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Glen Greenwald: Don't Trust Anonymous Anti-Snowden Claims
Glen Greenwald casts a scathing look at the claims (such as by the Sunday Times) that Edward Snowden's leaked information had been cracked by Russian and Chinese spy agencies. Greenwald compares Snowden to some other public figures against whom underhanded tactics were employed by the U.S. government. A slice: There’s an anonymously made claim that Russia and China “cracked the top-secret cache of files” from Snowden’s, but there is literally zero evidence for that claim. These hidden officials also claim that American and British agents were unmasked and had to be rescued, but not a single one is identified. There is speculation that Russia and China learned things from obtaining the Snowden files, but how could these officials possibly know that, particularly since other government officials are constantly accusing both countries of successfully hacking sensitive government databases?
Anyone who has been following these Snowden-related news already knew the US government officials lied, lied, and lied repeatedly, lied to the world, lied to their own people, lied to their Congress, all without any consequences.
Anyone who still believed them would need to have zero capability in logical thinking, so what's the point in pointing out flaws in the logic of these statements?
After all, China and Russia are supposed to be the bad dude, and Snowden is supposed to be a traitor
Who are us to argue with the mighty Uncle Sam?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... the whole "snowden's leaks did it" could be a cover for what other hacks did.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Given that we just had the big story about the Office of Personnel Management getting hacked six ways from sunday by parties unknown, 'OMG Snowden' seems unlikely to be the biggest of the US spooks' problems at the moment.
The encryption designed, implemented and deployed by the world's leading experts in the field was broken in a couple of years (and this occurred simultaneously in two other countries).
Yet crooks and criminals are using technology so advanced that GCHQ, NSA, .... cannot break it and governments start proposing ill thought through and half-baked laws about use of encryption and ask for back doors.
EITHER they were all encrypted with the same details and 'rubber hose' cryptanalysis was used [which would be both unlikely and a massive breach of operating procedures]
OR our beloved leaders are being at best misguided and/or disingenuous or at worst dissembling schemers [aka 'cock-up vs conspiracy']
... the russians and chinese arn't going to suddenly go out and arrest a load of US spies making it obvious that they've cracked it. They'll probably use the information to make high value gains. When the british cracked Enigma in WW2 they made damn sure it wasn't obvious to the germans that it had been cracked and even allowed some of their own ships to be sunk even though they knew where U boats were just so they had the advantage of continuing to decode more important correspondence.
If there was any danger to British Agents why were they not recalled a year ago when that claim was first made?Also, the whole argument is an attempt to justify the " Snoopers Charter ", as an excuse to spy on British Citizens . They want our information unencrypted because they say they can't do it themselves, yet Russia and China can? It is either a lie or an admission of complete irresponsibility and incompetance on behalf of Western Security.They are saying GCHQ and M.I.6. are unfit for purpose.What an admission. We should also remember that China would not give Snowden asylum,-why then would they want to unencrypt his files?Russia, likewise allowed asylum for a limited period with reluctance.
Is anyone buying this BS?
> It's absolutely predictable that those files would be cracked, why is that not more believable?
Cracking one of current strong cyphers is hella bigger news than some spying operations having to be terminated.
"Well, we had to move a few of our agents. Oh, and also, whole Internet needs to be rebuilt, and everything you did over HTTPS in the past and we sucked off the net will be readable in a year, after we plug in more computers".
PS: Not to mention the small detail that russkies weren't even supposed to have the encrypted files.
One of the whole points of an intelligence organisation is to know what the 'enemy' knows and how they got that information.
...and then make that information public? No, that's the propaganda department's job, and they don't usually care to validate the "information" they spread. Whenever a government makes a public claim to have proof of something and then refuses to make that proof public, they're LYING. Every single time.
If Russia and/or China would have decrypted messages, they would most certainly not tell the rest of the world.
Similarly, they wouldn't publish it if they managed to locate enemy spies.
If somehow, this DID happen, the US government would most certainly not publish the fact that they knew.
Information is valuable.
Information the enemy thinks you don't have is invaluable.
The fact that this is published tells me it's most likely not true.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Snowden was starting to get some very begrudging props for his role in the limited NSA reforms passed by the US Congress. This laughably ridiculous and unsubstantiated attack on him was deployed to help keep Snowden trapped in the traitor role.
The real danger here is that if the powers that be keep destroying their own credibility like this, eventually they will start to lose control and then all Hell will break loose. They seem to be reacting emotionally, not rationally and they seem to be losing touch with reality. It reminds me of the craziness of the last days of the Nixon White House. Only this time the problem goes much deeper. It is no longer a single person and the tight knit group surrounding him. The insanity has metastasized.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
So basically, we have no evidence, but there are reasons why we have no evidence so we should just trust the claims blindly.
What we've found out from Snowden, and Manning for that matter, is only a revelation to us. Our enemies already knew.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Take your anti-psychotics.
Once someone has been exposed as a spy, they can't really be used as such again, because you simply have no idea who the country they were spying on and have been exposed to have told that that person is a spy.
It'd just be far too risky to put them back out in the field, the best you can do is bring them back home and give them a desk job there, at which point there's no problem in outing them because it gives credibility to the argument.
Even if you say, well, he's been spying on Russia, they hate ISIS, we hate ISIS, so we'll use this person as an anti-ISIS spy you're taking too much of a risk with that agents life because you still have absolutely no idea if anyone in Russia that knows about this spy has still leaked information about them to someone who isn't so unfriendly towards ISIS. What if the Russians let the Syrians know about this spy they've outed, and some Syrian who then knows gets captured by ISIS and tortured for information?
When a spy is done in the field because they've been unmasked, they're done for good in the field and with good reason.
Greenwald is right, the fact they're saying that some people have effectively had their spying careers shut down - because that's what being found out by even one nation implies, without giving any evidence that that's actually happened, means that such claims are as good as worthless. If any such agents have indeed been unmasked then they're now sat back safely in the US/UK with a desk job requiring no identity protection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame
If there is a political point to be made, yeah, I'd expect them to name every single one of them.
They'd have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
What's the weather like on your planet?
People expect the kind of shit the government is pulling from Russia and China, they just don't want it from countries which are actually *supposed* to be bastions of freedom.
In the long run he did more harm than good. The same practises will continue to happen, he just enabled our enemies to know about them too.
Yes, most of us are aware how those in the US and other '5-Eyes' governments view their citizens.
China and Russia? They knew long before Snowden. These guys are not amateurs. The only people who did not know were the general populations of the US and the world, the ones upon which this global surveillance & tracking behemoth is aimed.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Edward Snowden had no family to take care of. He was a loner who could afford to flee the country. Most other people are not in this kind of position.
I don't care who you are; people act in their own self-interests. For many government workers, their self-interests include keeping their job, taking care of their families, and not getting thrown into jail. So when a government employee tells you something, you can't trust it. But that's not because they're lying. Most of the time, they're misinformed. Nobody in the NSA knows what anyone else in the NSA is doing. It looks like it's so poorly managed that the management doesn't know what the rest of the organization is doing. (Hey, they should try spying on themselves!) The rest of the time, they're just saying the minimum that is safe to say. The main thing impacting what they say is keeping out of trouble, so they'll say whatever achieves that goal.
Considering that neither you nor I have the circumstances or cojones to do what Snowden did, we're in no position to judge what he or anyone else has done. Most slashdotters in his position like to talk big right now, but the fact is, you'd be scared shitless and do absolutely nothing. Or maybe if you could manage in this economy, you might try to find a different job. Someone really smart and dedicated would work to gain employee status so they could be covered under whistle-blower laws. But that's neither you nor I. The same applied to every other government position.
And as I say, everyone else is in the same position. You want to judge the people who work for the federal government. But they act with total self-interest in the same way that we do. Don't make waves, feed your family, don't get arrested. The only way to fix these problems is to change the law, and that is slowly happening. It may take decades, but it'll happen.
Meanwhile, we all need to be cognizant of the needs to maintain both freedom in our country and also security. We should not sacrifice one for the other. But that makes this a delicate and dynamic balancing act. There are no simple solutions. And on our own, neither you nor I knows the whole solution (in part because the solution has to keep adapting to the ever-changing threats to freedom and security).
No, *that* is a lack of understanding.
1) Plaintext attacks (or "knowing some of the decoded contents") are applicable only to some cyphers in some configurations.
2) With best currently known attack against AES-128 it'd take ~3000 billion years at 10^18 attempts per second. 2 years mean complete breakdown. Nobody said "realtime", DId you miss the talks about snooping and storing everything that might be of interest on the net? That data might be lying in cold storage for now, but if it's crackable in a reasonable timeframe, NSA and all the other agencies will be reading through it soon.
By the way, that report was not picked up by most news agencies. BBC had it on their front page but since removed it. It seems that they smell a rat too.
Snowden is a hero to me.
1) It removed the government's plausible deniability with regards to the rules of engagement (Manning) or the use of surveillance against Americans (Snowden).
2) The government's reaction to the leaks demonstrated that they are not incompetent, but evil.
These discussions would not have happened otherwise. Manning and Snowden did not sacrifice themselves for nothing. Tides will eventually turn, and history will eventually vindicate them (well, vindicate Snowden. Perhaps "Understand and excuse" Manning).
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You have zero evidence about any of the ridiculous claims you concocted. As for eloquence, I'd dare say Ellsberg is/was brilliant and eloquent, but my suspicion (since you misspelled Chelsea Mannings name) is that you probably spend too much time listening to Alex Jones/Info Wars, rather than thinking. You also ignore the fact about the Snowdens Field Time as a CIA agent in Europe, in a lame attempt to pretend he was no better than a Devry tech student who could never possibly have this level of information.
What is the exact narrative you think Snowden is spinning, which others like Ellsberg who have given public support for his whistle-blowing, as well as the other 4 post 9/11 NSA whistle blowers who have supported his position equally?
Anyone with half a brain also already knew what they revealed.
No. Anyone with half a brain already believed what they revealed. Now we have proof. If you think that you already knew what they revealed, then you are a wingnut or a complicit member of the intelligence community.
Snowden wasted his time,
Possibly.
put people at risk
Our own government has said that this is not true, that our enemies already knew the "secrets" which have been revealed about informants, operatives etc.
that couldn't have been done in a safer and more reasonable way;
There was no more reasonable way to deliver the information to the public, which needs to know; not only our own citizenry, but also the nations with whom we hold treaties which we have broken. They need to know that we have become the world's greatest evil, and not to do help us.
Holding either of these children up as examples of 'standing up to the machine' is just ridiculous;
What have you done? Jack fucking shit. All you've done is tell lies about them. Fuck off immediately.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And even if they managed both of those, why would Snowden's files include information on human resources? Why would a contractor even have access to that information?
Because everything you believe about government information security, air-gapped networks, and security clearances is wrong. The truth is that none of this information was critical enough to get anyone killed, and therefore none of it was treated with the respect that you think its security classification merits. And even if it were that important, they probably still wouldn't protect the information properly.
The federal government is having real problems hiring directly, especially the military. Therefore they are using very large numbers of contractors. They have extra-special problems finding competent technical employees, so those employees are more than typically likely to be contractors. Get the picture yet?
The truth is that highly scrupulous yet intelligent people won't go to work for the government in the first place. If you're smart, you know that it's a big crock of shit. If you're scrupulous, you won't go support that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"This hopelessly dishonest blogger has been posting misleading articles for years" Then you'll have no problem posting some of them and pointing out why they are misleading, right?
So which one's Alien and which one's Predator?
A Large government (with virtually unlimited funding) will crack any commodity encryption scheme.
That claim goes against all public analysis of the ciphers in play - what extraordinary evidence do you have to support it? Hollywood doesn't count.
Recall that physical access to the hardware trumps most security. In the crypto world physical access to the person who has the cipher keys would be the equivalent. Ignoring coercion, the CIA and KGB performed many amazing technical surveillance feats back in the day. Some of it damn near unbelievable, beyond what hollywood dreams up (ex 1945-52 a listening device with no power supply or active electronics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... There is no reason to believe comparable technical feats no longer occur.
> If you love China so much, then go live there.
That's such a classically stupid cliche of a line, you should be embarrassed to use it.
Cliches are overused lines. Overuse does not imply falsehood. In fact cliches often express a truth, they just express the truth in a tired unoriginal unartistic manner. Yet, a truth is a truth.
LOL, How is there any truth to the statement "If you love China so much, then go live there"? Such a statement is on the same intellectual level as "if you love China so much, why don't you marry it?" No truth there either.
Snowden blew the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional practices AND ALSO terrorists were made aware of techniques and methods that otherwise would have been used to catch them.
Yeah, like the Tsarnaev brothers and the others. It should not be a surprise that so many terrorists seem to slip by/around all this surveillance.
The type of mass surveillance being carried out is not suited for, nor is it intended to, catch foreign terrorists.
It is intended to and is most useful for gathering detailed data on as many individuals as possible, so if somebody 'steps out of line' the data can be sifted through to find some convenient method of silencing them, either by leaking (or threatening to) damaging personal information or to find something with which to (threaten to) charge them with.
It is a tyrant's surveillance-WMD wet dream. As designed and implemented, the US's domestic mass-surveillance dragnet has little utility other than spying on and controlling the domestic population and needs to be scrapped, with those in charge sent to prison or executed.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.