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CBS 60 Minutes: NSA Speaks Out On Snowden, Spying
An anonymous reader writes "This week CBS New's 60 Minutes program had a broadcast segment devoted to the NSA, and additional online features. It revealed that the first secret Snowden stole was the test and answers for a technical examination to get a job at NSA. When working at home, Snowden covered his head and screen with a hood so that his girlfriend couldn't see what he was doing. NSA considered the possibility that Snowden left malicious software behind and removed every computer and cable that Snowden had access to from its classified network, costing tens of millions of dollars. Snowden took approximately 1.7 million classified documents. Snowden never approached any of multiple Inspectors General, supervisors, or Congressional oversight committee members about his concerns. Snowden's activity caught the notice of other System Administrators. There were also other interesting details, such as the NSA has a highly competitive intern program for High School students that are given a Top Secret clearance and a chance to break codes that have resisted the efforts of NSA's analysts — some succeed. The NSA is only targeting the communications, as opposed to metadata, of less than 60 Americans. Targeting the actual communications of Americans, rather than metadata, requires a probable cause finding and a specific court order. NSA analysts working with metadata don't have access to the name, and can't listen to the call. The NSA's work is driven by requests for information by other parts of the government, and there are about 31,000 requests. Snowden apparently managed to steal a copy of that document, the 'crown jewels' of the intelligence world. With that information, foreign nations would know what the US does and doesn't know, and how to exploit it."
We know who your friends are we know where your children go to school, keep quiet and it will all be aright......
So it sounds like it will be pro-NSA spin-doctoring from our crony-corporatist media.
The character assassination of Snowden begins.
>Snowden never approached any of multiple Inspectors General, supervisors, or Congressional oversight committee members about his concerns.
Good idea too. Everyone else who did (that we know of) was fired and investigated. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake
>The NSA is only targeting the communications, as opposed to metadata, of less than 60 Americans. Targeting the actual communications of Americans, rather than metadata, requires a probable cause finding and a specific court order.
We don't believe you, and quit targeting my metadata without a warrant.
Who in their right mind would believe anything the NSA says? They have lied to everyone about everything.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Could this be more biased in favour of the NSA? I don't think so. It reads as pure propaganda.
The fact is - the NSA, and the US government, has consistently been lying to the American people. Consistently. The Guardian publishes one thing, the US responds, and then the Guardian publishes another clearly indicating how the US government lied. Time and time again. How many times do we have to go over this?
Excuse me while I go take care of my sudden onset nausea...
Does this just seem like the heaviest kind of propaganda on how bad snowden is. the whole thing is just emphasizing how 'horrible' he is and making no mention of how unacceptable Almost all NSA actions are. Its when I post to these articles that I wonder how much slashdot articles get red flagged.
Other than lies, lies and more damn lies, what else can NSA come up with ?
No matter how slick or how polished their lies be, NSA's lies are still LIES.
NSA has betrayed America.
NSA has betrayed the Constitution.
NSA is a rogue organization within the government of the United States of America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Not having access to 60-minutes in the UK, it would seem the main thrust of the NSA's argument is that the system has checks and balances for exactly this sort of situation, and that Snowden should have notified the right people about his findings rather than go public. What it doesn't seem to mention is that these very same people should already have known about this - everyone whose responsibility it was to either refrain from these actions or say "No" when someone else asked if they were allowed had already said "Yes" so I think removing the system's responsibility for self-regulation by public release in that context is exactly the right thing to do.
By trying to paint Snowden's actions as irresponsible by failing to follow the preapproved script for this sort of violation, they are also trying to cover the arses of the self-regulators by claiming ignorance of the matter on their behalf. It's simultaneously a smear-attack on Snowden and an attempt to save the faces of the people he's made like utter f***wits. The logic-fail in this case is that they can't cover up what we already know from their own documents happened, so the ignorance play only makes the self-regulation argument even weaker as, prior to Snowden's releases, it had already comprehensively failed to protect those in it's charge over a long period of time.
So an organization whose existence is predicated on lying, and whose employees, from the top of the food chain to the bottom of the food chain, have done nothing but lie to their country, from the top of the food chain to the bottom of the food chain, goes on a national TV show and says stuff that we are supposed to believe?
Either the NSA is staffed by utter morons, or they think we are the utter morons. There is a huge believability deficit in that agency, and an enormous cognitive disconnect among its leaders. It's yet another federal agency that needs a large funding reduction, and whose leaders need many years of therapy.
It always cracks me up when whsiteblowers are criticized for not contacting their superiors with the information first--as if it's not THOSE VERY SAME SUPERIORS who aren't the ones PERPETUATING THE WRONGDOING IN THE FIRST PLACE.
"Sir I think this Adolph Hitler may be nuts!"
"Well, then you must report this concern to Herr Hitler immediately!"
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Nothing that has been revealed so far shows any wrongdoing. Hell, half the civil libertarians probably wanted to find something to impeach Obama with, that is there whole interest in this.
Having a computer store metadata that you don't try to hide from private companiees just isn't that big of a deal. And it sure doesn't warrant one story a day from Slashdot...
Have you considered that maybe they need to store data that's not your e-mails and phone calls? I mean, their focus is primarily foreign surveillance.
"Joslyn: So the idea here is we’re looking at a sequence of numbers, and we want to determine whether they’re random or not random.
John Miller: How are you approaching that? Can you show me?
Joe: We are looking at this data here and it is a bunch of random numbers on the screen.
John Miller: That looks a tad overwhelming.
Joe: It is."
They are trying to determine if the numbers are random by looking at them on the screen? If this was how they were doing cryptoanalysis at the NSA, we could all sleep better. Of course, as noted above, there's no reason to believe any information provided in an obvious propaganda piece like this one.
In the balance of power/abuses, I'd still consider the NSA more appropriate than say... the Chinese/Russian equivalent ...
Just look at the modus operandi of the apologists ...
They are actually TRYING VERY HARD to compare an apple to an orange !
RUSSIA and CHINA are NOT democratic countries.
THEIR GOVERNMENTS are RUTHLESS and VERY AUTOCRATIC, and they have the power to PERSECUTE, and even EXECUTE their people WITHOUT REASON.
I am from China. I know what I am talking about !
On the other hand, the United States of America is supposed to be A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY - where *LAWS* are obeyed, and even the government has to OBEY THE LAWS.
NSA is NOT an apparatus of the Russian nor an apparatus of the Chinese government.
NSA is a branch of the government of the United States of America.
Which means, NSA has the OBLIGATION to operate ACCORDING TO WHAT HAS BEEN CLEARLY STATED IN THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Has NSA done that ?
Nope.
NSA has VIOLATED the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA !
Apologist, you are forewarned !
We will hunt you down, no matter where the fuck you are !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Having a computer store metadata that you don't try to hide from private companiees just isn't that big of a deal.
Actually many people do try to hide them from private companies. But even if this statement was entirely true, there is a big difference between what a corporation can do with the metadata vs what the government can do. Last time I checked, Google isn't able to send out a drone to extrajudicially kill a US citizen.
The LOVEINT scandal is one of the perfect examples of how that statement is patently bullshit. Unless they're going to claim that the FISA court is giving out LOVEINT warrants now.
Snowden never approached any of multiple Inspectors General, supervisors, or Congressional oversight committee members about his concerns.
Ya, because he'd rather spend the rest of his life a fugitive, essentially exiled from his home country and family under fear of rotting in solitary confinement in a military prison without charge. He'd rather do this than simply follow the perfectly effective checks and balances this completely innocent organization is government by.
How stupid do they think we are?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
You have got to be kidding. NSA specifically targeted an American company and copied their inter-data-center traffic for surveillance purposes, thereby stealing the personal information and papers and effects of millions of US citizens. You try that and let me know how prison treats you -- it's prohibited from both a civil rights and constitutional standpoint. It's a criminal act.
If we can't trust our government, then we can't trust each other.
Oh really? I think you'll find that it's quite easy to trust the majority of our fellow human beings, those who haven't tried to set themselves up in a position of false authority, while simultaneously refusing to trust governments or other criminal organizations trying to rule over us.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
but privacy is the culprit here. The NSA can go rogue because they have way too much privacy of a certain type, the "it never happened" type privacy, not the "no one knows what we are now talking about " privacy.
They can plan and plot in a dark so dark no one can ever know what was said. That has to go. Every single they do, speak, write , everywhere they go, every access to every computer system anyone there ever avails themselves of has to be memorialized into an incorruptible audit trail which can "replayed" and otherwise analyzed by investigative authorities given the proper authorization to do so.
To start with the premise that "we don't need this surveillance" is to concede the argument before it's even begun.
You can't win an argument starting with a false picture of reality. We DO need this level of surveillance. We DO need these systems and we will need them even more going forward. That is a highly unpleasant fact about reality. We need new thinking here.
So how do we stop an agency with that much assymetrical information from leveraging it into domestic political or global economic power and thus consuming on the one had our democracy and on the other our legitimacy as a world power?
The answer is to make it impossible to abuse the system AND ALSO get away with it, both.
The people in charge there now need to be moved out. People like Binney and Drake and Snowden - all true patriots- who KNOW how this technology can and is abused need to be put into positions of power. The old guard would never ever permit that , even to the point of staging a coup d'tat . Obama needs his own, legitimate, Sunday Night Massacre (Nixon 1973) there and he needs to move all at once and very suddenly with a clear vision of how that agency is going to be going forward.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need the NSA and what it does. We need more of the same from the NSA in fact. But we need the contingency of ironclad transparency into the organization also.
If you take the long view, it was predictable even obvious that the individuals who "came of age" in the NSA during the digital revolution would attempt to leverage their newly invented and secret powers into an position of untouchability and engage in lawlessness. These guys have a god complex the size of a mountain, and they can have and will continue to demonize, including in their own minds, anyone who opposes their personal vision of what their careers and lives are all about, what their mission is and the best way to achieve that mission.
No point in picking their psychology apart, the point is they need to be relieved of duty and also we need to implement totalitarian-level of accounting within the organization that any lawbreaker will fear, even as we continue to spy as we have been, pushing the technological limits of what can be uncovered on our very real enemies.
So he broke into a secure environment, serruptitiously obtained confidential and/or classified information, and used his take to successfully gain a competive advantage over his peers? And somehow this makes him unsuitable for employment at the NSA?
I guess it's a good thing he wasn't a state sponsored spy... I mean, just imagine what would happen if there were multiple powerful nations with "cyber armies" that wanted at that data and the gall to infiltrate and spy on the USA / NSA. Why, all that data would just be ripe for the taking, like a huge single point of failure. The NSA would be a huge threat to national security. I mean, wow, Snowden was a contractor; Just imagine if he had been a really bad guy trained in computer exploitation and given a big budget to buy any zero-day exploit on the black market he needed? Wow, scary stuff NSA. I guess they'll be shutting down now that the biggest threat to national security has been identified as the NSA itself... right?
What is even more funny (and telling) about the reporting on this is that the NSA people in the interview claimed the NSA stopped this attack and then CBS reported that directly with no question about whether this was legitamate or not. They claim this would have bricked all the computers, which presumably includes the one I am typing this message on. So we are just told they stopped the attack... how.
Seriously, how the fuck did they do that?
They claim China wrote some super virus that could brick the bios on a PC and they stopped it. Really? Did they run some bios update on my computer to defend it against this malicious update, because I don't seem to recall taking such defensive measures myself. Or maybe they stopped the virus from propagating around the internet in the first place and therefore protected me from ever seeing the virus in the first place. That must be how they did it, I guess that would explain why the hundreds of antivirus companies never seemed to mention that a world ending virus is a thing that we should all be worried about and maybe, you know, buy some antivirus software from them to defend against.
It also begs the question, if they can stop this virus in such a fashion, why couldn't they stop any other attack in a similar fashion. And then why, not 10 minutes later in the interview, does the head of US cyber command claim we are vulnerable to cyber attack (and therefore the NSA is totally justified in doing all this spying and oh by the way they sure could use a bigger budget).
To call this reporting is just laughable. It's not reporting, it is propaganda, and not even good propaganda. Wow, you stopped a world ending virus, gee thanks NSA. Golly gee willickers I sure am glad you saved us all. Tell me some more about how awesome you all are. Give me a fucking break.
-AndrewBuck