Report: Russia and China Crack Encrypted Snowden Files

New submitter garyisabusyguy writes with word that, according to London's Sunday Times, "Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services," and suggests this non-paywalled Reuters version, too. "MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China," writes the submitter. "This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war. Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?"

Comments

Two questions need to be asked

[knightmad]

First (as stated in the summary): "Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?"

Second (not asked, but as important as the first): Was it worth it? Did the revelations made the world a better after the revelations?

IMO yes, it was worth it. Having secret programs authorised by secret laws and secret alliances to reduce or remove the privacy of the population as a whole for some geopolitical goal is not something that should happen in democratic countries.

Re:Two questions need to be asked

[ShanghaiBill]

"Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?"

Why is all the blame heaped on Snowden? What about "the actions of the NSA"? Running a massive illegal spying operation on the American people, lying about it in sworn congressional testimony, and having no effective confidential channel for whistleblowers, they deserve far more blame for this than Snowden does.

Re:Two questions need to be asked

[whoever57]

Of course it wasn't worth it, because your privacy is far less important than your security.

Maybe mine is, but what about members of Congress? How many members of Congress have secrets that can be used to influence votes? How many votes does it take to influence the policy of the US Government?

Let's face it, the "security threats" are vastly overblown. When teenage kids get get over airport fences we can be farly sure that terrorists are not trying.

We adults make fun of this sort of thing.

Not the real adults. Only the scared, little-minded people.

Re:Two questions need to be asked

[Fire_Wraith]

"Was it worth it?"

That's the question - not for Snowden, but for the policymakers, including both elected and career/appointed officials, that decided that it was worth discarding privacy concerns or worries that things were going too far, to the point that they finally pushed someone in their organization to blow the whistle? He wasn't even the first, either, just the biggest. Think of all the abuses we wouldn't have known about if it weren't for people like John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake, for instance. Classification of information is not meant as a shield to prevent wrongdoing from coming to light; yet that's exactly what some people try to use it as. They wring their hands and bemoan the fact that legitimate secrets were exposed in the course of bringing misconduct to light.

And yet, that is on their hands, at least in part, because if there wasn't wrongdoing covered up in the first place, I don't think any of those people would have risked ruining their lives and careers to expose things. Even if you're one of the people that thinks what was done wasn't wrong in the first place, is it really right in a democracy for that to be decided in secret? If half the country is going to be pissed off if they knew what you were up to, that should be a sign that you shouldn't just get a secret order approving it, it needs to go before a public debate.

Re:Two questions need to be asked

[Hevel-Varik]

This should not have been modded troll. It's different opinion. The support for the contention is provided. It's not the favored opinion on this website but since when does an out of favor view get down-modded her (I kid, I kid).

Seriously, you guys who mod down things you don't agree with make this site poorer than it should be.

Mmm hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

The better question is why we're letting these agencies get away with scapegoating Snowden, just because they try to blame everything on him? It's not like they're free of any cu;pability for their actions just because some guy blew the whistle on them.

Propaganda - Unless They Are Fucking Idiots

[theshowmecanuck]

Look, they've had a couple years to figure out that if Russia and China have a shit pile of encrypted files, that they are going be busy trying to crack them. So if they haven't substituted out their people (operatives in spooky talk) in the last 2 years, the people running the circus are a bunch of fucking clowns. If they didn't have alternate plans with different networks, they are incompetent. Those files only show what those agencies were doing historically at this point. Because if they are still current, the U.S. is really in trouble. The next thing you know they'll be run by creationists who don't believe in science and evolution. Or they know how to capitalize on a really arcane book of myths to keep the people occupied.

Re:Proof

[Ly4]

It seems like their even disclosing the fact they know if the Russians and Chinese had access would be considered a state secret.
This. A thousand times this.

Did MI6 really blow sources in both China and Russia just so they could make Snowden look bad? Why would they do that?

It all sounds like the 'drained laptop' stories from early on in the Snowden saga, which turned out to be just speculation: http://publiceditor.blogs.nyti...

I call bullshit

[msobkow]

GCHQ and the UK have been crying wolf about encryption for years. Now after all their bleating about how they can't crack encryption, they're claiming the Russians and Chinese have done it, but they couldn't?

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

Keep the real story off the news ..

[nickweller]

Assuming this Sunday Times story is accurate, what idiot spymaster kept the real identities of active agents on a 'computer' that apparently any random IT techie had access to. I wonder if the media is trying to distract attention from that massive OPM hack.

Second OPM Hack Revealed: Even Worse Than The First

Re:Proof

[KGIII]

Yet, even if this story is true and this is a negative outcome, I still feel that Snowden was a patriot of the highest order. One does not need to be supportive of the current regime to be a patriot, in fact the reverse is the seeming greatest creator of patriots. This trend began with our founding fathers, dissent is a good thing at times.

Re:Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

So the NSA keeps a list of identities of MI6 members stored where some Hawaii-based contracted sysadmin has complete access to them.

And they trust him, his integrity and technical expertise enough that it takes years before they resort to action. And even then the purported reason is not that Snowden has been discovered to actually be a traitor, but rather that the technical tools even the U.S.A. had available for encryption were insufficient for guarding secrets.

If this is not a full-scale endorsement of Snowden and a thundering report of failure for U.S. intelligence politics, I don't know what is.

But more likely than not it is just a propaganda piece that the lying NSA scumbags could not be bothered to think through. But probably good enough for the American public.

Re:Proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would current-day hackers be unable to compromise the databases Snowden had regular sysadmin access to from Hawaii? Those are online. Snowden's stashes are offline and outdated. And individual agent lists were not the kind of stuff he was interested in anyway. He did not take an omnibus dump like Manning.

This really looks like scapegoating for a current-day whale-scale fuckup nobody wants to claim responsibility for.

Re:Proof

[IamTheRealMike]

There won't be any evidence offered, because this event is almost certainly a work of fiction. A careful reading of the articles and simply thinking things through will reveal colossal, gaping holes in the story the British government is peddling.

Firstly: we know beyond doubt that this story is at least partly fictional. We know this because the anonymous government sources (i.e. civil service officials) keep contradicting each other. We see for example this quote in the Independent, "However, despite a senior government official was quoted by the paper as saying that Snowden had "blood on his hands", Downing Street confirmed that there was “no evidence of anyone being harmed” as a result of his leaks". Different versions of the same story contradicting each other is a good sign that what we're being fed is a story: things always grow in the telling, especially when we're hearing a third or fourth hand account of what happened. The way US officials contradicted each other in the wake of the bin Laden assassination is a good example of that.

Secondly: this story asks us believe several extraordinary and completely implausible things.

In the UK foreign spying with people is the mandate of MI6, a separate agency to GCHQ, which handles signals intelligence only. It's like the split between the CIA and the NSA. Yet in several years of Snowden reporting there has never been any mention of documents from MI6. There has in fact only been a single mention of MI6 in the GCHQ/NSA documents, and that was a joint presentation about spying on climate change conferences! So the UK government is asking us to believe that journalists like Greenwald (who hates the UK because of the holding of his partner at Heathrow) would have a large cache of documents from an entirely separate agency and yet find nothing newsworthy in them at all ..... indeed, apparently MI6 is so boring that the existence of such documents isn't even worth mentioning? Apparently the UK has never done anything even embarrassing in many years of engaging in foreign HUMINT? That stretches the bounds of credulity beyond breaking point.

But it goes on. We are asked to swallow a second utterly ridiculous idea. Apparently the Russians and Chinese suddenly got access to a wealth of information on British spies, information so detailed it allowed them to be targeted:

The newspaper quoted a senior Home Office source as saying: “Putin didn't give him asylum for nothing. His documents were encrypted but they weren't completely secure and we have now seen our agents and assets being targeted.”

What normally happens when spies are caught? Well, they are normally arrested and tried, or at minimum thrown out of the country. Yet Downing Street is telling us that there was "no evidence of anyone being harmed". In short, we're being asked to believe that Russian and Chinese counter-intelligence suddenly found themselves with information so detailed that it amounts to a brain-dump of MI6, including lists of foreign agents ...... yet they walked away from the biggest gift in counter-intel history with nothing at all. Not a single arrest, not a single trial.

That the KGB and Chinese counter-intelligence are so incompetent defies belief - indeed, it is literally unbelievable.

There's a third totally implausible thing about this story. It asks us to believe that there is a cache of encrypted Snowden documents out there .... somewhere ..... and the Russians/Chinese were both able to obtain this cache, yet they could not obtain the accompanying password. So where did this cache come from? Again, the civil service is asking us to believe something utterly stupid: "Putin didn't give him a

Re:How do you know?

[Gr8Apes]

Anything anyone related to a spy agency says should be considered a lie until proven true. It's in their job description.