Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
The first question that comes to my mind is, "Has anything actually been cracked?" Maybe this is all just some kind of release to make Snowden looked bad. All I know is that spying is all about lying. All I know is that I'm an American who feels compelled to be an Anonymous Coward when talking about things like this... in America, and wondering if that makes any real difference. All I know is that they, ultimately, will die just as I will die. All I know is all they know, when you reduce it down. The spy is in me, and try as I might... I cannot decipher my own secret.
The timing is convenient.
I mean, last week, OPM gets pwned by $FOREIGN hax0rs. Everyone who's ever had a clearance, your SF-86 data has been compromised.
And today, out of the blue, agents (who, you know, tend to have clearances and whose real-life identities and/or cover identities may well have been compromised last week) are being pulled back, on account of ... Snowden?
The timing is *too* convenient.
Also it's a very interesting time. Right after they find out that the recent breach by the Chinese Government got the personnel files with information for all executive employees up to cabinet level (including the security clearance data) they reveal that the Chinese (and Russia) got secret personnel information after all via the Snowden leaks. Something seems weird about this timing.
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.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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...
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seems like of they embraced him as a citizen doing what was right, instead of sending him to Russia, things would be safer for mi6
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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
What I find difficult to believe:
1. Russia or China would make it known they cracked anything.
2. Western intelligence would make it known they know what Russia and China were able to do.
3. Articles which read like propaganda, provide no details and cite no specific sources.
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.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Agreed, 100%. And, I'll add that if the NSA and top government officials weren't such dickheads, Snowden probably never would have acted in the way he did. Government apologists tend to forget that a very large percentage of the NSA's spying is simply UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The NSA possesses all the tools to turn the US into a police state in short order. They are abusing those tools pretty badly. Who knows what the hell is going to happen in the next year, or ten years, if no one stands up to them now?
Partisans are quick to point out that Obama (or Bush, or Clinton, or whoever) would never do anything like that. The partisans are idiots, because THERE ARE people who would do all of that, and worse. I'm quite certain that General Alexander rationalizes how important his work is, and if he were allowed to act without fetters, he WOULD INDEED turn the US into a police state.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
USA does not need a proof! If we say something you have to trust us! We are the good guys! You hate to trust us! Why would we lie? We are always right! How do you even dare to ask for proof? Traitor. Terrorist! We are coming for you!
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
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.
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.
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:
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
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Ian Ameline
Anything anyone related to a spy agency says should be considered a lie until proven true. It's in their job description.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.