If the point was to make Americans aware of NSA oversteps there was a way to do that without threatening to give away national security secrets to the Chinese and Russians.
Snowden is clearly a bit of a fool. I feel for the guy and don't think he did this with malice. But he's basically playing with high voltage wiring and should surprise no one if he gets badly burned by this move. First rule of playing with high voltage wiring... Be careful. Failing that... make a good will.
There is no evidence that he gave any national security secrets to the Chinese of the Russians (or that he has any national security secrets at all). If you believe the NSA, all snowden had acces to was meta-data. Even if he had real data, Do you really think that the Russians and Chinese aren't aware that we spy on them?
Keep in mind that there is a full blown propaganda machine in force against him right now to get people on the side of the government. The NSA, by it's very inception, is about deception. Who knows what leaks are from Snowden or an NSA smokescreen?
Maybe the slide in the polls for Snowden isn't apathy (although I'm sure that's some of it), but instead all of these new leaks. At first he was a whistle blower telling the American people that their government was spying on them and he had wide support. But now, the leaks are about foreign governments and people don't think that is right.
Here is the question. When Snowden first went public, both he and the NSA said that he didn't have the kind of information that has been leaked lately that has discredited him. So, either he and the NSA both lied or one of them is telling the truth and the other is intentionally leaking non-critical information to make him look bad.
While I have no reason to trust Snowden. I have even less to trust a government who a month before he went public proclaimed that it was not gathering intelligence information on the American public. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again?
I think they would. They could even get the Europeans involved to take the blame again and not explicitly even mention them. The only thing they might do differently is double check their intelligence info next time. All the US has to do is quietly ask the Europeans to do it and ask them not to admit that they were the ones who asked. They cannot be officially blamed without proof and there won't be any.
The flaw in that theory is that it violates international law and they would effectively be asking their European allies to take the fall for them. There would have to be a pretty good reward to risk sanctions from other countries.
The US did not stop or search the plane. The countries denying airspace also admitted the US did not request any such action. If the US really wanted this guy what makes anyone think Venezuela or Bolivia can stop a military snatch and grab? The US certainly had no qualms about going into Pakistan to get what they wanted and Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a sizable army backed up by armed militants spread across the country just looking to kill an American. If Snowden returned to the US he would have a very public trial where his guilt would be assessed. He cannot be disappeared. He would have an opportunity to go before a jury and make his case. If his actions and intentions are so admirable it should be no problem getting the jury to find him not guilty. However, if he keeps releasing information about US foreign intelligence operations that have nothing to do with capturing data of US citizens he will be seen and treated as a traitor to his country. He is undoing any good that he may have achieved with outing the US domestic spying programs. Those looking to put his head on a spike would bolster their arguments and criticisms.
If he is the one releasing that data. According to his own claims and the original NSA reports, he didn't have data on foreign intelligence operations. So, could the release of foreign intelligence operations be a misdirect keep him from being seen as a hero to the american public? It wouldn't be the first time the government tried to disgrace somebody with misinformation, nor would it be the last (assuming it that it is actually happening).
Never trust eyewitness, because from the actual photos that are online the wings seem very much attached to the plane. The tail is missing and the top is burned out, though.
It may speed up adoption of FOSS (or homegrown) by other countries.
Though OTOH, I can't imagine any of them would have been blind enough not to see this coming.
As for terrorists, didn't aQ switch from cell phones to couriers about a decade ago? Anyone who gets found out on the basis of the activities we now know about is either careless or stupid.
That's the joke (if there is one) evidently everybody but congress and the American people new this was going on. And yes, aQ quit using cell phones once they figured out they could be tracked and monitored by them. The data-mining that the NSA is doing is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The problem is that the people that the NSA and others are really worried about are smart enough not to leave needles in a haystack.
Most of these programs were not started by the government and then farmed out to contractors. Most of them went the otherway around where contracts sold the idea to bureaucrats. NSA, CIA and whatever other As may be out there all use electronic surveilance, but their most reliable and prized source are feet on the ground. Always has been, always will be.
I didn't watch your tutorial, but I found installing PGP virtually trivial. It was a matter of running it, and pressing "return" a few times to accept the default key sizes and such. That was it.
If, as a population, we've reached the point where doing that is considered "hard", then I weep for our species.
Please tell me you're not a software developer.
If you think the problem to be solved is as simple as making it easy for users to install PGP and create a keypair, you're like a contractor who pours a foundation and then declares he's just completed a skyscraper.
No, he's like a government security contractor who doesn't screen employees walking out for usb keys.
The more people that encrypted trivial bullshit, the more they need to store and the longer it'll take them to crack it at any point in the future. And the less likely it is that they'll be able to pay attention to everybody.
Remember, the time it takes them to crack thousands of LOL cat videos is time they don't have to crack things we actually care about.
Unless such a strategy just gets you on their watch list and since you now are exhibiting suspicious behaviour, they take more drastic measures. Your choice.
That's an easy answer, Mr. Betteridge: no, it won't. (People are way too much comfortable with not being careful about their privacy, otherwise the whole Facebook thingy would never have gotten off the ground. Now you're asking them to become techno-savvy just because of privacy reasons?)
Facebook got off the ground because it was about where the next party was and who wanted to hook up. Sex and alcohol trump privacy every time.
Yep. If you've been following the news, you'll notice that it's all about catching Snowden, and not about the massive NSA surveillance program. Most people just don't care about it, and the media sure isn't helping by focusing on Snowden to the exclusion of everything else.
I'm sure that ultimately, we'll get some law to "increase oversight on the NSA" that will have no teeth, the NSA will go back to spying on all communications it possibly can, and Snowden will get to discover the true meaning of "extraordinary rendition."
The irony is that most of the information into what the NSA was doing didn't come from Snowden. All Snowden basically said was that the NSA intercepted calls and emails and gave specific examples. The talking heads on the networks like Faux News and MissingNBC then went on to explain the details of how the NSA actually did it and even tried to justify it by comparing what they data-mined compared to Google.
Snowden just blew the whistle. The talking heads explained the playbook and yet Snowden is the one in trouble. Go figure.
Hi, nice to find you here. I sent you the truecrypt container with the bomb plans you requested and also the location of those 27 tons of fertilizer to your secret email address. It's the usual password.
Omar
While you post in jest (at least I hope), the scary part is that with six degrees of separation, all of us are not too far removed from somebody who actually did do something like that. In the US it used to be innocent until proven guilty. Now it is guilt by association, particularly where terrorism is involved and the definition of terrorism changes daily to justify all sorts of actions.
No one has seen him there, so who knows where he is? Even the USA lost track of him if they erroneously tipped off European countries that Snowden was on Boliva's presidential plane.
You are assuming the US erroneously tipped of European countries. It could also have been a calculated action to signal to Bolivia of things to come if they mess with the US. If so, the US should rework the math, because it doesn't seem to have worked out as planned and raised the ire of many neutral allies and countries.
I think it's more likely that Bolivia was deliberating screwing with the USA by quickly ushering a hooded, sunglassed man on the plane or loading a suspiciously human sized box at the last minute, just to see who was watching and see if they could make a fool out of someone. If that was their plan, it seems like they succeeded.
Regardless, the US violated international law by forcing the plane to land and searching it. That would be no different than a country forcing Air Force One to land and searching it. Diplomatic planes are considered sovereign territory. Back in 2001, the US made that exact argument against the Chinese who had detained a US plane.
diverting or dissallowing diplomatic flights would be serious business.
Bolivia would like a word with you.
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again? If the US keeps interefering with diplomatic travel, which is against international law, it won't be long before foreign airspace is closed off to US diplomats. Bolivia is already threatening to close the US embassy there.
No one has seen him there, so who knows where he is? Even the USA lost track of him if they erroneously tipped off European countries that Snowden was on Boliva's presidential plane.
You are assuming the US erroneously tipped of European countries. It could also have been a calculated action to signal to Bolivia of things to come if they mess with the US. If so, the US should rework the math, because it doesn't seem to have worked out as planned and raised the ire of many neutral allies and countries.
Here is a solution for Snowden. Get to South America via China. China is big enough and scary enough that not too many people are going to mess with a diplomatic flight from them. If the US does try, China controls enough of the US economy that it can really play havoc with it. Sino-Russian relations are pretty good today and Chinese investment/support in Russia could easily replace any lost from the US.
Yes, the US wants Snowden back, but they are playing a really dangerous game in the way they are trying to do it. Much more revealing than any information Snowden might have released is the extent that the US will go to silence him. Hell, for most people in the US, the whole Snowden afair was old news until the US had diplomatic flights diverted.
I have no doubt that the US will eventually get Snowden, the questions is how big of a martyr will the make him before that happens. What was a minor embarrasment in leaked secrets that everybody new was going on has escalated into Snowden being treated like public enemy number one. Meanwhile, the really bad people are laughing as they plot their next moves in relative obscurity.
It was a test to see how they would react if they want to get Snowden to safety. Leak false information and see if the plane would get into trouble.
I to have to wonder if Snowden pulled a counter-intel move, knowing that the NSA was listening in on some conversations and deliberately fed them misinformation to provoke a reaction.
Whether Snowden simply pulled their chain or they are so bumbling incompetent that with their $50B/year budget the NSA can't figure out if a guy has boarded a plane in the Moscow airport - it sure makes them look massively incompetent.
If it was Snowden, it is unlikely that Morales would be threatening to close the US embasy. More likely, the leak came through the intelligence community and it backfired bolstering Snowden's support from countries that were otherwise trying to stay neutral.
But once you start diverting diplomatic flights in violation of international law, people get upset. What has happened is however the leak originated, it has opened the door for Snowden to be placed on a diplomatic flight.
He doesn't want to take a boat...... too easy for the boat to be boarded in international water....
With a plane, you can attempt to force it to land with threats of shooting it down, but there is less chance that the US would actually shot down a plan killing him than of them boarding a vessel in international waters to take him.
Maybe Russia ought to send him to the International Space Station. That would really poke at the USA and there's nothing the USA can do about it since we've failed to maintain our space program so it's not like they can send the CIA after him, and the 3 Russian crewmembers can keep him safe during his stay. Then after he leaves the ISS, they can just have the Soyuz touch down in Venezuela.
It would actually be kind of amusing to see the USA's reaction to Snowden sitting aboard the ISS, releasing a new classified document each day.
To get to the ISS, Russia would first have to let him into the country. If they were going to do that, then he wouldn't be stuck in the internantional hall at the airport, effectively not in any country.
All it takes is one of those countries, assuming they have an embassy in Russia to charter a diplomatic flight and let him on the plane. There may not be direct flights from Moscow and they may divert commercial flights, but diverting or dissallowing diplomatic flights would be serious business.
Obviously you haven't tried to take source code written for GTK2 and recompile it agains GTK3. It may not be magically broken, but it is definitley broken.
I've heard the Gtk3 devs are actively trying to prevent their stuff from being used outside of apps intended for GNOME 3 itself.
Not sure how true that is though.
I don't think that the Gtk3 devs are trying to prevent others from using their stuff, but Gtk3 is actively being developed to suppoert Gnome 3 and particularly gnome-shell. As such, there are lost of changes from one release to the next of Gtk3 that are not backward compatible. That is fine for Gnome 3, but not for others trying to use the libs.
It is anticipated that eventually, the changes will settle down and things will stabalize, but right now, GTK3 is a moving target. Since desktop environments like LXDE and Xfce don't have large development teams, it's hard for them to make a new release to keep up with the Gnome 3/Gtk3 release schedule.
I already have QT and such installed on my LXDE machine due to a couple of KDE apps I fell in love with. They work fine under Openbox/LXDE, so shouldn't be much of a problem to convert over to the new QT based DE.
The problem isn't running QT based apps under Openbox/LXDE. The problem is rewriting LXDE componets to use QT to draw to the screen instead of GTK2. They are basically rewriting the panels and all the other components to call QT libraries instead of GTK2 libraries.
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If the point was to make Americans aware of NSA oversteps there was a way to do that without threatening to give away national security secrets to the Chinese and Russians.
Snowden is clearly a bit of a fool. I feel for the guy and don't think he did this with malice. But he's basically playing with high voltage wiring and should surprise no one if he gets badly burned by this move. First rule of playing with high voltage wiring... Be careful. Failing that... make a good will.
There is no evidence that he gave any national security secrets to the Chinese of the Russians (or that he has any national security secrets at all). If you believe the NSA, all snowden had acces to was meta-data. Even if he had real data, Do you really think that the Russians and Chinese aren't aware that we spy on them?
Keep in mind that there is a full blown propaganda machine in force against him right now to get people on the side of the government. The NSA, by it's very inception, is about deception. Who knows what leaks are from Snowden or an NSA smokescreen?
Maybe the slide in the polls for Snowden isn't apathy (although I'm sure that's some of it), but instead all of these new leaks. At first he was a whistle blower telling the American people that their government was spying on them and he had wide support. But now, the leaks are about foreign governments and people don't think that is right.
Here is the question. When Snowden first went public, both he and the NSA said that he didn't have the kind of information that has been leaked lately that has discredited him. So, either he and the NSA both lied or one of them is telling the truth and the other is intentionally leaking non-critical information to make him look bad.
While I have no reason to trust Snowden. I have even less to trust a government who a month before he went public proclaimed that it was not gathering intelligence information on the American public. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again?
I think they would. They could even get the Europeans involved to take the blame again and not explicitly even mention them. The only thing they might do differently is double check their intelligence info next time. All the US has to do is quietly ask the Europeans to do it and ask them not to admit that they were the ones who asked. They cannot be officially blamed without proof and there won't be any.
The flaw in that theory is that it violates international law and they would effectively be asking their European allies to take the fall for them. There would have to be a pretty good reward to risk sanctions from other countries.
The US did not stop or search the plane. The countries denying airspace also admitted the US did not request any such action. If the US really wanted this guy what makes anyone think Venezuela or Bolivia can stop a military snatch and grab? The US certainly had no qualms about going into Pakistan to get what they wanted and Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a sizable army backed up by armed militants spread across the country just looking to kill an American. If Snowden returned to the US he would have a very public trial where his guilt would be assessed. He cannot be disappeared. He would have an opportunity to go before a jury and make his case. If his actions and intentions are so admirable it should be no problem getting the jury to find him not guilty. However, if he keeps releasing information about US foreign intelligence operations that have nothing to do with capturing data of US citizens he will be seen and treated as a traitor to his country. He is undoing any good that he may have achieved with outing the US domestic spying programs. Those looking to put his head on a spike would bolster their arguments and criticisms.
If he is the one releasing that data. According to his own claims and the original NSA reports, he didn't have data on foreign intelligence operations. So, could the release of foreign intelligence operations be a misdirect keep him from being seen as a hero to the american public? It wouldn't be the first time the government tried to disgrace somebody with misinformation, nor would it be the last (assuming it that it is actually happening).
Never trust eyewitness, because from the actual photos that are online the wings seem very much attached to the plane. The tail is missing and the top is burned out, though.
It may speed up adoption of FOSS (or homegrown) by other countries.
Though OTOH, I can't imagine any of them would have been blind enough not to see this coming.
As for terrorists, didn't aQ switch from cell phones to couriers about a decade ago? Anyone who gets found out on the basis of the activities we now know about is either careless or stupid.
That's the joke (if there is one) evidently everybody but congress and the American people new this was going on. And yes, aQ quit using cell phones once they figured out they could be tracked and monitored by them. The data-mining that the NSA is doing is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The problem is that the people that the NSA and others are really worried about are smart enough not to leave needles in a haystack.
Most of these programs were not started by the government and then farmed out to contractors. Most of them went the otherway around where contracts sold the idea to bureaucrats. NSA, CIA and whatever other As may be out there all use electronic surveilance, but their most reliable and prized source are feet on the ground. Always has been, always will be.
Please tell me you're not a software developer.
If you think the problem to be solved is as simple as making it easy for users to install PGP and create a keypair, you're like a contractor who pours a foundation and then declares he's just completed a skyscraper.
No, he's like a government security contractor who doesn't screen employees walking out for usb keys.
The more people that encrypted trivial bullshit, the more they need to store and the longer it'll take them to crack it at any point in the future. And the less likely it is that they'll be able to pay attention to everybody.
Remember, the time it takes them to crack thousands of LOL cat videos is time they don't have to crack things we actually care about.
Unless such a strategy just gets you on their watch list and since you now are exhibiting suspicious behaviour, they take more drastic measures. Your choice.
That's an easy answer, Mr. Betteridge: no, it won't. (People are way too much comfortable with not being careful about their privacy, otherwise the whole Facebook thingy would never have gotten off the ground. Now you're asking them to become techno-savvy just because of privacy reasons?)
Facebook got off the ground because it was about where the next party was and who wanted to hook up. Sex and alcohol trump privacy every time.
Yep. If you've been following the news, you'll notice that it's all about catching Snowden, and not about the massive NSA surveillance program. Most people just don't care about it, and the media sure isn't helping by focusing on Snowden to the exclusion of everything else.
I'm sure that ultimately, we'll get some law to "increase oversight on the NSA" that will have no teeth, the NSA will go back to spying on all communications it possibly can, and Snowden will get to discover the true meaning of "extraordinary rendition."
The irony is that most of the information into what the NSA was doing didn't come from Snowden. All Snowden basically said was that the NSA intercepted calls and emails and gave specific examples. The talking heads on the networks like Faux News and MissingNBC then went on to explain the details of how the NSA actually did it and even tried to justify it by comparing what they data-mined compared to Google.
Snowden just blew the whistle. The talking heads explained the playbook and yet Snowden is the one in trouble. Go figure.
"I won't. I don't care at all."
Hi, nice to find you here. I sent you the truecrypt container with the bomb plans you requested and also the location of those 27 tons of fertilizer to your secret email address. It's the usual password.
Omar
While you post in jest (at least I hope), the scary part is that with six degrees of separation, all of us are not too far removed from somebody who actually did do something like that. In the US it used to be innocent until proven guilty. Now it is guilt by association, particularly where terrorism is involved and the definition of terrorism changes daily to justify all sorts of actions.
No one has seen him there, so who knows where he is? Even the USA lost track of him if they erroneously tipped off European countries that Snowden was on Boliva's presidential plane.
You are assuming the US erroneously tipped of European countries. It could also have been a calculated action to signal to Bolivia of things to come if they mess with the US. If so, the US should rework the math, because it doesn't seem to have worked out as planned and raised the ire of many neutral allies and countries.
I think it's more likely that Bolivia was deliberating screwing with the USA by quickly ushering a hooded, sunglassed man on the plane or loading a suspiciously human sized box at the last minute, just to see who was watching and see if they could make a fool out of someone. If that was their plan, it seems like they succeeded.
Regardless, the US violated international law by forcing the plane to land and searching it. That would be no different than a country forcing Air Force One to land and searching it. Diplomatic planes are considered sovereign territory. Back in 2001, the US made that exact argument against the Chinese who had detained a US plane.
diverting or dissallowing diplomatic flights would be serious business.
Bolivia would like a word with you.
That's my point, exactly. Look at the ruckus it caused. Would the US really try that again? If the US keeps interefering with diplomatic travel, which is against international law, it won't be long before foreign airspace is closed off to US diplomats. Bolivia is already threatening to close the US embassy there.
No one has seen him there, so who knows where he is? Even the USA lost track of him if they erroneously tipped off European countries that Snowden was on Boliva's presidential plane.
You are assuming the US erroneously tipped of European countries. It could also have been a calculated action to signal to Bolivia of things to come if they mess with the US. If so, the US should rework the math, because it doesn't seem to have worked out as planned and raised the ire of many neutral allies and countries.
Here is a solution for Snowden. Get to South America via China. China is big enough and scary enough that not too many people are going to mess with a diplomatic flight from them. If the US does try, China controls enough of the US economy that it can really play havoc with it. Sino-Russian relations are pretty good today and Chinese investment/support in Russia could easily replace any lost from the US.
Yes, the US wants Snowden back, but they are playing a really dangerous game in the way they are trying to do it. Much more revealing than any information Snowden might have released is the extent that the US will go to silence him. Hell, for most people in the US, the whole Snowden afair was old news until the US had diplomatic flights diverted.
I have no doubt that the US will eventually get Snowden, the questions is how big of a martyr will the make him before that happens. What was a minor embarrasment in leaked secrets that everybody new was going on has escalated into Snowden being treated like public enemy number one. Meanwhile, the really bad people are laughing as they plot their next moves in relative obscurity.
It was a test to see how they would react if they want to get Snowden to safety. Leak false information and see if the plane would get into trouble.
I to have to wonder if Snowden pulled a counter-intel move, knowing that the NSA was listening in on some conversations and deliberately fed them misinformation to provoke a reaction.
Whether Snowden simply pulled their chain or they are so bumbling incompetent that with their $50B/year budget the NSA can't figure out if a guy has boarded a plane in the Moscow airport - it sure makes them look massively incompetent.
If it was Snowden, it is unlikely that Morales would be threatening to close the US embasy. More likely, the leak came through the intelligence community and it backfired bolstering Snowden's support from countries that were otherwise trying to stay neutral.
But once you start diverting diplomatic flights in violation of international law, people get upset. What has happened is however the leak originated, it has opened the door for Snowden to be placed on a diplomatic flight.
He doesn't want to take a boat...... too easy for the boat to be boarded in international water....
With a plane, you can attempt to force it to land with threats of shooting it down, but there is less chance that the US would actually shot down a plan killing him than of them boarding a vessel in international waters to take him.
Maybe Russia ought to send him to the International Space Station. That would really poke at the USA and there's nothing the USA can do about it since we've failed to maintain our space program so it's not like they can send the CIA after him, and the 3 Russian crewmembers can keep him safe during his stay. Then after he leaves the ISS, they can just have the Soyuz touch down in Venezuela.
It would actually be kind of amusing to see the USA's reaction to Snowden sitting aboard the ISS, releasing a new classified document each day.
To get to the ISS, Russia would first have to let him into the country. If they were going to do that, then he wouldn't be stuck in the internantional hall at the airport, effectively not in any country.
All it takes is one of those countries, assuming they have an embassy in Russia to charter a diplomatic flight and let him on the plane. There may not be direct flights from Moscow and they may divert commercial flights, but diverting or dissallowing diplomatic flights would be serious business.
Then you need to define "excessive" which is a subjective term.
No, I don't, actually, but if I were doing a research project to study the subject, then I would.
Skype?
I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.
Ironically, didn't Gtk (and Gnome) come from disatisfaction with the original license QT was released under years ago (and since remedied)?
GTK+ 2.x apps aren't magically breaking and GTK+ 3.x apps won't magically break either.
Obviously you haven't tried to take source code written for GTK2 and recompile it agains GTK3. It may not be magically broken, but it is definitley broken.
I've heard the Gtk3 devs are actively trying to prevent their stuff from being used outside of apps intended for GNOME 3 itself.
Not sure how true that is though.
I don't think that the Gtk3 devs are trying to prevent others from using their stuff, but Gtk3 is actively being developed to suppoert Gnome 3 and particularly gnome-shell. As such, there are lost of changes from one release to the next of Gtk3 that are not backward compatible. That is fine for Gnome 3, but not for others trying to use the libs.
It is anticipated that eventually, the changes will settle down and things will stabalize, but right now, GTK3 is a moving target. Since desktop environments like LXDE and Xfce don't have large development teams, it's hard for them to make a new release to keep up with the Gnome 3/Gtk3 release schedule.
I already have QT and such installed on my LXDE machine due to a couple of KDE apps I fell in love with. They work fine under Openbox/LXDE, so shouldn't be much of a problem to convert over to the new QT based DE.
The problem isn't running QT based apps under Openbox/LXDE. The problem is rewriting LXDE componets to use QT to draw to the screen instead of GTK2. They are basically rewriting the panels and all the other components to call QT libraries instead of GTK2 libraries.
Need I say more?