? HTML ad
overlays on the m site? The same descent into usability hell that the desktop
has suffered, only without the possibility of ad-blocking plugins for mobile
browsers? Or maybe it's 10 views a month, then you must use their dedicated
app? Perhaps it'll be subscription only, through walled gardens like
Newsstand? (Maybe that's even a good thing: we'll be paying directly for the
content, instead of having our eyeballs sold to advertisers).

People on this site are thinking about this stuff. Working on it. Some for
evil, some for good. I'm curious what this'll all look like in a few years.

------
diminoten
Everyone's focusing on the fact that Snowden claims he is torture-proof, when
in reality he never said that. He said that he "cannot" be tortured into
revealing information he is protecting.

For example, Glenn Greenwald may hold a private key which must be used IN
CONJUNCTION with Snowden's key to decrypt the information Snowden has. It's
possible/probable that Snowden does _not_ have access to the secrets he
protects without Greenwald's key, as well as possibly many other keys. He may
have a network of people he's made part of the group such that any two of them
plus Snowden can decrypt the information, but Snowden himself can't without
two keys plus his own, and he could make it such that his key is required in
the group of three to decrypt. Hopefully someone else here can provide the
name for this kind of encryption (something like n-key encryption, it's
escaping me currently) and a link to how it works, but this is all very sound
and entirely doable from a math standpoint.

So no, Snowden himself isn't torture proof, but his security is, if he's doing
something like what I outlined above. They'd have to go after Glenn Greenwald
too, or whoever else is involved, before gaining access to the intel.

Edit: This link[3] might explain it slightly better, but I once read a great
primer on the topic, filled with examples and was pretty simple to understand
(the layman could grasp at least the concept). I'll add more links as I find
more info.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-
party_computation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-
party_computation)

[2]
[http://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2001/20450279.pdf](http://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2001/20450279.pdf)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem)

[4]
[http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.159/2004/slides/L9.pdf](http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.159/2004/slides/L9.pdf)

[5]
[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/CS5430/2013sp/L.SecretSha...](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/CS5430/2013sp/L.SecretSharing.html)

(thanks ##crypto for the help!)

------
mrt0mat0
Edward Snowden makes me proud of my country, and the people that fight for it.
But he also makes me ashamed of my Government and the people that hide behind
it.

~~~
gcb0
This raise an interesting point.

The guy is risking his life, and no one even wonder who is the branch/person
in government that should be responsible for what he says is going on.

Who should be taken accountable for this? why people is not on the streets?
...well people are on the streets, but for the wrong reasons. media is
transforming a, sadly, commonplace killing in hate/race crime. Any conspiracy
theorist already linked the time they scheduled the trial with the snowden
thing? didn't another army whistle blower was on trial on the very same day as
the zimmerman one?

~~~
cheald
> _Who should be taken accountable for this?_

Anyone and everyone with knowledge of it who didn't do what he did, IMO.

I realize that's a wide net.

------
btbuildem
"identify, remove from office and bring to justice those officials who have
abused power"

This, here, is the crux of the matter. Drag into the light the parasites that
consume the living flesh of this society.

~~~
SolarNet
I hope people, and indeed the senator, realizes that the people he is talking
about are senators and congressmen, not the president who did his duty and
executed the 20 million dollar PRISM budget forced on him by congress.

~~~
twoodfin
Huh? There's no law or budget that requires PRISM. Any of these programs could
be shut down with one phone call from the Oval Office, and Congress couldn't
say boo. That's sort of the reason they're Constitutional in the first place:
The executive has broad national security powers.

~~~
SolarNet
Not since nixon:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974#Impoundment)

Also, he must execute the law faithfully, if the Congress gives him the power
to use secret courts to wire-tap people he is expected to use it to it's
fullest extent, to do otherwise would be illegal:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_State...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Clause_5:_Caring_for_the_faithful_execution_of_the_law)

PRISM is the president faithfully executing the laws set by congress, between
the 8 billion dollar NSA budget and the Patriot Act, they are responsible.

~~~
declan
Um, the above is the Sunday School version of U.S. politics.

In reality, the executive has a tremendous amount of discretion. Just look at
the Obama admin unilaterally extending an Obamacare deadline that was set by
Congress -- and which did not give the executive branch the ability to alter.
Didn't matter.

It's true that Congress is also responsible for NSA domestic surveillance. But
every branch of government has a duty to ensure their conduct is
constitutional.

~~~
SolarNet
First, where is your evidence of this opinion, I provided links to two sources
describing the modern state of Executive powers and you basically call me
naive without specifically refuting my evidence or points.

Second, the ACA (AKA Obamacare) does not specify specific deadlines except
when reports to congress must be made. I googled for the deadline extension
you were referring too, there were many, so please be more specific. Here is
the text of the bill to read it for yourself
([http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr3590/text](http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr3590/text)).
In general it says the the secretary of HHS shall set deadlines as reasonable,
and hence giving the Administration the power to change their own deadline.

Third, I generally base my opinion off of personal anecdote since I have a
family member serving as an elected politician in an executive office. Their
job requires them to execute laws very specifically, often requiring them to
consult lawyers regularly (even though they are a lawyer!). Laws can be
tricky, and while I am not knowledgeable of government law I would be willing
to bet the President is basically required to use section 702 of FISA whenever
he can in regards to terrorism. But then again, my personal anecdote is from a
county position.

Finally, it isn't a question of constitutionality. Congress said it was legal,
therefore it's legal until the supreme court (or a lesser court that doesn't
get appealed) says it is unconstitutional. I agree that the law is
unconstitutional, but the executive branch does not get the luxury to exercise
their opinions on laws like that.

~~~
declan
As you continue to explore this area, you'll find pretty quickly that your
family member's experience as a local elected official doesn't have that much
relevance to NSA surveillance. Other than that, you're mistaken but well-
intentioned, and I encourage you to read up on this topic. I might suggest my
articles about government and the law over the last 15 years or so as a
starting point.

------
grey-area
What I find interesting here is that a former Senator is commending a
dissident from the United States and wishing him good luck in evading the
government and seeking asylum from the US.

Lots of respect for Senator Gordon Humphrey for speaking out with what will be
a very unpopular opinion in Washington. I'd like to hear the same from UK
politicians past or present on Tempora, but have heard nothing of consequence
from any of them.

------
brown9-2
As Joshua Foust points out, Snowden gave some info to Der Spiegel that they
chose not to publish which seems to conflict with some of the "no harm"
statements here:

 _SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret
operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing
the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information
about the general surveillance of communications. They don’t endanger any
human lives — they simply describe a system whose dimensions go beyond the
imaginable._

[http://joshuafoust.com/dangerously-naive-or-a-
liar/](http://joshuafoust.com/dangerously-naive-or-a-liar/)

The Guardian and Washington Post also decided to not publish the majority of
the Prism slides for similar national security reasons, even though Snowden's
initial push was to have them all published (and almost immediately after
receipt by the Guardian and WaPo).

~~~
DigitalJack
He has asked the journalists to be rigorous in weighing the decision to
publish what he gives them. I don't have a citation but it's in some of
greenwalds recent posts.

~~~
brown9-2
That would seem to conflict with his statement that _I have not provided any
information that would harm our people - agent or not - and I have no
intention to do so_.

If Der Spiegel (or the Guardian, or the Washington Post) was less rigorous,
then information could have been published that harmed "our people" or
intelligence agents.

He is positioning himself as having carefully reviewed everything he has given
out, but if he has given info to some media sources who themselves have been
"rigorous" enough and realized the danger of publishing some of it, then the
statement in this letter cannot also be true.

------
vijayboyapati
This young man is an American hero

~~~
sigzero
No, he is not.

~~~
tghw
Want to bother attempting a compelling argument to that effect?

~~~
twoodfin
Like all the bother the parent poster made to argue that Snowden is a hero?

~~~
tghw
I think the original post did that sufficiently.

------
6d0debc071
_" Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to
compromise the secrets I continue to protect."_

I currently suspect this to be false or a straight up lie:

=================

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-
mans-s...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/)

 _" Snowden, a former systems administrator for the National Security Agency
in Hawaii, took thousands of documents from the agency’s networks before
fleeing to Hong Kong in late May, where he passed them to Guardian columnist
Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. The journalists have
handled them with great caution. A story in the German publication Der
Spiegal, co-bylined by Poitras, claims the documents include information “that
could endanger the lives of NSA workers,” and an Associated Press interview
with Greenwald this last weekend asserts that they include blueprints for the
NSA’s surveillance systems that “would allow somebody who read them to know
exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade
that surveillance or replicate it.”

But Snowden also reportedly passed encrypted copies of his cache to a number
of third parties who have a non-journalistic mission: If Snowden should suffer
a mysterious, fatal accident, these parties will find themselves in possession
of the decryption key, and they can publish the documents to the world."_

=================

From the sound of it, you can compromise him by expedient of killing him.

------
rodolphoarruda
"...one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such
information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-
intelligence environments (i.e. China)."

Interesting. Is it from a technical/IT standpoint or more of a "social
engineering" one? Or a bit of both? That's a genuine question because I really
don't know how feasible this type of work could be when done from within the
US.

~~~
mtrimpe
There are ways to store a password in your subconscious [1] but they are
relatively gimmicky.

The more logical interpretation is that he doesn't have the decryption keys
and has given partial keys to multiple people, thus making his secrets safe
from torturing _just him_.

------
e3pi
>I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted
from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't
assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary
claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.

>... an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence,

Not.

"Normally ciphertexts decrypt to a single plaintext and hence once decrypted,
the encryption user cannot claim that he encrypted a different message.
Deniable encryption allows its users to decrypt the ciphertext to produce a
different (innocuous but plausible) plaintext(s) and insist that it is what
they encrypted. The holder of the ciphertext will not have the means to
differentiate between the true plaintext, and the bogus-claim plaintext(s)."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption)

with:

"Secret sharing (also called secret splitting) refers to methods for
distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of whom is
allocated a share of the secret. The secret can be reconstructed only when a
sufficient number, of possibly different types, of shares are combined
together; individual shares are of no use on their own."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing)

Let the shared secret be deniable-crypto plaintexts. Threshold T sharers may
release plaintext_1 while ignorant of a different sharer subset intersection
may release a different plaintext_n, benign or otherwise, for example.

At another level of deniability, Snowden may also not even know the current
identities or nos of secret sharers participating.

------
capnrefsmmat
The most interesting part of this is the following paragraphs from Snowden:

 _Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to
compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported
in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to
keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat
counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China)._

 _You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that
information, even under torture._

While he may be overconfident (it's easy to say you can resist torture, at
least until you're tortured), this shoots down the unverified claims that the
Chinese or Russians could easily already have copies of his data. Not unless
he's willingly handed it over or he's much less competent than his data theft
would suggest.

~~~
kybernetikos
I can imagine systems that would be coercion proof, but I can't imagine any
that would be coercion proof and also allow a dead mans switch, which I
thought he had also claimed to have.

~~~
grey-area
If reconstructing the secret requires a certain no of keys, but not all, and
those people are distributed around the world, it's quite possible to be
coercion proof as one party (because you can't decrypt on your own) and the
secrets still accessible even if one party is compromised.

~~~
ianterrell
If that were the case, there would need to be at least two other parties who
share his ideology specifically enough to decrypt the data _only after_ he's
presumed dead. They would also need to remain secret in order to not be
targeted simultaneously.

Not impossible requirements, but they seem unlikely.

The question is: Can you automate it to remove the human element?

Assuming Tor is perfect, could you create N co-conspirator hidden services
that need checked in with periodically to not work together to decrypt it?
Assuming the check in would be able to detect duress, that might be a viable
system.

~~~
grey-area
_If that were the case, there would need to be at least two other parties who
share his ideology specifically enough to decrypt the data only after he 's
presumed dead._

Well apparently Senator Humphrey is on board with his ideology :)

I really don't think it'd be a problem for him to distribute keys to a few
like-minded individuals before he left, or even when he was in hong kong,
particularly if he has some shared key system set up so that any n keys can
open the secrets. It sounds like he has certainly distributed an encrypted
file of the docs to several people, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has
likewise distributed the keys to open them.

However while the mechanics of his protecting this data are interesting on a
technical level, they're also not the most important story here, and we don't
really know enough (or at least I don't) to speculate without more facts...

------
pbreit
Can anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA, using the tools
that many of us would rather they not, "keeps us safe"?

Are there specific incidents that have been avoided (that wouldn't have
otherwise)? Is it just that we are generally "safer"?

~~~
DanBC
> Can anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA

In the UK GCHQ provides intel to the Ministry of Defence. MoD then uses that
intel. The intel is secret, and thus we don't know if it has helped or not.
The intel is also misused (see, for example, the "sexing up" of documents) or
ignored.

But in general you don't know what the spies are doing. It's the nature of
spies. You could ask your representative politician to ask some of the
oversight politicians, but the answer you'll get back is going to be on the
same lines. "The provide valuable intel, and we use it, and we are safer
because of it".

~~~
pbreit
I just wonder how true that is or is it mostly just legacy behavior (we're a
country so we gotta have spies, right?).

------
scorpionian
I thought he said in the conference with WikiLeake staffer that he has shared
everything he knows. Now in the email he is talking about protecting more
information. Now I am confuse.

------
outworlder
> " While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was
> to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being
> compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments
> (i.e. China)."

Mr. Snowden has come a long way from "just a sysadmin". It appears people were
trying to downplay the role he had in his line of duty.

------
2na
This is like a dialogue from a spy movie, the good guy is on the run trying to
save his country, while this very nation is hunting him down.

I think Wesley Snipes plays the good guy! :-)

Jokes aside I salute Snowden, he's doing a very very brave thing. We should
come up with a hacker salute for his cause.

~~~
logicallee
Actually it's a bit over the top for a Senator to write a man on the run.
Luckily, unlike fiction, this stuff doesn't have to be believable!

------
MikeCapone
Sometimes I wonder if the intelligence community doesn't have people who's
sole job is to write comments on websites/forums to help shape public opinion.
It would be something fairly trivial for them to do and help further their
interests...

~~~
ianterrell
Well, the Air Force has already been caught doing it. Why wouldn't everyone
else?

[http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-
ord...](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ordered-
software-to-manage-army-of-fake-virtual-people/)

------
mathattack
I just wish this wouldn't be such a politically partisan issue.

------
antocv
I will just leave this here as an encouragement for anyone to write to their
representatives, media, journalists and mention this in debates about this
issue.

> remove from office and bring to justice those officials who have abused
> power, seriously and repeatedly violating the Constitution of the United
> States and the rights of millions of unsuspecting citizens.

This is what we should be focusing on and now Snowdens character, his this and
that, I and many with me are tired of celebrity-culture and gossip around him.

Lets talk about the US officials, NSA higher-ups who must be removed from
office, put on trail or investigation and lets get those companies Google,
Facebook accountable.

Anyone know who the NSA high-ups are, names? We know companies CEOs, lets put
them under the spotlight instead of Snowden, what did they know? When, how
come they did not know, where they coerced or fooled into it? Do they deserve
to continue being CEO when such grave mistakes happen under their watch?

