Slashdot Mirror
Could Snowden Have Been Stopped In 2009?
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The NYT reports that when Edward Snowden was working as a CIA technician in Geneva in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion that Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access. But the red flags went unheeded and Snowden left the CIA to become a contractor for the NSA so that four years later he could leak thousands of classified documents. In hindsight, officials say, the report by Snowden's supervisor and the agency's suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the NSA under much greater scrutiny. Had Booz Allen or the NSA seen Snowden's CIA file before hiring him, it almost certainly would have affected his employment says Dashiell Bennett. 'The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn't passed on,' says a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Snowden's activities. It's difficult to tell what would have happened had NSA supervisors been made aware of the warning the CIA issued Snowden in what is called a 'derog' in federal personnel policy parlance."
This is a classic case of "who watches the watchmen" or Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Apparently, no one. It seems that anyone with top secret at the NSA can do whatever they please with no oversight or discipline. It must be a fun place to work where you can spend you days creeping on your ex-girlfriends, elected officials, and corporate CEOs. Unchecked power is a very bad thing as we move farther and father from the principle of "habeas corpus" and into the land of "it's top secret and no you can't see the evidence, trust us, were a bunch of good, trustworthy folks."
And if you haven't seen "Flying Robots", go watch it now. The NSA will want these toys overhead next, if they aren't already there.
Fixed link: OT but informative: Timeline of Edward Snowden's revelations
I worked for a Federal Government Contractor. I administered a number of servers--the one with financial information and one with Classified information. I found another employee trying to break into my servers on a few occasions and reported this security breach to management. The CIO said "Good catch" but did nothing to the employee. (Well the CIO did give a promotion to the offending employee.) As a manager, this person set up a rogue server between Security Audits and continued his attempts to break into my servers on a regular basis. I continued to tell management and added notifications to Cyber-Security. Nothing was ever done about these attempted breaches.
Federal Government Contractors do not report problems to the Federal Department if they can help it. The Feds will investigate and that means a huge disruption of operations, productivity and costs the contractor a lot of money. So, problem people are left unreported, unchallenged, and on-the-payroll. It sucks to work for a Federal Government Contractor when you/your job are experiencing internal threats but it is Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
Snowden is a hero. It's a damn good thing he wasn't stopped. Else, the American people would have had no chance to stop the fascism that is enacting a slow-mo coup d'etat of our democracy. Time will tell if we can do anything about it now anyway, but at least we have the knowledge if not yet the means.
We will know victory when the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world and those on Capitol Hill and K Street who enable them are swinging from the trees that line the National Mall.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Let me recast this: Sometime in 2009, Edward Snowdon, having been a faithful and perhaps unquestioning CIA employee for some time, began to have pangs of conscience and take some preliminary steps toward what he ended up later doing: revealing what was going on at the highest and most secretive levels of government. His "superior" noticed this and recorded it in Snowdon's her personnel file.
Why does this article – which is cited, of all places, on Slashdot – try so clearly to change the event by relabeling Snowdon a criminal instead of a whistleblower beginning to come to his senses? Answer: to serve the established powers. To rewrite the narrative.
This makes me want to barf because I know so many people will buy into it and, apparently, some of those people are right here on Slashdot. In fact, such a twisting of the narrative has really already succeeded, having been played over and over in the newspapers and on the network news that everybody sets their sights by.
The American public, and also the rest of the world, need more whistle-blowers to leak illegal activity and overreach by self-serving secret agencies, that refuse to allow themselves to be subjected to proper and transparent oversight.
No law abiding person has any issues with spying on suspected individuals and organisations with just cause and court order. But most people do not want a dictatoral police-state based wholesale surveillance on everyone, as we have now.
How is what the NSA is doing in the USA now any different than what the former East German secret police use to do, with their secret files kept on ever individual, so that they can use any individual's past as a weapon, in case they get out of line?
Nor do we want to see security, such as encryption, weakened, if it makes the public more vulnerable to attack by bad/evil organisations in general, or makes it harder for honest and lawful people to cooperate for the benefit of society, even if it means letting a few bad people get away. Proper security requires risk-benefit analysis for the whole of society, not just selected groups.
The real way to have stopped Snowden would be for the government to not be a privacy-destroying, dossier-collecting, network-infiltrating, security-inhibiting organization that spies on its own people.
Then Snowden wouldn't have had a reason to leak.
Who says they're false positives?
As many people have pointed out, the difference between Snowden and everyone who came before him is that Snowden had the decency to send the information to the US people, as opposed to some other government. But apparently he's the traitor.
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I find it interesting that his efforts go back this far and span another agency. He was aware of things back at the CIA that even then disgusted him so much he was already trying to do what he ultimately accomplished. Most people that upset would have simply quit and walked away from the whole thing, or turned a blind eye. Instead, he dug in deeper and moved to an even more secret agency - it's safe to say he had intent. That took a lot of backbone. Snowden is like a one person spy agency, only working for the people instead of against. This guy manages to earn more respect from me on a weekly basis it seems.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I've seen a few examples of this in my past careers. When a boss starts screwing over the company, his employees typically respond in one of several ways: Some try to get their own piece of the action. Some just say 'Screw it' and let their productivity go to hell. Some quit. And some push back and figure that they'll 'get' something on the SOB. Its possible that Snowden fell into the latter category. He either left on his own, figuring the battle wasn't worth fighting. Or he was pushed out in a manner designed not to trigger any further investigations that could blow back in the boss' face. So he takes his clearance and goes to work as a contractor for the NSA. And he sees that the problems are so widespread, they cross organizational boundaries. In the final analysis, it appears he was proved correct.
The CIA/NSA/FBI and other TLAs appear to have such lax ethics, it would not surprise me at all if quite a few employees in these organizations are choosing the first option: Might as well jump in and grab a piece of the action.
Have gnu, will travel.