Man, if you work in defense, pretend you didn't even see that URL.
Back in the day, three gigs ago - when this stuff was full on the boil - bunch of people got insta-fired for just clicking on news stories about Snowden. It was insane how fast it happened. Click -> Bathroom -> boxes+guards+parkinglot. I mean, granted, leadership does[1] precious little other than looking for new ways to get rid of as many heads as possible, but it was still impressive.
[1] Not counting the "Instant VPs" hired on from procurement offices, which is where virtually all new business comes from. Seriously, guys, just can the entire BD division and let the double dippers sell corner offices to their old pals.
Yeah it’s a good point, government “no comment policy” still exists, even if it’s in open source if it never got declassified congratulations, you have to pretend you can’t see it
I'm not sure leadership believed anyone was all that valuable. The general impression was (and still is, sadly) that we were all worth more fired as cost savings than we were employed[1]. The only thing keeping them from doing your kind of shenanigan was probably the hit to NIST / FEDRAMP / whatever else that can get you blacklisted as a supplier.
I remember one single exception. One of the regular rotating layoffs took out this one engineer who had extremely niche knowledge when it came to microphones. Like, there's four other people on the planet who do the math this guy does. But he's on the list, so there he goes. Pink slip, boxes, guards, parking lot . . and then they call him back in before he even gets everything packed. Someone must have run upstairs to yell at someone important - I mean, this guy wasn't just "make new things" sort of skill, but also "keep everything else working" sort of skill, peppered with "the FAA will get extremely angry if we don't have this sort of thing" skills. Luckily, he was a canny old gent, and replied on the spot: "Sure. I'll come back in. But it's gonna cost ya." Rumor was he managed to double his wages, and get a stock thing to boot. That still brings a smile to my face, many years later.
[1]The monkey wrench is that Cost Plus pays for hours, so they're gonna try and get those hours cheap as they can. This is one of the reasons they haaaaaaaated hourly headcounts - see, you pressure your salaried people to stay 50-60 hours, but you keep billing the DoD for hours, and it's like free money. Hourly, that doesn't work so well. They converted literally everyone to salaried as soon as they possibly could.
It's well past time for the entire Snowden document collection to be released. But that won't ever happen due to all the agreements each person or institution made with various governments who want to keep very embarrassing info on their illegal spying operations away from the public.
It won't happen because the Snowden archives are the goose that keeps laying golden eggs for the media. Remember that journalism is first and foremost a business.
I really hoped the entire collection of documents would have been disseminated by now.
Surely it's been long enough that anything in them that might compromise the security of undercover people or irrelevant personal information or whatever could have been redacted.
The feds are extremely unwilling to declassify documents that have been leaked. They usually continue to deny details or the entire existence of them even decades after it’s “public knowledge”
Looking back it shines an interesting light on the motivations. Everything was filtered using a very specific politically motivated lens and lacked a lot of important context.
You could steal all the emails of any HN user and cherry pick a few dozen to make them look like a monster, where I believe on the whole most users of this site are good people.
Definitely not. The US military plays the long game and works very hard to conceal its exact capabilities. That's how you win wars, be more persistent, more capable, and surprise your enemies with your capabilities.
There are undercover intelligence assets that have been undercover for 10-20 years.
For those who fall into the camp that have never taken a security clearance before but have worked on more interesting tech ... why is this all so sensitive? Are we to ignore these capabilities as if they do not exist or what? Is there a handbook for stuff you read you probably shouldn't know about or are we ready to accept the fact everything is hacked or can be hacked? Personally as an independent small timer with no cool or a secret accomplishment to date ....... assumed breach is my day to day reality.
Really? Do we have names and evidence or just feelings on this? From the outside looking in ... any institution feels dirty for the fact institutions sacrifice the individuals in favor of the institute. But is this criminal or systemic? Does the system define the crime or is there an individual to convict?
Good point, this is probably the gist of it. I imagine this particular case went something like this...
We have stuff that can't go offsite what do we do? Burn it. Why? Because that's what we always have done. Why? Because it is cheap, fast and it works anywhere. Ok, lets just burn it. Good burn it. Ok here is the burn pile dump secret trash in. We don't have a list of dangerous stuff to burn just a bunch of stuff with no other costly or timely plan to dispose of and everyone has 100 other important things to do like process stuff that is still useful and not being burned. Just burn it and save the country with a more important task on the 100 point todo list. Ok done, and had time to save the country left. Oops we burned carcinogens. Who? No idea ... something in the pile. Will we ever know? No way to know but xyz is highly classified so no can do.
Somewhere somehow the risk of material leaving site exceeded the risk of burning carcinogens. We can't ever let anyone know what we burned. That's why we burned it. The institutions rights again exceed the humans rights. Why? Because institutes are few controlling many. Why? Because humans are mostly automatic and predictable. Why? Because we programmed them to be. Why? Because we are lazy and useless without successful programming and hedonism rules the land otherwise. What's wrong with hedonism? We get complacent and die faster to the trillions of dangers we have successfully mitigated with our institutions. Ok burn it. Got it.
Yawn. He could've leaked the entire thing at once way back in '13 if he really was serious about it. Ten year old documents about programs at least 15 years old are all but worthless now. There was a time to do something about it and he never exploited it.
IIRC, he gave it all to the press and gave them the burden of going over them and releasing them as they saw fit. He was concerned about sensitive material getting out that would harm other US interests / people on the ground, etc. Most outlets didn't want it, but the Guardian picked them up and reported it.
Assange was the one that just dumped documents, and look what happened to him.
This could be a problem. I know companies that will block entire sites if they're hosting material like that, especially in the government contracting sphere.
Was going to suggest Cryptome - but it was apparently closed this August in protest of the unfair case against Assange (Young tried to argue for being tried as a co-defendant, having published unredacted documents prior to WikiLeaks):
I am confused by this. The guy who runs Cryptome (which is arguably a thorn in the side of the US intelligence services and US government) is telling the US government that if they don't charge him with a crime (which if convicted could probably lead to the website being shutdown.), he's going to shut down that website that exposes US intelligence secrets.
Um. I just don't know what to say about this. I'm so confused by this logic. I'm sure the people in the US Intelligence services are going to be crying themselves to sleep because Cryptome closes. I bet they'll be begging US prosecutors to charge him with a crime just to keep Cryptome open. I just don't get the logic behind this. Someone please explain it to me.
Although as other people have pointed out, the site might actually still be up… tho I think there’s a trend that is real, to do with the personality of people who get into this kind of “work”.
I think one reason is… a lot of “personalities” in the leaker movement seem to have a pathological martyr-like demeanor (often amplified for good effect with a diva-like character too), which leads them to making these irrational own-goal “strategic win” protest moves, which might really just be them hitting the big red self-destruct buttons on their chest.
Almost like it’s daddy issues writ large, and they want to do anything provocative just to get attention. Which kind of leads them to seemingly gauge their success by the question: “how much have I been oppressed today?”
I think Snowden is remarkable for having avoided this common pitfall, leading to him having a longer shelf life.
I don’t know that much about this it’s just a theory.
The latest document that Cryptome is hosting on their homepage is "Douglas Valentine Sues CIA for PHOENIX Documents" dated October 14, 2023. I don't see any indication to them remaining closed, though I could be mistaken. Do you have any references you could cite?
Edit: I see a letter to American judge Hilton on Cryptome where Young states that he will be closing after 27 years until Assange is granted freedom, though the site remains alive and appears there is ongoing publishing, so I'm still unclear of the current status and any references regarding the status would be welcome.
No particular reason. I was watching the Snowden film for the first time, and at the same time fixing some bugs in secure document viewer code that required me to test it on large zip files (ideally containing PDFs). I just happened across this repo from a DDG search.
I would recommend Citizenfour if you haven't seen it. It's a documentary where you essentially see Snowden leak the documents from his Hong Kong hotel room. It's amazing the footage exists.
My theory is that trolls/bots work together to get this content to the front page and keep it there. If you pay attention you'll notice Snowden, CIA, FBI, NSA, or adjacent topics on the front page daily with a corresponding political flame war.
It's easy to be tempted by such theories—they're almost mesmeric—but the data doesn't support them. For example in this case the early upvoters (I just checked) are mostly accounts around 10 years old, which have posted and upvoted as ordinary HN users since forever. Of course that doesn't prove they aren't trolls/bots, but it's a strong counterindicator, unless you believe they've been building up a track record of posting about functional programming languages or whatever for nefarious purposes.
The upvote data isn't public, of course, but you can do much the same analysis by looking at the posting history of submitters and commenters. That is public, and what I can tell you is that on topics like this, the private data and the public data nearly always point in much the same direction.
(That's not true in every context—for example, voting rings are a thing in terms of people wanting to promote their startups and whatnot, and we've put a ton of work into combating that over the years. But none of that analysis yields anything significant when it comes to a topic like the OP.)
I love this reply and all the perspective it provides on what can be gleaned and what is the baseline state of affairs.
But I'm a little sad that I had to know the extra special secret click spot (on the link showing the age of the flagged item, which item was folded away and fully hidden other than the grayed metadata/title) to even see it (it==your reply) at all. Well I'm not sad for me, because I did know how to click there, expand the post, and read your reply, but it's a pity that your reply won't be seen by more people.
I do understand however that maybe you've chosen the right tradeoff here of giving the targeted info to the poster who probably was sincere and can benefit, versus showing it more widely which would be a frequent enough occurrence that it might become a distracting portion of the site content. So, I defer to your judgement; just sharing thoughts here. Thanks for what you do.
I love a good HN conspiracy theory. The best was when someone accused me of being the agent of a foreign adversary intent on sowing discord for using the word "boomer".
HN is clearly the vitally exposed artery of all Western media!
Back in the day, three gigs ago - when this stuff was full on the boil - bunch of people got insta-fired for just clicking on news stories about Snowden. It was insane how fast it happened. Click -> Bathroom -> boxes+guards+parkinglot. I mean, granted, leadership does[1] precious little other than looking for new ways to get rid of as many heads as possible, but it was still impressive.
[1] Not counting the "Instant VPs" hired on from procurement offices, which is where virtually all new business comes from. Seriously, guys, just can the entire BD division and let the double dippers sell corner offices to their old pals.