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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

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Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#361

Post by rjf72 »

roenxi wrote: post #126
kareemm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate database, identifying you using photo recognition algorithms and your location using the home's address, and using that information to sell you things.

> using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happe…

It's ironic to see a comment like this in a thread on Snowden. It's remarkable how quick we are to forget about things such as PRISM [1]. PRISM is a government-corporate surveillance coop. Players include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many others. Capabilities described in slides never intended for public access indicate unilateral access by the NSA to "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.

Especially in modern society government and corporate interests are increasingly interweaving. And I'm no more comforted by governments having access to dystopic levels of personal information than I am by corporations having that access. It just so happens that, in practice, there's no difference anyhow.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#362

Post by loup-vaillant »

bdhess wrote: post #258
loup-vaillant wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think calling Assange a journalist is very debatable. He certainly doesn’t comply with the ethical norms of the profession.

How good a journalist he is is debatable. His ethics as a journalist may be debatable. His status as a (possibly bad, possibly unethical) journalist is much harder to debate: he set up a way to have information, which he then made public. Sounds like journalism to me.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#363

Post by slim »

roywiggins wrote: post #215
MiroF wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, I think the fact that you think both Snowden and Assange are Russian agents demonstrates that the administrations response was actually quite effective.

Calling him an "agent" is silly, but Snowden is living in Moscow at the pleasure of the Russian regime. It's hard to believe he's entirely free, or even substantially free, to do what he wants. It's pretty clear he never wanted to end up there. The US definitely screwed up by leaving him few other options. He's not an agent of Moscow, but he's not a free man either.

He's probably as free as he could be. Certainly more free than in US. Russia is scoring against US by simply letting Snowden live free. Then even if it will be hard for you to believe, some countries grant asylum to asylum seekers, simply to comply with international treaties

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#364

Post by snowden_report »

Bartweiss wrote: post #352
boomboomsubban wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was a system administrator with similar responsibilities for several years, and it was quite clear who the system architects were and who the maintainers were Both groups would have been necessary to build the a long term system. Beyond that, I don't see how his status while working for the intelligence sector is very important, and I've never gotten the impression Snowden was trying to boast about how achievement…

Amazon page blurb aside, I don't understand why this question comes up so often. Even during the initial revelations, people who wanted to downplay the topic regularly pointed out that Snowden was "just a system administrator, not an intelligence agent" and attempted to debate whether he worked directly for the government or only for a contractor. It baffled me, because that doesn't even seem relevant to his claims.…

That's an excellent point. Using the "only a sys admin" example was pretty weak. I just chose it quickly as one example of his trustworthiness level from the report. A better example would be that Mr. Snowden claims he began collecting files after James Clapper's testimony, but in fact he began 8 months earlier (third point in the Executive Summary, page iii).

My main takeaway form the report is that Mr. Snowden was misleading/dishonest about elements of his past and motivations. Read the report for other examples of his misrepresentations, mainly that he never reported his suspected abuse of government programs via established internal process and he took and shared material on much more than the programs he was concerned about.

The discussion of the programs themselves is certainly much bigger. I view these programs as the nuclear weapons of our age. It was inevitable that they would be created (with similar capabilities in the hands of other governments and corporations), and there is always the risk of misuse. While the US Government is not the ideal owner of these tools, I generally trust the USG more than other countries and corporations.

The problem with intelligence agencies is that you rarely hear of their successes, and almost always hear of their failures.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#365

Post by dredmorbius »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #358
dredmorbius wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can decide not to buy corporate products That's a fallacy by both choice and externality. There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement. Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She c…

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products "No choice" in the sense that you lose business, lose touch with your high school classmates, or are forced to go out and pick up your own food from the restaurant down the street? Or "no choice" in the sense that people show up at your door with guns? What a privilege it is to be able to casually use the same language to describe such…

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns.

Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns.

to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting

https://suntzusaid.com/book/3

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#366

Post by slg »

BeetleB wrote: post #338
slg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge ethical red flag for Assange and Wikileaks is their view on redacting documents. They published numerous details that a traditional journalistic outlet would never make public include the names of informants. This almost certainly resulted in people being killed.

> They published numerous details that a traditional journalistic outlet would never make public include the names of informants. Valerie Plame would like to have a word with you. If we keep going down this road we'd end up with No True Scotsman. The reality is "traditional" journalists have done this - Assange is not an outlier in this regard. If we tolerate the "worst" of the traditional (which US society clearly d…

>Valerie Plame would like to have a word with you.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "never", but the fact that the Valieria Plame reveal was such a big deal is basically the exception that proves the rule that it is highly unusual for a journalist to reveal this information.

Assange is certainly an outlier in the number of people who he exposed and the reason for exposing them. He reportedly said on the issue that "they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." [1] Maybe you think that is a No True Scotsman argument, but I really can't imagine a well respected journalist showing such a complete lack of concern for human life. A traditional journalist would generally required some reason of tremendous value to justify putting those people's lives at risk. Assange's reasoning instead appears to be "They deserve it."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_War_documents_leak#Info...

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#367

Post by halr9000 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #365
CamperBob2 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products "No choice" in the sense that you lose business, lose touch with your high school classmates, or are forced to go out and pick up your own food from the restaurant down the street? Or "no choice" in the sense that people show up at your door with guns? What a privilege it is to be able to casually use the same language to describe such…

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns. Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns. to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excel…

Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make. Healthcare is heavily regulated as we all know. This raises the barrier to entry to new competitors, and leads to a less dynamic market where the status quo can last a long long time. So you end up with only 1 or a very small number of medical devices (with the associated software) for a given situation.

I would expect that the greater debate on privacy will, over time, hopefully lead to some changes in how we are able to control the data generated by our bodies. Until that happens, I’m going to take the thing that saves my wife’s life with the potential for some shadiness or simple distaste at what may happen to her data, or, I might look at it as her voluntary consent which was fully given with her and my knowledge well ahead of time — helps to save others lives, and some loss of control of that data is actually quite noble.

As you might guess, I started at the abstract, but ended up at the concrete, and my wife really does have such a device, similar to your example. And I also work in big data analytics industry, and get involved in these sorts of discussions pretty often.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#368

Post by jascii »

dTal wrote: post #281
thelittleone wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed and cheap enough to throw away after each project for improved opsec.

Why would you care about opsec for consensual "penetration testing"?

Your security profile needs to exceed that set for the highest level of clearance you could possibly gain. In practice that means exceeding the highest level of security used in an organisation. You wouldn't want to inadvertently exfiltrate a clients data would you? Aside from that, it is not uncommon for say a department to not be aware they are being pen-tested with consent of their management, and you don't want to trigger counter measures.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#369

Post by CamperBob2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #365
CamperBob2 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products "No choice" in the sense that you lose business, lose touch with your high school classmates, or are forced to go out and pick up your own food from the restaurant down the street? Or "no choice" in the sense that people show up at your door with guns? What a privilege it is to be able to casually use the same language to describe such…

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns. Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns. to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excel…

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns.

But it was far too specific (and frankly too obscure) to serve as a general basis for argument. Pacemakers used to run on plutonium. Should that influence the larger debate over nuclear power versus fossil fuels?

If someone has to use a pacemaker or insulin pump that runs proprietary software, that's unfortunate as far as it goes, but the patient himself/herself is fundamentally fortunate to have that option. It would perhaps be better to focus on developing open-source alternatives than to rail against a particular manufacturer's policy... except the (captive) regulators will have something to say about that, won't they? Specifically, what they will have to say about the idea of an open-source pacemaker is "No."

What you are complaining about in this specific instance isn't corporate policy, but government policy. I'm actually very sympathetic to your argument, personally. I've made the point many times that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. But you need to be careful to identify the party who is actually forcing or denying choice.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#370

Post by boomboomsubban »

snowden_report wrote: post #364
Bartweiss wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon page blurb aside, I don't understand why this question comes up so often. Even during the initial revelations, people who wanted to downplay the topic regularly pointed out that Snowden was "just a system administrator, not an intelligence agent" and attempted to debate whether he worked directly for the government or only for a contractor. It baffled me, because that doesn't even seem relevant to his claims.…

That's an excellent point. Using the "only a sys admin" example was pretty weak. I just chose it quickly as one example of his trustworthiness level from the report. A better example would be that Mr. Snowden claims he began collecting files after James Clapper's testimony, but in fact he began 8 months earlier (third point in the Executive Summary, page iii). My main takeaway form the report is that Mr. Snowden was…

> A better example would be that Mr. Snowden claims he began collecting files after James Clapper's testimony, but in fact he began 8 months earlier (third point in the Executive Summary, page iii).

His claim was that testimony was the "breaking point" on the decision to leak, not download files, and soon after he agreed to publicly be named the source.

>mainly that he never reported his suspected abuse of government programs via established internal process and he took and shared material on much more than the programs he was concerned about.

It's his word vs theirs on whether he raised the issue before deciding to leak. And he knew there was a ton of unrelated data in what he leaked, that was why he privately gave it to reporters and didn't publicly post it.

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