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NSA Has No Clue As To Scope of Snowden's Data Trove
krakman writes "According to a NY Times article, a 6-month internal investigation has not been able to define the actual files that Edward Snowden had copied. There is a suspicion that not all the documents have been leaked to newspapers, and a senior NSA official (Rick Ledgett), who is heading the security agency's task force examining Mr. Snowden's leak, has said on the record that he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those unleaked documents. 'They've spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don't know all of what he took,' a senior administration official said. 'I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.' That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America's most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010."
There is a suspicion that not all the documents have been leaked to newspapers, and a senior NSA official (Rick Ledgett), who is heading the security agency's task force examining Mr. Snowden's leak, has said on the record that he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those unleaked documents.
What Snowden has leaked is stuff that many people suspected but could not prove. A lot of it are things we know that the technology existed for, and an unscrupulous Spy Agency (like the NSA) might be likely to attempt.
But what this new disclosure says to me is that there might be things that go WAY beyond what we have learned or more accurately, confirmed, so far. Things that really do stretch way into the clearly unacceptable in ways that the disclosures thus far pale in comparison.
Why else go public and suggest "amnesty"? Which, I don't think Snowdon would consider at this point, he would certainly risk ending up in a "accident" in a few years, something he is quite at risk from now.
If as "they" say they think he has't given up everything he had to the News Media, we will never see it because it's in Russian hands. Snowden isn't that stupid.
And by the way, I'll bet Julian Assage is feeling pretty jealous right now, what with the spot-light off of Him... Assage is a lime light whore, an ego the size of a blimp, he's got to be pacing back and forth in that small room of his, plotting a "come-back".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Those unleaked documents may be all that's keeping him alive. No sane being would ever give up that insurance policy in his situation.
it's only treason if it doesn't expose treason ;)
aanyhow... maybe they don't know what he took because they wanted to keep the system in such a way that there wouldn't be accountability about who did what and looked at what on the executive level in nsa...(he used some higher ups credentials).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I know its hopeful thinking, but if the NSA was a person, they would know how it feels when you don't know what someone knows about you.
...(he used some higher ups credentials)
It has never been disclosed that he used "higher-ups" logins, only that he (supposedly) user "other people's" logins.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I immigrated to US in 1998 and to honest, and until recently, I was under impression that US was the best county on the entire globe. Period.
Guns, jobs, "Freedom", country had real drive. That is how I saw it for last 30 years.
It me a while to sink in that it shit is going down a drain.
Iraq and Afghanistan wars didn't make me change my opinion.
Economic Meltdown in 2008, and the fact that no one went to jail and CEO's got big ass bonuses, didn't make me change my opinion.
Fucked-up Health Insurance didn't......
Guess what changed my opinion ? NSA.
It's worse than that.
They're afraid that the world will soon learn some inconvenient truths: (a) that Oswald in fact acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, (b) that the crashed object at Roswell was in fact a high-altitude weather balloon, (c) that the Rosenberg's were in fact Soviet spies, (d) that the moon landings in fact happened and were not staged in a Houston hangar, and (e) that every ounce of the gold in Ft. Knox is in fact sitting exactly where it should be.
And then the American public might start asking questions related to ACTUAL government conspiracies.
The horror...
The US mil has had a long history with computer databases going back to the 1960's with the Community On-line Intelligence System effort.
The CIA, FBI and MI5,6 all knew what a motivated cleared individual could do with a "photocopier", "camera" and more trusted clearance level to a paper file system.
Would digital files be that just left to be that easy?
East Germany showed what a levels where needed to protect aspects of running spies or handling covert materials - a split of data making any one "walk out" very limited in what was lost.
We are now to believe 'the' US agency at the centre of US data integrity, protection and world wide data penetration could not rewind its own networks logs?
Snowden was CIA, was passed onto a contractor with his CIA work 'cleaned' at some point by someone and then onto the NSA.
Snowden would have had direct id/code/physical location contact with how many people who could have been allowed to look into files from "that" "site" in the USA?
What are the options? The NSA structure is now (~past 10 years) so 'sharing', 'out sourced', 'cloud based' and privatised that any staff "member" can look down over many projects without 'question' or any useful 'logging'?
That an admin can be so 'skilled' to cover/find/alter all digital tracking logs, using digital methods that none in the NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6/5, GCHQ ever thought about?
With all the Soviet/Russia spy hunts wrt staff, past whistleblowers over ~30 years, the digital file structures where 'outsourced' to such an extent that all security protections are now lost?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A phone call from BHO to Mr. Putin
I've heard of browser helper objects phoning home, but never phoning heads of state.
I wonder if this BHO can make my experience at healthcare.gov any more pleasant?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem the NSA's having is likely the same one most large businesses have when it comes to IT: the management involved has absolutely no clue about what's going on with their computer systems, and they won't believe what the technical people who do know what's going on are telling them because it disagrees with what that management thinks should be going on. End result, the steps that are taken don't fix any of the security problems and the steps that would fix the problems are vetoed. And it'll be "lather, rinse, repeat" until management starts being fired (not allowed to resign, fired for incompetence) and losing their cushy termination benefits packages because they failed to listen.
Part of the value of ubiquitous surveilance is character assassination, and a key part of that vulnerability is in our own oversimplified thinking. Yes, Assange is a limelight whore, but perhaps he's making the best use of that failing. Nelson Mandela was at one time a terrorist expousing violence, could have a quick temper and had a "colourful" personal life. Reagan and Thatcher painted him as a terrorist for years before the saint image became dominant - but BOTH these images are oversimplifications. We MUST work on this "oversimplification" vulnerability in ourselves and those around us even if it seems an impossible task.
Re consider forgiving someone
From the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse to rendition and the junk global telco encryption -
So much is now in history books and can be found by any academic or person -
Think of how the Soviet Union got into any country - the press, academics, students, peace groups, trade unions, banking, trade, mil.... politics
i.e. internal 'news' about trusted names/brands within the USA that where turned by the Soviet Union/Russia or "worked" for the US gov in the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird gives a hint.
Generations of bulk insider trading within very trusted sectors of the private sector via privileged files and tips/front groups.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
NSA has nothing to worry about if it has done nothing wrong.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The U.S. government has demonstrated itself to be completely untrustworthy. The best he could hope for would be to have his lawyers arguing the validity of his amnesty in front of secret courts while he's tortured in a black site somewhere.
He acts only against the US
Strange how revealing the government's criminal activities to the very people it's supposed to be working for is acting against the US. The US is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, and was founded on a distrust of government. How is revealing the fact that the government violated the constitution and the principles the US was founded on acting against the US? I feel that I, as a citizen of the US, have a right to know.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide!
Twinstiq, game news
We have no idea what a random person working for a contractor with access to our top-secret systems managed to steal before he went on the run...
but we have to know your shoe-size, what toilet-paper you use, and what kind of porn turns you on.
A well-prioritised spying agency, there.
I don't mean to suggest that any of the conspiracy theories are accurate, but the BBC did, in fact, report WTC 7's collapse before it happened. They've basically admitted as much:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/03/part_of_the_conspiracy_2.html
See also: https://archive.org/details/bbc200109111654-1736
The BBC erroneously reported the collapse at 4:53 p.m., as acknowledged in the above-linked article. The actual collapse occurred at 5:20 p.m., as confirmed by FEMA: http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf
At the time of the BBC's report, however, WTC 7 had been on fire for some time, and was already in danger of imminent collapse, so I don't find it too hard to believe that they simply made an honest mistake in the midst of all the confusion.
Sharepoint? You got to be joking. Why would the NSA use Sharepoint to store heaps and heaps of data? Surely they are using Access.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's not the capability of the USA here, it's the capability of some clowns that thought it was a good idea to get a Hollywood set designer in to do an operations centre. It's not Tom Clancy calling the shots here - reality is closer to Conrad's "The Secret Agent" where deluded and petty figures are just taking advantage of anything they can.
You are getting them mixed up with the military. They are toy soldiers and a network of Horse Judges that got the job because of who they knew, and a lot of it seems to be pointless busywork designed to justify a flow of money.
However due to the way that information is compartmentalized within the NSA, it is entirely possible that Snowden has more information than a senior NSA official may be aware that the NSA has. There is a wel known security policy that states that information should only be provided to eople on a need to know basis, and it is entirely possible that up to now the senior NSA official may not have had a need to know just how much data the NSA collects. For that matter, it is possible that the official may still not have a need to know, or never have it.
You never know...
May be he's a patriot to the America it claims to be rather than the America it has been shown to be.
If you need to compare him to someone, he's more a PFC Manning than a second Julian Assange. And he learned from Chelsea Manning that trying to hide your identity after the leaks works only for so long, so he decided to flee forward, make his identity open and in the same time got out of the direct reach of the U.S. authorities. There are not much places in the world where you are out of the reach of the U.S. authorities. He never openly decided for Russia, it was the place he got stuck.
Why are foreign adversaries a justification for domestic policy? We outspend the world's militaries, what exactly should we be afraid of?
The American people are not and should not be the legitimate target for the State intelligence apparatus. If you have done something against the interests of the State, it would be a matter for our police. If you have not done something against the interests of the State, if you are merely thinking about doing that, or even taking steps towards doing so, you have not yet in actual fact committed that crime. The choice is fundamentally whether to permit people to commit crime, or to treat everyone as if they were a criminal. We can't guarantee that we can catch criminals after the fact, and it's hardly possible to keep people from committing criminal acts in jail, let alone in the greater society. This suggests that a police state is not a good value proposition: trying to stop people before they commit crimes is flawed, in principle and in practice.
But we are not speaking of common crimes, we are speaking of crimes against the State, and correspondingly the bodies we have endowed with the right to pursue those who have committed such malefactions. The NSA has become not only the foremost intelligence body of the US Military, but as such it is undeniably the most effective intelligence body that the world has ever seen. It is wrong for the police to pursue men who have not committed criminal acts, but it is far more wrong to be treated as an enemy of the State, and investigated as such, without an inarguably just cause, or existential necessity. Not only does this rule out mass surveillence entirely, but it is difficult to describe how few external existential threats these United States face. So far the internal police appear to be adequate to the task of containing whatever terrorist uprising we may be in danger of.
The parent poster is not being facetious. The American People, and our Allies, are being targetted by the Signals Intelligence branch of the United States Government. There are quite excellent reasons this is forbidden, which have nothing in particular to do with our laws, and a plenitude of historical examples which bear this point out. Mass surveillance of the American public is nothing less than enormitous treason.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The US government has done so much more to damage the US than Snowden has that Snowden's actions aren't even worth talking about in that regard.
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