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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

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Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#241

Post by [deleted] »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #230
rosser wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I downvoted both your and your parent's comments, not for saying disparaging things about Obama, his record, his hawkishness (many of which criticisms I quite eagree with), or anything otherwise negative about him , but rather for saying that HN is a place where that stuff is wrongthink. Disagreement isn't persecution.

So you downvoted _my_ experience? -Time and again? On NH? Because my experience is "wrong"? Oh. I see. I wish had a reply for that but I can't even get my head wrapped around the irony and the absurdity.

[deleted]

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#242

Post by snowden_report »

apexalpha wrote: post #53

I can't speak for the US but this man has shifted so much of the political debate in my country and I think also in the EU in general. If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. After Snowden no one could ignore you anymore and privacy is an aspect in any public debate.

Much discussion on this topic relies on popular sentiment and media reporting. The redacted and declassified Congressional report should be considered a primary source and contradicts many common beliefs about Mr. Snowden: https://www.congress.gov/114/crpt/hrpt891/CRPT-114hrpt891.pd...

The Executive Summary provides a good overview.

In contrast to the Amazon book page that claims he helped "build" the system, it appears he was primarily a system administrator responsible for tasks such as patching and file transfers.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#243

Post by dahdum »

kerkeslager wrote: post #170
outside1234 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are kidding right? The whole cold war?

During the Cold War, the US government did a lot of things which were extraordinarily harmful to US Citizens and contributed nothing to fighting Soviet totalitarianism. Soviet totalitarianism was certainly a threat, but US repsonses to Soviet totalitarianism were often counterproductive. There's a strong argument to be made that the US government did more harm to US citizens during the Cold War than the Soviets ever…

> There's a strong argument to be made that the US government did more harm to US citizens during the Cold War than the Soviets ever did. I'd be open to hearing evidence that the NSA was an exception, but you certainly haven't presented any.

What harm do you claim the NSA did to Americans in that time? Their mandate is foreign surveillance, and while citizens do get caught in their net (especially with foreign contacts), it's not their focus.

I can think of a couple, but they seem relatively limited?

a) Surveillance revealing domestic crimes that were prosecuted through parallel construction.

b) American businesses benefiting from NSA intelligence gathering, through politicians passing along information.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#244

Post by loup-vaillant »

slg wrote: post #176
empath75 wrote: post #138

I think the administration badly, badly mishandled Snowden and Assange, and allowed Russia to coopt them by isolating and threatening them. If they had treated them as whistleblowers and journalists (even if they had nefarious motivations), they could have kept them in "the west" instead of driving them into the arms of Russia. I don't believe that Assange was a Russian agent at the beginning but he was surely one by…

I think you do Snowden a disservice when you lump him in with Assange. Snowden you can easily argue is a whisleblower. You can't argue that with Assange since he doesn't have first hand knowledge of what he is leaking and instead actively recruits people to feed him information to leak. He also seemingly encourages people to commit crimes to get more information for him. Snowden did that all himself. In addition, Ass…

> I think you do Snowden a disservice when you lump him in with Assange.

Correct. Snowden is a Whistle-blower. Assange is a journalist, though perhaps not the kind Snowden would have trusted his stolen data with.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#245

Post by acollins1331 »

davidw wrote: post #127
penagwin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $400 per year in time and money to file a tax return That number seems pretty high unless you have very complicated income (in which case you likely have a lot of money too) Also worth mentioning is that Foreign Income is taxed differently, so while you technically still have to pay taxes, I believe for most people who work mostly in a foreign country don't have to pay very much.

> complicated Yes, like, say, having an accountant that can read and understand your taxes where you live in Italy and then use that information to file US taxes. And of course they'll need to understand the tax treaty between the two countries so you don't end up paying extra. Of course it's complicated and a huge pain in the ass! And that's with a relatively normal, stable, well-established country with a lot of US…

You do know you can file your own taxes for free (or very little $) online if you can read?

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#246

Post by jascii »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #193
jascii wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems good practice not to assume there are no other ways to id/fingerprint a device then by mac address..

That's actually the opposite of good practice; good practice in security is to base your planning off of facts and research. Throwing away your whole setup after every gig works for Mission: Impossible, and I guess it makes people feel extra-super-ninja, in practice it just perpetuates the endless (and pointless) culture of I-know-something-you-don't. Opsec should be based on reality and threat modeling, not endless…

That really is the difference between "proven secure" vs "not proven insecure", which would you consider best practice? As far as fingerprinting WiFi devices goes: It is an rf device and all rf devices vary in behaviour due to component tolerances. This shows in such things as spurious emissions, power variations across its transmission spectrum, oscillator drift, etc, etc. These are fairly easy to detect remotely. One example is shown in this paper: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/infocom18_wireless_finge...

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#247

Post by wolco »

madengr wrote: post #210
slg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you do Snowden a disservice when you lump him in with Assange. Snowden you can easily argue is a whisleblower. You can't argue that with Assange since he doesn't have first hand knowledge of what he is leaking and instead actively recruits people to feed him information to leak. He also seemingly encourages people to commit crimes to get more information for him. Snowden did that all himself. In addition, Ass…

Snowden also leaked everything he had. It certainly was not targeted.

Everything was 100% vetted through two respected journalist. They decided what to leak and when and what to protect. Very well done by any standard.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#248

Post by slg »

reallydude wrote: post #224
slg wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign citizens? I was a big fan of Snowden until he started doing that. That isn't whistleblowing against Constitutional violations and seemed to indicate a shift in his objectives. It now appears that he is just against US spying at large, which is a perfectly acceptable political opinion to have, but it doesn't justify whis…

> What are the motives for leaking information regarding our actions on foreign soil against foreign citizens? 1. Removing plausible deniability. "Well we might be deeply involved in domestic surveillance but we certainly don't do it outside the US!". The laws that enabled the NSA to do the surveillance were attributed to accessing data that traveled outside the US. 2. Demonstrating the power and reach for legitimacy…

1. They don't need plausible deniability because they wouldn't deny they are spying on foreign nationals. Every world power spies on foreign nationals. The controversy that Snowden revealed is that they are spying on their own citizens, spying on foreign citizens is already known and accepted as a reality of modern politics.

2. No one was really questioning the plausibility or legitimacy of the documents Snowden released (there was some challenges on the interpretation of those documents) and revealing unconfirmed and unrelated intelligence operations does nothing to confirm the information about the domestic operations that he released.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#249

Post by rosser »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #234
rosser wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I downvoted both your and your parent's comments, not for saying disparaging things about Obama, his record, his hawkishness (many of which criticisms I quite eagree with), or anything otherwise negative about him , but rather for saying that HN is a place where that stuff is wrongthink. Disagreement isn't persecution.

> "...disparaging things about Obama..." When we start using the word disparaging to describe facts and truth we are ALL in a lot of trouble. So as well-meaning as you believe you might have been with your downvote, you wording has only confirmed the general problem / bias. Irony that just pointing these things out will get more DVs is Chapelle-funny.

So the part where I actually agree with many of the concerns about the man and his administration is ... what? Noise? Doesn't matter, because I didn't use the "right" word?

Real talk: we haven't even begun unpacking the ironies here, dude.

EDIT: No, that's not an invitation. This conversation isn't going anywhere useful to anyone, and I have both a meeting, and deadlines. Have a good day.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#250

Post by scarejunba »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #193
jascii wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems good practice not to assume there are no other ways to id/fingerprint a device then by mac address..

That's actually the opposite of good practice; good practice in security is to base your planning off of facts and research. Throwing away your whole setup after every gig works for Mission: Impossible, and I guess it makes people feel extra-super-ninja, in practice it just perpetuates the endless (and pointless) culture of I-know-something-you-don't. Opsec should be based on reality and threat modeling, not endless…

I actually recycle my entire person after each pen test attempt to prevent people from cottoning on to each body’s unique tics.
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