This really depends on the type of encryption used, and if the key can be discovered. When you discuss cryptanalysis from a math position, you have ideas like "this is a known plaintext attack- we know the first X bytes of the message, can we recover the rest of the message, or the key?" and so on down the list. If something is encrypted with a symmetric key- for instance, AES 128, or Serpent, or Twofish- then the odds of recovering the data given just the key, or a plaintext sample, seem hopeless.
But if you are asking from the perspective of law enforcement, you have a great deal of other options for not having to fight that mathematically impossible fight- you might be able to look at other communications, or exploit a weakness in the design of the sender or receiver, etc. You could keylog them, or put listen to their conversation with a microphone, etc.
To answer your question generally- no, the NSA could not decrypt the information of only targets. If you go get Veracrypt (or Truecrypt, or LUKS, or anything else using a block cipher), make a drive with it, and then never screw up your security, it would be beyond the current hypothesized resources of humanity to ever recover the data. If you died with a secret that would change society for the better in that drive, it would be more reasonable to cryopreserve your brain, because it's likely that within the next few millenia someone will learn how to read data out of a frozen human brain, and get the key that way- that would be a more effective way to get the key than trying to break the crypto.
So no, the NSA couldn't just focus their computing power on just targets and get to read everything they do, even assuming targets could be chosen with exact accuracy. The fact that the government knew that something was suspicious about most terrorists before they terrorize is generally something in their favor- but it skips that there are quite a few people who wish us harm at any given time, most of whom never get the chance or simply never turn their politics and rhetoric into violence.
Now, what the feds could *maybe* do, that more Americans *might* be ok with, is to greatly dial up their amount of targeted surveillance of suspected foreign nationals. While probably better for privacy than the "wide net" that we see, this obviously has other issues- not only is this extraordinarily expensive in ways that databases are not, but it is also fraught with privacy concerns as well, just not the exact same ones.
> I've been custom building PC since the 90's and haven't had driver issues on PC in **years.** Stop buying cheap-ass parts.
Dude, parent is talking about budget PCs, and you say not to get cheap parts. If you have to do a huge amount of research to get your video drivers to work correctly, that's an argument in favor of consoles for this application.
The whole thing is about gaming in a living room and whatnot, and you're suggesting a HOTAS setup? Yes, if you fucking need Elite Dangerous, you need a goddamned PC. No console will ever do that. But *that is not the topic at hand*!!!
Poster says: "The kids want Fallout 4, and I want Star Wars Battlefront and any version of Gran Turismo."
You say "Buy an SNES or an NES ".
First, it's "a SNES".
Second and more relevantly, what the fuck kinda grinch are you? If the demand is for Fallout, why would you recommend a system from the 80s or 90s? That's nuts!
Note that current kids- who, like we when we were younger, tend to have more time than games- will play the fuck out of a new title just as we did SMB3 or w/e.
As a note, if you have Wii-U, your kids (or you) can play the games on the pad while the TV is used to display whatever romance dramedy is totes pop, or whatever.
If the games are multiplatform, you buy the more powerful hardware or the one with more units shipped. The PS4 is both of those, so for a multiplatform game it is correct just on that.
The games will be designed for the most powerful platform or the one with the more units shipped. The other platform will receive ports of varying quality.
It's worth considering a PC, for the reasons you list. But PCs are also a pain in the dick in the way that even a console that wants to always communicate to the mothership can't touch. Never had a video driver error an any console, for instance. Star Wars Battlefront on my PS4 is a video game- on a PC, it insists you install Origin, which does god only knows what (it used to literally scan your drive and upload parts of it to EA), and spams you with ads. PC gaming supports split screen gaming terribly and infrequently, and each controller is its own bullshit to configure.
1)- Sony is not very evil right now. Sony supports the gaming industry. Even most of their evil is in part dedicated to the continuance of the business practice of many smaller studios. 2)- Microsoft is at peak evil right now. Microsoft tried to kill off the revenue streams of all the local mom-and-pop stores (and of course, Gamestop), they tried to have an always on camera be required, they tried to eliminate disks, they tried to make the Xbone dial in every day to ensure it wasn't being used in an unauthorized manner. They also have just a shit ton of ads. Just so many fucking ads. 3)- The PS4 is more powerful than the Xbone and has sold a shit lot more units (so many that Microsoft stopped reporting consoles sold). To a lot of people this doesn't make sense- you may not care if something is slightly more or less powerful, and you may not care about graphics, and you may not be concerned about who ELSE is playing which console. But in the console world, this has HUGE ramifications, because it controls what gets ported, what is the core product, etc. If the more powerful console is the most powerful, it means that games will be designed for it (or PC) and ported over as an afterthought, losing stuff in translation. It's not about who is better, or how many pixels you get to pix- it's about the games being designed and tested on the primary gaming machine, which is without question the PS4. 4)- Better hook to the Japanese developers. Microsoft doesn't have much presence in Japan, and treated them as an aftermarket, which means that the J developers give them the cold shoulder- the products will appear on the PS4 and be very well supported.
But let me say this: for powerful games, the PC is the way to go. For portable games, a tablet or a powerful phone is the way to go. For unique games, a Wii U or portable Nintendo is the way to go. The PS4 and the Xbone are both fighting over the "I'm your blu-ray and I play PC ports plus a few system specific titles". In that niche, I think PS4 does it right, and Xbone takes it on the chin. If Microsoft can go two console generations without trying to "embrace, extend, extinguish" all of console gaming, maybe I'll give them a second chance. But Halo isn't worth giving up the host of system specific titles that PS4 has, and Halo isn't worth giving up all of console gaming to Microsoft's ecosystem.
But do consider the Wii U. The games it has are not that common, but they are truly excellent.
I don't run Mac, and if I did I would not do the majority of my browsing in Safari. Interesting on ios, I can hold on a link and the context menu that pops up has "open in new window" (which is a tab, of course).
That being said, it's sad to hear that. That's a universally useful feature. And I am way too much a gamer princess to ever use anything but some fancy pants multibutton mouse that glows. I even have to stop mentioning which one willfully lest everyone think I'm some kind of shill:P
> Nearly all modern infinite progress indicators (computer, web, or mobile) fail because they use things like animated gifs or a separate thread to keep the indicator animation running, even when the task it's supposed to represent is stopped or slow.
Yea, I hate this. This is worse than no progress bar. "Oh, good, you managed to not break the computer so hard it can still update the monitor. Great status indicator:/ "
> The reason they got rid of progress bars in many cases is because they never figured out a good way of making them even remotely accurate.
I'd like them to work on that, not throw it out.
Progress bars are often very useful. The screwball exceptions are the ones that break it.
When I'm on Windows, I want to see a list of what it needs to do, maybe one I can scroll through. When I'm watching a Linux boot, I like that it gives me a list of completed elements and results, but I'd like a top level view too. When I'm on an Apple, I just wish it would tell me something.
One of my gripes is on ios games- when I log into them, after a few seconds, Game Center sees that I'm playing, and puts up a "sup yo" banner at the top of the screen. This, of course, obscures the buttons that live where Apple told them to.
> And in a sort of related issue, the recent revelation that Siri won't answer music related questions unless you have a current subscription to Apple's music service is both worrisome and telling about the direction that Apple is taking.
Can someone give me an example of this? Like, I can ask Siri who sang "the day the music died" and she does a web search and finds "American Pie" byDon McLlean. She also does a similar web search for the actual name of the song, "American Pie". I don't have an Apple Music subscription. What are the questions she won't answer? I was never really clear on it.
i've commented on this elsewhere, but what if a user is unfamiliar with google and thus could neither use it or look up the web address for it? the UI breaks and the user has to get help outside the UI. How is this intuitive, discoverable, or consistent?
Yes but how do you open the google page in the first place if you don't know the address? Or what if you're so off track that you need more than a single search engine to help?
> I find it funny that people are complaining about inscrutiable icons on a site where the very name of the site sounds like the command prompt.
We don't like the command prompt "because it's hard". We like it because it's easy, once you have paid the "tax" to learn it. It's the BEST way to interact with a computer for the MAJORITY of computing tasks. The exceptions are the ones that are in common consumer use- the ones everyone pretends are all that a computer is for.
Command prompts are self documenting, and let you chain outputs effortlessly.
For tasks that are best served on a GUI, we want them done in a way that is good and reasonable. Command prompts aren't some hard mode version of computing- they solve a problem correctly. We want the GUIs to do that too.
On the plus side, getting Siri to play a song by name works even without the Apple Music stuff- she can play anything in my list, just by me saying that.
On the minus side, I don't always want to talk to my mp3 player, nor am I always going to have to use server side processing just to figure out what song I'm requesting.
The ipod had a great interface, the current music thing has REALLY small buttons. Sure sure, I can ask Siri to play a song- but I don't always want to.
While I overall like ios, the usability changes are always puzzling, and you point out what I consider the worst: anything related to getting my music to play.
The ios side of things features this SUPER TINY progress bar, in a mode when that is likely to be your primary piece where you need precision interface. It's not obvious how to get the album art to pull up, and there's no way to make it full screen, or do anything cool, like cycle through album art pieces, or display a second one. It's difficult to set the repeat modes, and the stuff you might expect on that screen (take me to similar songs) isn't there- you had to make THAT choice way earlier or something. It seems like it is less featureful and useful than what we had a couple years ago.
Now, I'll offer this as a defense- you can just go get another music app. You can use something else as music, and it will even integrate with the lock screen interface. It's nice that there's that option, but nowhere else in the Apple ecosystem do you basically have to look elsewhere to get a decent GUI.
The flipside has NO redemption- itunes. To make your playlists and put them on the phone either takes itunes, or has some obscure workaround I never found. I tunes has a million buttons that make no sense, and you just have to memorize what the fuck is going on. "Ok, first I have to find the music library, which used to be somewhere else, then I can edit the *itunes* library, of which what goes on an individual device is a SUBSET of, and is invisible until I plug in the device, at which point a small rectangle appears on a toolbar that defaults to off, and I can click on THAT and then my options are..."
I mean, it's fully functional. It does everything I need. All the features are there, but none are next to each other, ever. And how to do stuff changes, and sometimes niche functions go away. "An itunes update is available!" ---->> "OH FUCK GOTTA RELEARN ALL MY SHIT"
Unlike the actual on-device apps, itunes can't be replaced (or I don't know how to). I can't sync from Linux. Since I don't own a mac, this means I have to boot Windows for games (a different drama, whatever) AND anything related to Apple. I get that they want to sell me a Mac and all, but that's a pretty low way of doing it.
There's many things that Apple does that are great. But the music interface has been super annoying for awhile, and it keeps changing to be silly. At some point, the few songs that I bought from Apple directly became handled as some other class, using their own album art, with odd little download icons- I was very glad that I didn't actually invest a lot of effort into buying stuff from them. Again, it's all there, but not at all easy to figure out what the heck to do- and it changes over time.
I think the article discusses stuff more generally, but the combination of itunes and the music player are definitely some easy pickings for complaints.
The Hobbit always struck me as a weak little brother to the power of the Lord of the Rings trilogy- a kid's book before he launched into what he really wanted to leave the world. While taking the one with the least content and turning it into a trilogy sounded silly to me (along with pretty much everyone), unlike the majority of Tolkein fans, I was *immediately* sold when I realized that the extra stuff he had added was to bring back characters I wanted to see a hell of a lot more of, and to highlight all the cool middle earth setting stuff. I knew they would probably never get rights to any other story in that universe again, and by turning the Hobbit into this trilogy- milking it for all it was worth- I got to see Orlando Bloom jump up a falling staircase of rocks. *And I loved that!*
If I had been of the opinion that The Hobbit was some masterpiece of literature in the same way I feel about the epic trilogy, maybe I would have been really cross. But I just don't. It was fun and had good production value and had great characters, and gradually walked through the storyline.
I know it's a minority opinion, but I just thought it was great.
I'm sure if they could get their hands on him, they would charge him with more, and much of that is debatable, but we are talking about a man who is famous because he disclosed classified information while he had an active clearance, and doing exactly that is against the law. There's no possible way for Snowden to be materially innocent of disclosing classified information, again, barring jury nullification or something really odd.
If it creates more liability on the part of the scammers, it increases their cost of doing business. That means less of it, and better penalties, right?
Slashdot Mirror
> From TFA, "As we’ve said before, a difficult transitional period is coming up for Firefox users...."
Nonsense, Pale Moon installation is effortless!
This really depends on the type of encryption used, and if the key can be discovered. When you discuss cryptanalysis from a math position, you have ideas like "this is a known plaintext attack- we know the first X bytes of the message, can we recover the rest of the message, or the key?" and so on down the list. If something is encrypted with a symmetric key- for instance, AES 128, or Serpent, or Twofish- then the odds of recovering the data given just the key, or a plaintext sample, seem hopeless.
But if you are asking from the perspective of law enforcement, you have a great deal of other options for not having to fight that mathematically impossible fight- you might be able to look at other communications, or exploit a weakness in the design of the sender or receiver, etc. You could keylog them, or put listen to their conversation with a microphone, etc.
To answer your question generally- no, the NSA could not decrypt the information of only targets. If you go get Veracrypt (or Truecrypt, or LUKS, or anything else using a block cipher), make a drive with it, and then never screw up your security, it would be beyond the current hypothesized resources of humanity to ever recover the data. If you died with a secret that would change society for the better in that drive, it would be more reasonable to cryopreserve your brain, because it's likely that within the next few millenia someone will learn how to read data out of a frozen human brain, and get the key that way- that would be a more effective way to get the key than trying to break the crypto.
So no, the NSA couldn't just focus their computing power on just targets and get to read everything they do, even assuming targets could be chosen with exact accuracy. The fact that the government knew that something was suspicious about most terrorists before they terrorize is generally something in their favor- but it skips that there are quite a few people who wish us harm at any given time, most of whom never get the chance or simply never turn their politics and rhetoric into violence.
Now, what the feds could *maybe* do, that more Americans *might* be ok with, is to greatly dial up their amount of targeted surveillance of suspected foreign nationals. While probably better for privacy than the "wide net" that we see, this obviously has other issues- not only is this extraordinarily expensive in ways that databases are not, but it is also fraught with privacy concerns as well, just not the exact same ones.
>> .... still use one. This makes me want to go get an iPhone.
> Why, isn't this the same policy they always had?
Correct, it has always been Blackberry policy to make you want to go get an iPhone.
> I've been custom building PC since the 90's and haven't had driver issues on PC in **years.** Stop buying cheap-ass parts.
Dude, parent is talking about budget PCs, and you say not to get cheap parts. If you have to do a huge amount of research to get your video drivers to work correctly, that's an argument in favor of consoles for this application.
The whole thing is about gaming in a living room and whatnot, and you're suggesting a HOTAS setup? Yes, if you fucking need Elite Dangerous, you need a goddamned PC. No console will ever do that. But *that is not the topic at hand*!!!
I avoid cloud services. Apple works fine without them. If I need to use cloud services, I'll have to get creative with 3rd party shizzledizzles.
It's pronounced "Xbone"
Poster says: "The kids want Fallout 4, and I want Star Wars Battlefront and any version of Gran Turismo."
You say "Buy an SNES or an NES ".
First, it's "a SNES".
Second and more relevantly, what the fuck kinda grinch are you? If the demand is for Fallout, why would you recommend a system from the 80s or 90s? That's nuts!
Note that current kids- who, like we when we were younger, tend to have more time than games- will play the fuck out of a new title just as we did SMB3 or w/e.
As a note, if you have Wii-U, your kids (or you) can play the games on the pad while the TV is used to display whatever romance dramedy is totes pop, or whatever.
If the games are multiplatform, you buy the more powerful hardware or the one with more units shipped. The PS4 is both of those, so for a multiplatform game it is correct just on that.
The games will be designed for the most powerful platform or the one with the more units shipped. The other platform will receive ports of varying quality.
It's worth considering a PC, for the reasons you list. But PCs are also a pain in the dick in the way that even a console that wants to always communicate to the mothership can't touch. Never had a video driver error an any console, for instance. Star Wars Battlefront on my PS4 is a video game- on a PC, it insists you install Origin, which does god only knows what (it used to literally scan your drive and upload parts of it to EA), and spams you with ads. PC gaming supports split screen gaming terribly and infrequently, and each controller is its own bullshit to configure.
Of the two, I'd recommend the PS4.
Here's my reasoning:
1)- Sony is not very evil right now. Sony supports the gaming industry. Even most of their evil is in part dedicated to the continuance of the business practice of many smaller studios.
2)- Microsoft is at peak evil right now. Microsoft tried to kill off the revenue streams of all the local mom-and-pop stores (and of course, Gamestop), they tried to have an always on camera be required, they tried to eliminate disks, they tried to make the Xbone dial in every day to ensure it wasn't being used in an unauthorized manner. They also have just a shit ton of ads. Just so many fucking ads.
3)- The PS4 is more powerful than the Xbone and has sold a shit lot more units (so many that Microsoft stopped reporting consoles sold). To a lot of people this doesn't make sense- you may not care if something is slightly more or less powerful, and you may not care about graphics, and you may not be concerned about who ELSE is playing which console. But in the console world, this has HUGE ramifications, because it controls what gets ported, what is the core product, etc. If the more powerful console is the most powerful, it means that games will be designed for it (or PC) and ported over as an afterthought, losing stuff in translation. It's not about who is better, or how many pixels you get to pix- it's about the games being designed and tested on the primary gaming machine, which is without question the PS4.
4)- Better hook to the Japanese developers. Microsoft doesn't have much presence in Japan, and treated them as an aftermarket, which means that the J developers give them the cold shoulder- the products will appear on the PS4 and be very well supported.
But let me say this: for powerful games, the PC is the way to go. For portable games, a tablet or a powerful phone is the way to go. For unique games, a Wii U or portable Nintendo is the way to go. The PS4 and the Xbone are both fighting over the "I'm your blu-ray and I play PC ports plus a few system specific titles". In that niche, I think PS4 does it right, and Xbone takes it on the chin. If Microsoft can go two console generations without trying to "embrace, extend, extinguish" all of console gaming, maybe I'll give them a second chance. But Halo isn't worth giving up the host of system specific titles that PS4 has, and Halo isn't worth giving up all of console gaming to Microsoft's ecosystem.
But do consider the Wii U. The games it has are not that common, but they are truly excellent.
I'm sorry to say all your post has done is remind me that I also want to see John Rhys-Davies hit more orcs to death.
I don't run Mac, and if I did I would not do the majority of my browsing in Safari. Interesting on ios, I can hold on a link and the context menu that pops up has "open in new window" (which is a tab, of course).
That being said, it's sad to hear that. That's a universally useful feature. And I am way too much a gamer princess to ever use anything but some fancy pants multibutton mouse that glows. I even have to stop mentioning which one willfully lest everyone think I'm some kind of shill :P
> Nearly all modern infinite progress indicators (computer, web, or mobile) fail because they use things like animated gifs or a separate thread to keep the indicator animation running, even when the task it's supposed to represent is stopped or slow.
Yea, I hate this. This is worse than no progress bar. "Oh, good, you managed to not break the computer so hard it can still update the monitor. Great status indicator :/ "
> The reason they got rid of progress bars in many cases is because they never figured out a good way of making them even remotely accurate.
I'd like them to work on that, not throw it out.
Progress bars are often very useful. The screwball exceptions are the ones that break it.
When I'm on Windows, I want to see a list of what it needs to do, maybe one I can scroll through.
When I'm watching a Linux boot, I like that it gives me a list of completed elements and results, but I'd like a top level view too.
When I'm on an Apple, I just wish it would tell me something.
One of my gripes is on ios games- when I log into them, after a few seconds, Game Center sees that I'm playing, and puts up a "sup yo" banner at the top of the screen. This, of course, obscures the buttons that live where Apple told them to.
> And in a sort of related issue, the recent revelation that Siri won't answer music related questions unless you have a current subscription to Apple's music service is both worrisome and telling about the direction that Apple is taking.
Can someone give me an example of this? Like, I can ask Siri who sang "the day the music died" and she does a web search and finds "American Pie" byDon McLlean. She also does a similar web search for the actual name of the song, "American Pie". I don't have an Apple Music subscription. What are the questions she won't answer? I was never really clear on it.
i've commented on this elsewhere, but what if a user is unfamiliar with google and thus could neither use it or look up the web address for it? the UI breaks and the user has to get help outside the UI. How is this intuitive, discoverable, or consistent?
Yes but how do you open the google page in the first place if you don't know the address? Or what if you're so off track that you need more than a single search engine to help?
> I find it funny that people are complaining about inscrutiable icons on a site where the very name of the site sounds like the command prompt.
We don't like the command prompt "because it's hard". We like it because it's easy, once you have paid the "tax" to learn it. It's the BEST way to interact with a computer for the MAJORITY of computing tasks. The exceptions are the ones that are in common consumer use- the ones everyone pretends are all that a computer is for.
Command prompts are self documenting, and let you chain outputs effortlessly.
For tasks that are best served on a GUI, we want them done in a way that is good and reasonable. Command prompts aren't some hard mode version of computing- they solve a problem correctly. We want the GUIs to do that too.
On the plus side, getting Siri to play a song by name works even without the Apple Music stuff- she can play anything in my list, just by me saying that.
On the minus side, I don't always want to talk to my mp3 player, nor am I always going to have to use server side processing just to figure out what song I'm requesting.
The ipod had a great interface, the current music thing has REALLY small buttons. Sure sure, I can ask Siri to play a song- but I don't always want to.
While I overall like ios, the usability changes are always puzzling, and you point out what I consider the worst: anything related to getting my music to play.
The ios side of things features this SUPER TINY progress bar, in a mode when that is likely to be your primary piece where you need precision interface. It's not obvious how to get the album art to pull up, and there's no way to make it full screen, or do anything cool, like cycle through album art pieces, or display a second one. It's difficult to set the repeat modes, and the stuff you might expect on that screen (take me to similar songs) isn't there- you had to make THAT choice way earlier or something. It seems like it is less featureful and useful than what we had a couple years ago.
Now, I'll offer this as a defense- you can just go get another music app. You can use something else as music, and it will even integrate with the lock screen interface. It's nice that there's that option, but nowhere else in the Apple ecosystem do you basically have to look elsewhere to get a decent GUI.
The flipside has NO redemption- itunes. To make your playlists and put them on the phone either takes itunes, or has some obscure workaround I never found. I tunes has a million buttons that make no sense, and you just have to memorize what the fuck is going on. "Ok, first I have to find the music library, which used to be somewhere else, then I can edit the *itunes* library, of which what goes on an individual device is a SUBSET of, and is invisible until I plug in the device, at which point a small rectangle appears on a toolbar that defaults to off, and I can click on THAT and then my options are..."
I mean, it's fully functional. It does everything I need. All the features are there, but none are next to each other, ever. And how to do stuff changes, and sometimes niche functions go away. "An itunes update is available!" ---->> "OH FUCK GOTTA RELEARN ALL MY SHIT"
Unlike the actual on-device apps, itunes can't be replaced (or I don't know how to). I can't sync from Linux. Since I don't own a mac, this means I have to boot Windows for games (a different drama, whatever) AND anything related to Apple. I get that they want to sell me a Mac and all, but that's a pretty low way of doing it.
There's many things that Apple does that are great. But the music interface has been super annoying for awhile, and it keeps changing to be silly. At some point, the few songs that I bought from Apple directly became handled as some other class, using their own album art, with odd little download icons- I was very glad that I didn't actually invest a lot of effort into buying stuff from them. Again, it's all there, but not at all easy to figure out what the heck to do- and it changes over time.
I think the article discusses stuff more generally, but the combination of itunes and the music player are definitely some easy pickings for complaints.
The Hobbit always struck me as a weak little brother to the power of the Lord of the Rings trilogy- a kid's book before he launched into what he really wanted to leave the world. While taking the one with the least content and turning it into a trilogy sounded silly to me (along with pretty much everyone), unlike the majority of Tolkein fans, I was *immediately* sold when I realized that the extra stuff he had added was to bring back characters I wanted to see a hell of a lot more of, and to highlight all the cool middle earth setting stuff. I knew they would probably never get rights to any other story in that universe again, and by turning the Hobbit into this trilogy- milking it for all it was worth- I got to see Orlando Bloom jump up a falling staircase of rocks. *And I loved that!*
If I had been of the opinion that The Hobbit was some masterpiece of literature in the same way I feel about the epic trilogy, maybe I would have been really cross. But I just don't. It was fun and had good production value and had great characters, and gradually walked through the storyline.
I know it's a minority opinion, but I just thought it was great.
No, but he's guilty though. Sure, the NEWS can't say that, but the only way he could be found innocent is jury nullification.
You can be pedantic, and of the HOST of crimes they will charge him with, some will be bullshit, but this one:
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/us...
He is UNAMBIGUOUSLY guilty of.
I'm sure if they could get their hands on him, they would charge him with more, and much of that is debatable, but we are talking about a man who is famous because he disclosed classified information while he had an active clearance, and doing exactly that is against the law. There's no possible way for Snowden to be materially innocent of disclosing classified information, again, barring jury nullification or something really odd.
If it creates more liability on the part of the scammers, it increases their cost of doing business. That means less of it, and better penalties, right?