Slashdot Mirror
Schneier: China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs
cold fjord writes: Writing at Wired, Bruce Schneier states that he believes that China and Russia actually do have the Snowden documents, but that the path by which they got them may be different than what has been reported: "... The vulnerability is not Snowden; it's everyone who has access to the files. I've handled some of the Snowden documents myself, and even though I'm a paranoid cryptographer, I know how difficult it is to maintain perfect security. It's been open season on the computers of the journalists Snowden shared documents with since this story broke in July 2013. And while they have been taking extraordinary pains to secure those computers, it's almost certainly not enough to keep out the world's intelligence services. .... Which brings me to the second potential source of these documents to foreign intelligence agencies: the US and UK governments themselves. I believe that both China and Russia had access to all the files that Snowden took well before Snowden took them because they've penetrated the NSA networks where those files reside."
Wow. No wonder they are so paranoid.
Wow, more speculation under the guise of actual reporting. Almost definitely? Sounds like a bad romantic comedy.
If China and Russia stole the docs from NSA, then he should refer to them as the NSA docs. MSM will take this out of context as damning evidence against Snowden.
"I believe that both China and Russia had access to all the files that Snowden took well before Snowden took them because they've penetrated the NSA networks where those files reside."
As a computer security professional I would be most interested in your thoughts on what were these files even doing on these networked computers
Everything you hear from the mainstream news media is a fucking lie.
Do not believe anything those assholes say....even if it makes the government look bad....because you can guarantee there is an angle in there, somewhere.
Also, Dice-- why the fuck can't you pricks make the cookies work right on this God forsaken site? Why am I logged in on the home page, but logged out on this article? Fix your piece of shit web site, cock suckers.
I believe that both China and Russia had access to all the files that Snowden took well before Snowden took them because they've penetrated the NSA networks where those files reside.I believe that both China and Russia had access to all the files that Snowden took well before Snowden took them because they've penetrated the NSA networks where those files reside.
Uh, yeah. This was obvious from the beginning. If it was that easy for Snowden to grab all of those files without anyone noticing anything until it was too late, how many other bazillions of employees, contractors, sysadmins, etc etc etc etc also had similar access.
The Chinese & Russians (and others--Brits, Israelis, what have you) are actively trying to subvert all these thousands of folks.
It's really not rocket science, or even computer science. More, do you have the right contact. With so many potential contacts it becomes almost inevitable.
And that's without even getting into technical break-ins--which also seem very, very possible given the lax security that the Snowden affair demonstrates. If Snowden can get unauthorized access to all those files, then it's possible for others to do so as well.
keep them locked up and off the fucking internet.
Give up on the conspiracy bullshit. He is just trying to excuse what Snowden did. Snowden had physical access to the network and still had to social engineer passwords.
Years ago there was story about Russian intelligence services using typewriters and putting sensitive data on paper documents to avoid digital security breeches.
Very clever, these Russians.
what people can pull out their asses
If you were just scanning, you might easily read that for:
Leading privacy expert backs The Sunday Times report
Which is not the case.
What the hell does "almost definitely" mean? Is it like near miss?
To be blunt. The dude is a publicity whore. Where's RMS when you need a laugh anyways?
it may now be time to deregister from slashdot.
our 'favorite' bootlicker gets a submission. this is not a good sign; but then again, dice has been ruining slashdot for quite a while, now.
why CF is wants us to read bruce's article, though, is a mystery to me. CF is NOT a fan of snowden and yet this article defends snowden.
something seems a bit off, here.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yup, reads like Bruce is saying China got the Snowden documents, NOT (as is actually the case) that he's saying they have access to the same documents without Snowden.
This is why cuntfuck wanted to take this on: so he can control the heading, the bit that turns up most visibly in websearches.
Control the first impression, you capture the mind.
Here is the key point Schneier's post makes:
To headline this story without including some reference to China and Russia having penetrated NSA networks is to imply Schneier is saying Snowden provided China and Russia with information they did not have already. It is either sloppy or intentionally misleading. The headline could have been "Schneier: Chinese and Russian Spies Probably Had Snowden Docs Before Snowden."
"I believe that both China and Russia had access to all the files that Snowden took well before Snowden took them because they've penetrated the NSA networks where those files reside."
If Russia and China had the files before Snowden took them then they are in no meaningful way "Snowden files". They are merely a set of documents that may, or may not, overlap a portion of Snowden's files. By repeating your opinion that Russia and China have them (apparently without having to decrypt them, if they received them separately from Snowden) you are bolstering the narrative that Snowden has done damage to the government and the people of the US rather than exposing the damage done by the government of the US to the people of the US and the world.
Well done, sir.
Captain Obvious.
They say on the internets, "tits or gtfo". This should apply whenever any of these government clowns or media cunts make claims: "proof or gtfo".
In fact snowden may have inadvertantly given them cover, now they can act on the intelligence in the files they stole from the NSA directly without revealing that they powned the NSA networks because the world thinks that snowden did it.
Does that really matter?
The NSA is more concerned with the dirty laundry being airedbagainst Americans, rather than what foreign intelligence services have compromised their firewalls. Absurd to say the least.
In the two years since the Edward Snowden saga went public, a handful of people who actually understand the Western signals intelligence system have tried to explain the many ways that the Snowden Operation has smeared NSA and its partners with salacious charges of criminality and abuse. I’ve been one of the public faces of what may be called the Snowden Truth movement, and finally there are signs that reality may be intruding on this debate.
No American ally was rocked harder by Snowden’s allegations than Germany, which has endured a bout of hysteria over charges that NSA was listening in on senior German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. Although these stories included a good deal of bunkum from the start, they caused a firestorm in Germany, particularly the alleged spying on Merkel, which was termed Handygate by the media.
In response, Germany tasked Federal prosecutors with looking into the matter and, they if determined there was sufficient evidence, to press charges against NSA for breaking stringent German privacy laws. The investigation, led by Harald Range, Germany’s attorney general, has been slow and diligent, examining all possible evidence about NSA spying on Germany. Here Snowden’s purloined information would play a key role.
However, the matter has become politically fraught. In the first place, senior German security officials were circumspect about the case, since Berlin is heavily dependent on NSA for intelligence on vital matters like terrorism. Worse, follow-on Snowden revelations showed that the BND, German’s foreign intelligence service, and NSA are close partners, and the BND has itself been spying on EU neighbor states that are friendly to Germany such as Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
To top it off, last month’s major hack of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, turns out to have been the work of Russians, apparently state-sponsored. In reality, the major spy threats to Germany are not NSA, but Russians and Chinese, as I’ve been saying for some time — and, to be fair, so have German security officials, though they got drowned out in the public hysteria over Snowden.
Now we learn that Range’s prosecutors are dropping their year-long Handygate inquiry, for want of hard evidence. Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe aren’t saying much, beyond that they simply don’t have evidence of spying that would stand up in court. Back in December, Attorney General Range offered a warning about the dubious nature of much of the “evidence” against NSA:
The document presented in public as proof of an actual tapping of the mobile phone is not an authentic surveillance order by the NSA. It does not come from the NSA database. There is no proof at the moment which could lead to charges that Chancellor Merkel’s phone connection data was collected or her calls tapped.
Got that? That’s the polite, legalistic way of saying the Snowden claims are backed by faked NSA documents, as has been clear for some time to anybody who understands counterintelligence and the SIGINT system. This should surprise no one, since using fake or doctored Western intelligence documents to embarrass democracies is a venerable tradition for Russian intelligence — the proper espionage term is Active Measures — and since Snowden’s been in Moscow for the last two years and shows no signs of going anywhere else anytime soon, two and two can be added together here.
To make matters worse for Snowden’s fans, a report about the Handygate inquiry being dropped in the magazine Der Spiegel, which has been a key player in the Snowden Operation, includes the painful truth. While some have clamored to get Snowden out of Moscow to testify before prosecutors, Berlin understood how politically tricky that would be. Moreover, prosecutors determined that Ed simply didn’t have much to say.
As a prosecutor explained, Snowden provided “no evidence that he has his o
Your faggot ass should.
Much like The US/UK let friendly ships be sunk to prevent it from being known that they had broken Enigma. With the knowledge it was broken elsewhere, they can claim they broke into the Snowden files, not the NSA files, when the reality is the opposite.
Learn to love Alaska
How does the CIA distribute reports and instructions...
When I worked for them near Paris, we had a 56k line (DS0) to Langley. IIRC (only saw the equipment once), it was a cisco ASA connected to an Adtran. The network guy said that on the other end was a T1 that terminated 24 of these connections, so it sounds somewhat cost effective. My current employer uses an Adtran MX410 to terminate 24 DS0 lines from a single T1. We have a bunch of employees in Seattle, and they can't get broadband so cisco AnyConnect fails to connect more often than not over their dialup connections so we had to resort to using leased lines. Those connections are pretty slow, but rock solid. If there is a problem, we can typically get CenturyLink to dispatch within an hour to fix it
First of all, if you rely your security on Cisco hardware, you have no security
Second of all, no matter if it is from Paris to Langley or from your current HQ to Seattle, as long as there is a line from Point A to Point A', there are infinitive possibilities for the existence of MIM somewhere
and, supposedly, the russians are returning to using type-writers instead of computers, for their secret memos and spy schtuff
Talking about typewriters ... China recently executed a typist who leaked sensitive information to foreign spy (or spies)
That only goes to show that there always exist the possibilities of leakage no matter which route it takes
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The whole point of Snowden leaking all that info was to get the ball rolling for transparency in the face of massive corruption. Now we know just how corrupt(to the point of feigning ignorance of actual problems to manipulate voters) government can be.
Here we have a guy showing us exactly where our problems are(a.k.a. a patriot) and we reply with "he is the problem!"
D'uh, once the files are are taken, assume they're gone and in the hands of anyone who wants them and the operations are compromised,
Almost pregnant perhaps?
PS! slashdot.org is going down and fast. Screw this new slashdot aka clickbait factory and it's owners.
Go and show support to https://www.soylentnews.org (yes, that ugly one running on updated slascode)
So, cold fjord, are you finally conceding that Snowden did, in fact, not cause any harm, and that the documents he has brought to light to the *rest* of the world, was already readily available to the purported enemies of the US via different channels by that time?
If so, good on you. If not, what the fuck are you on about this time?
There was no suggestion he was a problem, in fact i belive he is a hero too, i was just pointing out that other goverment actors may not be using him or the people with access to his trove as a source of inteligence, but as cover for activities they have already undertaken, as bruce has implied.
Yep, old school intelligence. Recruit employees with the correct access. Pay them well, get all the documents you want. The only thing that Snowden got wrong was doing it for free and publicise it....
Indeed. And that amply demonstrates why universal surveillance is an extreme problem: The data gathered cannot be secured effectively. For example, even if the NSA does not do industrial espionage on it themselves (which is doubtful), then China and Russia can steal the data and mine it for relevant findings. Or if the NSA does not use it to pressure and manipulate politicians and public figures (again doubtful), then others can do so after stealing the data.
The concepts of privacy and secrecy are important, because when it comes right down to it, everybody and every company has things to hide and can be harmed seriously if they become known to the wrong people.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Slashdot seems to be full of anti-Russian propaganda these days. As usual, any facts are completely absent.
Much like The US/UK let friendly ships be sunk to prevent it from being known that they had broken Enigma.
Wikiquote "After the war, it was revealed that Churchill had prior knowledge of the attack due to the relative daily ease with which the Bletchley Park "enigma crackers" decoded all daily Luftwaffe traffic since May of that same year. However, he decided to let the attack proceed because to do otherwise would alert the Germans that Britain had broken their code."
For a start, using an insulting epithet is not an ad hominem fallacy. Second, past actions inform your confidence of their actions in the future and their current actions. Without doing so because YOU claim it would be "ad hominem" we would be cripped by the lack of ability to use inductive resoning, and all we'd have left is physical verifiability of the past with no ability to say anything about the future.
So you may want to believe that slashdot should have known better, but you are in fact the one who is getting it wrong.
It's useful to keep in mind there's two layers to the Snowden-betrayal array of claims.
- There's the claims that he did damage.
- there's the underlaying claim that this proves that he did wrong.
In fact whenever a whistleblower comes out, there will be some damage in some areas. The same applies to journalism. Whenever you expose wrongdoings or questionable practices from those in charge it can be argued this helps the enemy, even if only by tarring the image of the government. But I think the main point is, it should be considered an acceptable cost of transparency of governance. Transparency has been embedded in the US constitution 200 years ago for a reason. Mostly, those accusing Snowden don't understand that reason, or see no reason to bother with it. Transparency means that to some extent the governing still represent the governed(although you need to close the feedbackloop to really achieve that).
So yes, I think the claims that Snowden damaged the US foreign policy are wildly out of proportion, but I also think that as long as some precautions were taken to limit damage done, then it's acceptable. That should be the general attitude towards whistleblowers: that some damage due to disclosures is acceptable, worth it.
Why would us Brits need to subvert anything? We're part of the five eyes network and contribute enough intelligence that you should share this info with us anyway.
So in stealing an unprecedented trove of millions of Top Secret documents Snowden has empowered adversaries of the US to act on things they already had, which they wouldn't have been in a position to do if Snowden hadn't stole the documents he did. Snowden - the gift that keeps on giving to the adversaries and enemies of freedom and the West.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Snowden freely admits that the information he handed over could well endanger people's lives. That's the whole reason, he says, that he handed it over to what he claims are responsible journalists for vetting and redaction. How do his defenders keep ignoring this?
So if Glenn Greenwald publishes something damaging which he does not (and cannot) understand, or if someone breaks into his house in Brazil and acquires the information that way, all of that is on Snowden. He handed over secrets to insecure, unauthorized foreign entities, and all consequential damages are his fault.
I think the people who suggest Russia or China has somehow gotten some "amazing secrets" from Snowden need to check some Wikileaks document dumps about how the 3rd party contractors are selling this data.
I was going to make a great quip with the name of the company, but Google is giving me nothing but popular results right now. Couldn't find the right terms to "NSA independent contractor." It told me the wages were up 25% however, so now is the time to sell out -- but with Patriotism.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
1st, see subject: Thanks for that & I agree with you - it's up to 'naysayer trolls' to validly disprove those they disagree with.
Instead, /. evidences itself to be the SAME as *any* other forums - a clique WITH AN AGENDA!
(A clique alright - albeit, composed largely of sockpuppeteering multiple account scumbags & yes, I have proofs of that going on galore, with them literally ADMITTING it, modding one another up & teaming up to downmod those they disagree with since it ADVERSELY affects their own PERSONAL AGENDAS (of which they use massive lies & bullshit to promote like mad no less)).
It's also idiots who had their asses handed to them by those they stalk/harass, unjustifiably downmod, & otherwise attempt to hassle who have an "axe to grind" but NOT THE VALID MEANS to do so - & they act like GOSSIPY BITCHES instead (they're the MOST laughable type - even worse than sockpuppeteers & yes, this "kind" of scum, does sockpuppets galore here too...).
APK
P.S.=> The TRULY BEAUTIFUL PART is that folks like you see & understand all of what I've just said - & it makes a HUGE difference seeing you state what you have now & in my defense before, even vs. the sockpuppet armies attempts @ "jump on the bandwagon since the 'hivemind' here says so" which ONLY WORKS on the WEAK-MINDED (& they're too weak to understand that much themselves doing their bogus downmods, mockeries of those they can't combat validly with facts & truth, etc. who annihilate & expose the sheer crap they pull around here)... apk
I posted in your defense (you have in mine before asking "where have you 'renditioned' apk to" when they effetely & VAINLY tried to limit my posting once, which failed, & I can post as much as you registered users do) here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
* Mainly since weilawei has a great point - & I felt it's up to your 'detractors' to PROVE YOU OUTRIGHT WRONG with facts... they don't do such a great job of it imo!
(All they do is attempt to crap on you, mock you, & THAT? Is the sign of what Ghandi said in "1st they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you, and you win...")
I have the same shit happen to me here ALL THE TIME (especially on hosts files man - but, I'm not that stupid, I KNOW who is behind it (1 of 5 types in malware makers/botnet herders, INFERIOR COMPETITORS (the main one I suspect is this one), webmasters, & yes ADVERTISERS (whom I have in fact, OUTRIGHT BUSTED 2-3 of their people like raymorris, andymadigan, & others in the act doing it)).
APK
P.S.=> Don't let them get to you with their gossipy beyotch bullshit tactics man - the real men out there, unlike those "not men" as I call those types of weasels, see it happening to you & do NOT agree with your naysayer detractor weasels (even IF I don't agree with SOME of your views sometimes? It's WRONG to do what's been done to you quite a lot here from mainly pusscake weasels))... apk
I'm sure I replied to this but must have failed to submit it properly or something.
In short, hiring a set designer is a gross symptom of a mindset of appearance over function to such an extent that a security risk and PR failure if it leaks overwhelms any positive outcome. It's wandering into "heck of a job" horse judge territory in terms of demonstrating someone is way out of their depth.
Second, the Navy trek thing is backwards. The Navy found it interesting that Trek sets had been inspired by submarine and other operations rooms from WWII up until the 1960s. Those vertical transparent charts that look cool in Trek are descended from manual methods of finding vessels by sonar. From what's been declassified computers have been doing all that stuff on screens since the 1970s so subs don't look like that any more. The navy inspired Trek, the navy then said "that's cool", but they were not inspired by Trek themselves - such a thing is ridiculous bullshit spouted by fans who want to feel important.
The last thing - Snowden was an external contractor. The trust level should have been very very low in such a situation - massive fuckup. Such auditing is fairly pointless in such a situation where they should never have so much trust in the first place, because they just want the cash and not the core values of whatever org they are contracting to. Contractors will rip you off in a variety of ways so there should be structures in place to limit the damage, because no matter what an audit tells you one of them will fuck you around for their own benefit if you look the other way long enough.