Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims

The interview he's talking about [1] was posted here [2] and it really is extraordinary. I highly recommend watching all the videos—unfortunately, they carved it into pieces and you have to scroll down the page to get at them. But it's worth it. The transcript doesn't convey how dramatic the discussion was, or capture William Binney's muttered asides ("including content! including content!") or show the meaningful expressions on their faces, or how the others react as each one is talking. I found the whole thing riveting and I'm still surprised that USA Today put it together. Having all four of them around a table created something entirely more compelling than one-on-one interviews.

Edit: also, the transcript is incomplete and leaves out some of the best parts, such as Binney's story of how he called "Tom" (i.e. Drake, whose phone he knew was being tapped) to let the government know that he had evidence of malicious prosecution. Plus the endearing smile on his face as he points out that his prosecution was dropped after that.

USA Today should put up the whole unbroken discussion. Apart from the obviously important content and the obvious authoritativeness of the speakers, it's just a great piece of television—and it's not even television. It puts actual news TV to shame.

1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891101

Another good article from The Atlantic.

ps. Can they start using other photos of Snowden? I mean come on, is that the only one the media has?

"The idea that we have robust checks and balances is a myth."

Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.

This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.

Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.

He's also said repeatedly he wants the focus to be on his disclosures and the wrongdoing; NOT on him, how his girlfriend looks, etc. Using the same boring picture over-and-over is probably what he wants and appreciates.

On facial recognition: my understanding is that in addition to using data points that are relatively easy to change with makeup or surgery (cheekbone height, nose, etc), they use some that are not such as eyeball distance. However, could the eyeball based datapoints be tricked with specially crafted lenses in glasses frames?