
The lie about Edward Snowden that just won't die - shill
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/16/the-lie-about-edward-snowden-t.html
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higherpurpose
They have no idea what he took and how much, because their internal logging
systems are non-existent (on purpose) - but you shouldn't worry about any NSA
abuses or other loss of data, because they have "strict oversight".

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mudil
The piece in WSJ titled "Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?"
is worth reading
([http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230483130...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932)).

Even though I am sympathetic to Showden for his disclosures of gov't
surveillance of American citizens and others, the scope, complexity, and
execution of operation leaves many questions unanswered.

National security officials (both Republicans and Dems) are quoted in the
piece that they believe that Showden operation was an espionage heist.

From the article:

"On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act
of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further,
suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three
possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage
operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-
Russian operation."

So on one hand we have people like the head of the Senate Intelligence
Committee and Obama officials who are neck deep in intelligence work, and on
the other we have feel-gooders like BoingBoing, who really don't know what's
going on, and who might never ever find out what really happened, because it
could be classified for ages.

~~~
harshreality
This doesn't pass the smell test. Feinstein has a bad track record on these
kinds of issues. Her statements made about whistleblowers do not properly
consider the good along with the bad; her NSA reform bill expanded spying
powers.

 _If_ Snowden stole documents at the behest of either the Russians or Chinese,
he was not the first to do so recently, nor will he be the last.

As I recall, Gen. Alexander or one of the top intel agency officials made a
statement last year dismissing concern that Snowden might have leaked info to
the Russians or Chinese, saying that he would expect those powers already had
other moles.

Cui bono? Who benefits? We don't know what other documents Snowden might have
taken, if he took any, that he didn't hand over to Greenwald and Poitras. From
what's been published, however, it seems very unlikely that the Chinese or
Russians have gained much from the _information_ leaked. That said, it is
_possible_ that it was a very clever Russian, Chinese, or Russian-Chinese
operation designed to egg the U.S. intelligence community and cast U.S.
technological primacy under a cloud. The counterargument is that since all
published information has been filtered by journalists who are not
(presumably) Chinese or Russian agents, such a psychological or propaganda
operation by the Russians or Chinese would have unpredictable and muted
results.

~~~
mudil
What doesn't pass the smell test is how a single individual like Snowden was
able to hack so many passwords, load so much stuff, contact Greenwald,
transfer the stuff out, successfully evade and eventually escape.

To me it smells like a sophisticated op, organized by an intelligence agency.

~~~
harshreality
It's been publicly stated that Snowden got fellow sysadmins to give him their
passwords. Is your theory that they're all Chinese or Russian agents, too? Or
that this is a face-saving false claim by the NSA?

He was in Hong Kong by the time the NSA knew something was wrong. There was no
evasion necessary.

Contacting Greenwald would have ordinarily been detected? Wouldn't that imply
that NSA contractors' personal communications are monitored? Source? It's not
like he contacted journalists directly. He was using lavabit or something like
it, so positively identifying a metadata link between Snowden and Greenwald
would have required the NSA to hack or NSL whatever email service he was
using. If there's automated metadata linkage from traffic analysis, they might
have had a weak correlation between Snowden's web traffic to e.g. lavabit and
an outgoing email from lavabit to Greenwald. I'm sure that's something the NSA
will be looking at in the future, because it's right up their alley and
something they probably could have done better.

You're presuming the NSA has far better internal computer security measures
than anyone else does (insider espionage is a pervasive problem in every
industry). I don't see any reason to think that it did. There's a trade-off:
the better the security, the harder it is to get anything done and the higher
that drives computer and network admin costs. Much of the security in
classified operations is gained through issuing clearances and relying on
social cohesion ("I'm cool; I've got a clearance and work for the NSA, and my
friends are here; violating classification rules would get me kicked out.")
and punishment ("Violating classification rules could mean prison."). Then
there's physical security: keeping those without proper clearance away from
data they are not allowed to access. The rest is fuzzy. A classified
system/network has some monitoring and auditing, but it's not a magic bullet
particularly against savvy sysadmins. Audit records are an information glut.
You have to have some idea of you're looking for in order to find it.

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dan_bk
I don't think this issue really is a big one.

I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have
accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". It seems like Snowden's work
has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance.

I really hope I'm wrong.

~~~
onnoonno
I wonder whether this could be a manufactured opinion to an extent?

I mean, we now know that online forums are subverted and socially engineered
to keep 'bad opinions' down.

Add to that the still persisting mass media with known effects - and I slowly
start to think of the internet as being very much part of the 'mass media',
too.

For example, I noticed a lot of articles in newspapers being written by
journalists that have agendas that diverge completely from the opinions of the
people commenting on an article. The next step, I'd guess, is to 'properly'
police these comments....

~~~
ZenPro
That is not necessarily a bad thing.

 _Free-market-oriented economists since Milton Friedman have strongly
criticized the efficiency of democracy. They base this on the argument that
voters are irrational, among other things. Their criticism towards democracy
is that voters are highly uninformed about many political issues, especially
relating to economics, and have a strong bias about the few issues on which
they are fairly knowledgeable._

No more is this point evidenced than on news forums regarding current events.
There is every possibility that the journalists diverge from the masses
because the masses are incorrect.

If I had a $ for every forum commenter that talked about the _oil in
Afghanistan_ I would be richer than Peter Thiel.

Have a read of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy)
and just consider whether in _some_ circumstances the consensus opinion may be
the wrong one.

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whoopdedo
The two questions that must be asked about this are:

Are all documents created equal? Is one document a multi-page report
containing detailed information, or is it a brief memorandum about something
trivial? How much of these documents is boilerplate such as daily summaries
that will repeat the same information as long as it's relevant? If I grab
someone's mbox is that one document, or a collection of emails that each count
as one document?

Of course none of that matters if there the number is entirely fictional. But
there is still the second question, does it matter how many documents were
leaked? Would your opinion of Snowden change if the number were different? If
you defend him, is there an upper limit after which revealing the information
is no longer justified? If you think he's a traitor, is there a small enough
number that you would not object to?

I don't think it matters. The writers probably don't think so either and are
thus using it not to add information to their articles but because sounds
better. A person learning about this for the first time will see "1.7 million"
and think either "Wow, that's a lot!" or "This reporter did a good job." A
person writing "Snowden is reported to have stolen an unknown number of
documents," will raise the question of who it is unknown to. The reader may
think the reporter didn't do enough research. Or doubt the NSA's account of
what happened. Adding an irrelevant statistic makes the article more
believable. And the more specific the statistic the better. Would the effect
be the same if it were "2 million", or the more cautious "over 1 million"?

I bet media analysts have studied click rates and know just what kind of
meaningless statistics can be added to an article to increase readership. This
is what happens when success in journalism is measured by page views.

~~~
DonHopkins

      %!
      % Top Secret Stolen NSA Documents
      1800000 { 100 500 moveto (TOP SECRET) show showpage } repeat

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staunch
You can't infer anything about his motives from the number of files he took.
It's just good sysadmin instinct to backup everything, encrypt it, and then
sort it out later. Disk space is cheap and it's better to have too much than
be missing something important.

It also often takes _less effort_ to take _more data_ simply because it
requires no additional thinking or typing to exclude things.

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peterkelly
s/stole/exposed to the public what they have a right to know in a democratic
society/g

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csandreasen
I don't think this would have been nearly as much of an issue if the reporters
had been up front about how much had been given to them. Pick a metric -
documents/files/pages/slides/whatever, and stick to it. As it played out, it
went from Snowden saying "I carefully evaluated every single document I
disclosed" in his interview last June, to Greenwald saying the total count was
9-10k in July, then 15-20k in August, then the NY Times saying that the
Guardian gave them 50k Snowden docs in September [1].

I'm curious why they won't give a definitive number - I'm assuming that
they're trying to avoid accusations that he just scraped as much as he could
and took it out of the country without properly evaluating the documents.

[1] [http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-
inc...](http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-incredibly-
mutating-document-trove/)

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brianbreslin
slightly off-topic. how do you think snowden will be remembered in 10 years?

~~~
Theodores
Yes, however, I sadly suspect he will be remembered as being a bit like this
guy:

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

Rather than being up there with this guy:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr).

~~~
RodericDay
I think he'll be remembered like this guy

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

And also I'd be wary of setting MLK as a golden standard- I'd say his image is
very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have
opposed (ie: all the kids who are obliquely taught that he "fixed" racism)

~~~
Theodores
Ellsberg is far from a household name, particularly outside the USA. 'That guy
who did the Pentagon Papers' carries no resonance at all, people don't even
know what the Pentagon Papers were (outside the USA).

Most British whistleblowers wrong-footed themselves with 9/11 or decided they
were Jesus, they didn't need the media to make fools of them. I don't think
that what's his name again? will make this mistake. However, there is a 'now
what?' aspect to the story, there is no uprising from the masses, marches on
Washington or anything troubling for the authorities.

In some ways Snowden has helped formalise the spying arrangements, it is now
just a fact of life like having CCTV everywhere. The social contract has just
been clarified.

Also, Snowden did one act, albeit a lot of planning and hard work went into
it. He is not recognised as a writer or a public speaker (yet). His
babysitting arrangements mean he cannot flourish that way to easily.

~~~
DonHopkins
Jesus's image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself
would have opposed, too.

~~~
hegotapoint
Ooo, I'm interested. Please elaborate?

~~~
DonHopkins
He wasn't white. And he wasn't the son of God. And he didn't hate all the
people who modern mainstream Christians hate.

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pbreit
With that headline I was expecting the author to put forth a number or at
least assert that it couldn't be 1.7 million.

~~~
kevingadd
The whole point of the article is that there's no credible number because the
government has no way to know what was stolen.

~~~
lazylizard
a little bit curious. i'd think that is a correct assumption to be working
with -> he accessed N documents, assume they're all compromised.

