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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?"
Here's the outcome of Mr Snowden's "whistleblowing":
- American IT companies are losing billions because foreign customers are scared
- Intelligence networks are fucked
- Nothing whatsoever has changed in the way government agencies spy on US citizens
The guy should send his resume to Al Qaeda.
lucm, indeed.
Of course it wasn't worth it, because your privacy is far less important than your security.
When your privacy is violated, you only worry about bad things that "might" happen.
When your security is violated, those bad things actually DO happen.
This is why, in the real world, people care so little about privacy rights. It's only a theoretical problem, only for young libertarian idealists to worry about: "What if government does this or that?!" But grownups already have society modeled out, and are able to calculate through the end scenario of what actually does happen: "That bad thing you're worried about is possible because we have these other systematic checks." Of course, inexperienced people do not understand systems-level perspective, and have limited insight beyond what they see.
Like, right now, you actually think your privacy rights is more important than your competitive economic advantages you may have over Russian or China (economics is the REAL issue behind the Snowden leaks...)
We adults make fun of this sort of thing.
Pics or it didn't happen.
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.
Actually there is a much more important 3rd question. Was it necessary to do a mass dump of NSA files that went far beyond mass domestic surveillance in order to bring that mass surveillance to the attention of the people?
The answer is a definitive NO. Snowden overshared. He may have inadvertently harmed legitimate intelligence programs and agents. He should have pruned his dump and kept it on topic.
"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.
Why the blame? Apparently incompetence. Why was he putting an archive out there that included legitimate operations and agents, why not confine his archive to docs exposing the domestic mass surveillance programs? He overshared.