
Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii - panarky
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty
======
revelation
This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a
boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty.

I don't see why, given that educating the US public about security best
practices perfectly aligns with their mission. Back in 2001 they even released
the first version of SELinux:

[http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2001/se-
linux.shtm...](http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2001/se-linux.shtml)

It is only in the post 9/11 world that we somehow believe a CryptoParty is to
the NSA what the tea party was to the british.

~~~
acqq
"This article keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a
boat to gitmo if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty."

No, the actual words are just "That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto
party while he was working for the NSA." It was a risk for him, the kind of
like organizing "don't drink sugar water" event while working for Coca Cola
which has effectively its own police, and that at the time the employee
already downloaded the secrets from the Coca Cola's secure network and he even
contacted some journalists to give them those.

~~~
lepht
> Coca Cola which has effectively its own police

Link with more info?

~~~
acqq
I'm not claiming that Coca Cola has its own police but suggesting to imagine a
hypothetical Coca Cola which has police at their command, and a hypothetical
employee working for a such company, who just took secret documents, contacted
a journalist, then making a "let's not drink sugar water" event, and then to
try to imagine if his behavior could trigger such police to investigate him
more and maybe in the process discover what he did. Sorry if it wasn't clear
enough.

Snowden organized a "let's use Tor" event after he apparently already
downloaded some secret documents and contacted a journalist. And the top
commenter disputes the claim "That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto
party while he was working for the NSA" falsely claiming that the article
"keeps saying in many words that the NSA would put Snowden on a boat to gitmo
if they found out he hosted a CryptoParty." It doesn't. But I also claim that
it was a potential risk for him as there was some chance that somebody in
charge for security starts to investigate what he does or already did.

And if I understood other sources, at that time Snowden actually worked for a
private company (Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.)

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462680...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579363651571199832)

which had the contracts with NSA. Still, apparently exactly working in that
company gave him access to the secret documents he wanted to take.

------
mfex
Be sure to check out this comment explaining the name of Snowden's email
address: [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-
cryptoparty#comment-139...](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-
cryptoparty#comment-1397370989)

------
icholboy
Regardless of all the controversy, I see this man as a hero and I hope history
gives him the recognition he deserves.

~~~
newscracker
It's obvious that Edward Snowden was upset with mass surveillance for quite
sometime and did a lot of preparation before taking the final leap to disclose
the truth.

He is a hero and has brought out a (long due and) renewed interest in privacy
and security. We'll all be the better for it in the coming years.

------
nardi
Love the last sentence of the article, quoting Wolf: "What a fucking legend."

Indeed.

------
scrollaway
> A recent Wall Street Journal column argues that Snowden might have been
> working for the Russians and Chinese at the same time.

This sounds straight out of The Onion. "Controversial figure found to be
working for the Chinese, the Russians, Al-Qaeda, the KKK and Nazi Germany at
the same time"

~~~
thekaleb
There has not been a single shred of evidence about this claim which is an
attempt to discredit his motives.

Here is the article mentioning this claim:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1cwq_2e...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1cwq_2eYAWwJ:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
jonnybgood
And if there was such evidence that came to light, would you believe it? Would
it change your opinion of Snowden?

~~~
joelhaus
Didn't he provide classified documents to the South China Morning Post?
Certainly a clever way to create plausible deniability, but anyone with Google
would be able to see how closely related that paper is to Beijing[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Alleg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Alleged_pro-
Beijing_bias_and_censorship)

------
pbhjpbhj
Cynically perhaps I'd imagine that increasing number of tor users for his node
would be a great benefit if he wanted to reduce the possibility that his own
traffic could be easily tracked. If you're the only user of a Tor node I'd
imagine it's far easier to track traffic and potentially deanonymise if not
decrypt some communications.

~~~
gloverkcn
This was my first thought as well. And specifically if anything he was doing
got flagged the crypto party would be an excellent cover for why he was using
Tor and TrueCrypt to send things to random people

------
deanclatworthy
> He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii
> residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously.

I found this quite interesting. I wonder how many more of these events are
happening around the world. They could teach how to use truecrypt, how to turn
on two factor authentication for the popular services that use it and what it
is, good password policies, and what https means for browsing the internet
securely.

Edit: I found this: [https://www.cryptoparty.in/](https://www.cryptoparty.in/)

~~~
wfn
Yup, quite a few of them are happening around the world - the overall
'movement' is / can be called the 'cryptoparty movement' (if one could say it
was indeed a 'movement'). We did our own event in our local town
([http://cryptoparty.lt/](http://cryptoparty.lt/)) (well, "i participated in
one" is more like it), and hopefully we'll pick it up and do it again.

There's always this delicate thing of having a balance between being
interesting to local hackers, vs. being understandable by laypeople. We veered
towards the former, and it was great fun, but it would be very beneficial to
try and be more welcoming towards the general crowd, too. It's not always easy
when introducing complex technologies - I try to avoid using leaky metaphors,
but sometimes that's not possible.

------
hkmurakami
Tl;dr not just a party but a crypto party.

What a link bait title :(

------
vdaniuk
So Snowden is basically Marcus Yallow from "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow.
Great book even if it is young adult sci-fi.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Does Marcus end up Putin's lapdog against the West? As good as his disclosures
are, fleeing to a state with much worse human rights records and pretty much a
one-party klepocracy obsessed with annexing territories and controlling its
neighbors isn't how most good stories end.

Why isn't he railing against Russia's SORM-1, SORM-2, and SORM-3? My concern
here is that his disclosures won't change business as usual and will provide
political cover for nations with just as bad, if not worse, human rights
violations because the US's critics can just point to Snowden and deflect the
conversation, which is EXACTLY what's happening now.

~~~
grlhgr420
depending on what you believed he either ended up there as a result of having
his passport revoked en route to ecuador (his story) or that was a ruse and he
intended to stay in russia because it was the only state that could and would
stand up to US pressure to extradite him (assange's claim); neither of these
interpretations lend any credence to the idea that snowden condones the
russian regime's policies. he has openly criticized putin's pre-scripted
response to his question regarding russian state surveillance.

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/vladimi...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/vladimir-
putin-surveillance-us-leaders-snowden/print)

~~~
Create
For one thing, he was _studying_ Russia in Geneva. With British help.

------
iamsalman
There's nothing as absolute privacy on the internet. Even Tor cannot keep you
truly anonymous ([http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/34294/tor-is-
not-a...](http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/34294/tor-is-not-as-safe-
as-you-may-think/))

However, perhaps Snowden's biggest achievement is to bring security to the
forefront of everything and create a wave of new half-baked "security"
products which want to ride the wave.

The notion of security is relative and the weakest link is always us. A small
overlook or an error is all it takes...

~~~
Karunamon
This is very true. But all that needs to happen is a non-trivial amount of
people making the bastards work for it, in order to make the kind of at-scale
mass monitoring the NSA and friends are doing become prohibitively expensive.
And oh yeah, as a bonus, it makes you a less attractive target to your
everyday script kiddie.

That means truecrypt all the drives, https all the websites, pgp all the
emails.

In short, If you have an option between a secure and nonsecure (but slightly
more difficult) way of doing something, always pick the secure one.

~~~
grandalf
Did Snowden, as a user of Tor, benefit from having more nodes in Hawaii at the
time?

~~~
Karunamon
Considering it's a stated goal of the NSA to break Tor, having more "friendly"
nodes in any location would be a benefit for all.

------
mikehi
so it all started at the Box Jelly co-working space :)

~~~
EvanKelly
I just checked through my email to see if I could find the thread on this from
the HiCapacity email list and I couldn't find it. I vaguely remember talk
about a crypto party, but there's nothing in my email from that time frame.

------
ryanmarsh
He was running one of the largest Tor exit nodes at 2Gbps. Meanwhile the NSA
was reading everyone's Facebook posts.

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Except prior to his whistleblowing he was the NSA and helped enable that kind
of data collection. It always seemed odd that defectors suddenly get absolved
of their crimes. If the NSA, as an organization, is guilty of felonies, then
their employees must face time, including Snowden. That's justice right? Or
does the "I was just following orders/paycheck" defense suddenly work as well?

Serious question, if we do round-up the NSA, who gets in trouble and who
doesn't? Just the leaders? Are we also absolving Congress and POTUS? Please
explain.

~~~
jessaustin
Make up your mind bro. Is it bad that he sysadminned for the bastards, or is
it bad that he stopped? It can't be both.

I'm all for voting out current office-holders, but in their defense: the NSA
not only lied to Congress, but spied on Congress so they could see how well
their lies were playing.

