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Info Leak Wars To Get Messier
jfruh writes "As we discussed this weekend, David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, was detained while transporting encrypted data on the Snowden affair from Berlin; all his electronics were seized. Over at the Guardian offices, British police destroyed more of the newspaper's hard drives. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan sees where this one is going: reporters like Greenwald are going to stop even bothering to be circumspect with their revelations. Sorting through the contents of such infocaches to redact sensitive information just gives the government time to track you down. Eventually, the information will just be dumped online, warts and all, as soon as someone who wants the information public gets ahold of it."
'Nuff said.
Do it and do it now. The news doesn't need censorship.
And? If the government has nothing to hide, as they've repeatedly claimed, then what's the problem?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
They must not understand the concept of a digital backup copy. You can take digital files of even gigantic sizes and copy them within minutes. They'd need to destroy every single copy at the same time before someone made another copy. No intimidation tactic is going to work at this point. There are copies around the world of what Snowden took with him.
You take all of the files and dump them on ThePirateBay, Wikileaks, or wherever, and the government can't stop it. No amount of threats or harassment can prevent people from getting the information once it is out in the open. It would be like trying to return used paint to the bucket or gluing together a smashed window pane. A useless exercise.
The government lost the information war. They are going to need to refocus on something else to win. Martial law. Election stealing. Murdering people. Extortion. At that point you're no longer looking at democracy and civilization but totalitarianism and military rule. We already lock up every marijuana user. Why not start locking up "terror violators" or some other nonsense 'crime'?
This is the breaking point. Will people vote in politicians who will stop the wars (terror, drugs, guns, privacy)? Or are we going to get another Bush/Obama clone?
The British police did not destroy the newspaper's hard drives. They just watched and took notes and photos while the paper's people destroyed the hard drives. This in no way justifies the actions of the British government, which are completely reprehensible.
I agree with Dan Tynan. Future leaks will be dumped without regard for how much they might hurt individuals or groups only peripherally involved. In a surveillance culture, that may be the only way whistleblowers can continue to do what is right.
What is the point of that distinction? Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
Geebus, the factual errors on these summaries are becoming eye-watering!
The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
I consider it a brave act of defiance on the part of the Guardian, good for them. It won't affect the fact that there's probably stashed copies of this stuff everywhere but the British Authorities wanted the actual hardware, so rather than give it to them they used an angle grinder themselves.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Au contraire, my dear Watson. Providing raw material is exactly the service news providers should be doing in the first place. Let other reporters and bloggers sift through this publicly available raw data to point out interesting stuff. There's no reason reporters should be entitled to exclusive access to raw material, and the rest of the world would have to accept what reporters say without a way of controlling that.
That was exactly the problem with Wikileak's initial redacted release of Cablegate. It was only after they've released the whole data unredacted that real reporting could begin (and can still take place).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Put it out there, let some people get outed and killed, they are collaborator scum anyway. Sure it sounds harsh and it is, but until the security apparatus suffers some major political damage and loses some people they think of as friends they will never appreciate the harm all there secrets are doing. They have proven this over and over again.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Considering this news...
Miranda's property was seized not destroyed. And he wants it back.
But even Groklaw has shut down due to the mere fact it is impossible to communicate in private, and Groklaw never did a single illegal thing as far as I can tell.
We think that making multiple copies cached around the world will keep the information public, but that is probably not correct. Look at the "practice run" the authorities are carrying out with Child Porn and a training exercise of how to combat access to any information, even when you don't control where that information is stored.
Having Snowden's windfall on a million drives all decrypted and open for all to see wouldn't help, because anyone accessing it at any time from any computer on the net could and would be instantly tracked, and forced to have a computer bashing party in their own basement.
We are on the tipping point of losing ALL freedoms. Anyone who sees this as anything but the beginning of end of freedom is an utter fool. The frog in the water and the heat is on.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Could be that's what they really want. Escalation, more power, more budget, more relevance at least in their own eyes. Why else would they target reporters and their partners?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Ever read David Brin's "Earth?"
That happens, but getting there is ugly.
Imagine the vault of secrets burst open. Every dirty deal, every evil plot, every political murder and wicked deed done in the name of power and wealth.
Now imagine the lengths to which the perpetrators of those deeds would go to hold on to the kind of wealth and power that rests atop the United States.
If your blood didn't just freeze, you have no imagination.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The above, of course, is the kind of rabid response that the over-reaching actions of the government and it's agents are causing.
These morons are creating the next generation of terrorists with their stupidity.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The solution here will not be solved with technology. The parlor tricks were fun when the law was unclear; but now that the law is clearly compromised, real action, in the real world, must be taken.
The people have been patient with the courts, with the law in general, as it has sorted through the general maze that is technology, and its effects on society. They need not be patient in areas where the law has already been clearly stated, for over two hundred years, in plain text, and in a copy that many people, even outside this country, own, and can easily reference. "Congress shall make no law..." and here we are, with secret courts, unable to face our accusers, dealing with gerrymandered accusations, and proof positive that the highest laws themselves have been violated. What more, one of our Founding Fathers did say, supposedly, "I prefer a hundred guilty men go free, than one innocent man be imprisoned."
So, what happened to that America? I signed up for that America, not this one. Did someone mislead me? Was I lied to? Was there a bait and switch in the womb of my mother? Having been born in this country, with full citizenship, rights and privileges, why have I been denied, since my birth, these plainly written guarantees? I've been taxed, I know this much...who represents me? What are their names? How have they voted in the last six months, so that I know they are truly representing me, and my closely-held values, as well as this country's written values, in our national capital?
I am John Hurt.
Spider Jerusalem
It seems to be the same method used in Australia over a book called Axis of Deceit.
..."also had their hard drives cleansed around early September 2004, several months after the amended book had gone on sale."
Destroy the drive in front of the gov 'now' or the gov will take the drive.
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22library%2Fprspub%2FN16J6%22
".... office to cleanse the offending material from our computers. They transferred the data to a hard disk then gave us the option of having it taken away or destroyed in front of us. We chose the second option, then watched them do it with a special little disk-breaking hammer. They graciously followed up this service with a customer satisfaction form.12"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The British police did not destroy the newspaper's hard drives. They just watched and took notes and photos while the paper's people destroyed the hard drives.
What is the point of that distinction? Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
It reminds me of a bully using a weaker child's hand to hit that child: "You're hitting yourself. Why do you keep hitting yourself?"
The bully could punch the child directly (and likely cause more physical pain), but chooses to get the child to hit itself, because it isn't just about control, it is about humiliation and control, in order to try to stamp out any chance of resistance.
The paper's people were forced to destroy their own equipment for the same reasons, and it distresses me no end that UK government officials are using schoolyard bullying tactics in this situation.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
That's quite an allegation. Do we have any reason to believe that Miranda was transporting anything of the kind?
What scares me more is that even if all that came out into the open, there's a better than good chance that the American public will ignore it and just keep on keeping on. The actions of some of our leaders and (corporate and political) have become so brazen, that in any other country or maybe even any other era of American history, heads would be rolling (and in France, literally). Instead, the public has been giving the "meh" heard round the world. :(
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Or to put it another way, if he wasn't a journalist then wtf did they detain him for 9 hours for?
There would be no point unless he was acting in the capacity as a journalist.
Lets see, his partner Mr. Greenwald (the one actually reporting on Snowden) thinks :-
Intimidating the 'enemy' seems to be the point.
Yea, but once it all comes out, and we read it ... we realize there isn't anything amazing or unknown in it, and the whole big deal was actually nothing new.
Interesting whitewash.
The details in the released cables was one of the triggers that sparked the Tunisian revolution. Maybe not new or important to you, but I imagine the Tunisians would beg to differ.
But what if Messier objects?
Pj got dragged through the mud and personally attacked just covering a minor intellectual property skirmish. Reporting the mundane briefs and filings of copyright proceedings.
Sure it was big news here, but in mainstream msm media it was a mousefart.
After that, in a real showdown with the actual government on one side, would you stick around? I wouldn't.