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Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

m.guardian.co.uk

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Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#131

Post by fragsworth »

tokenadult wrote: post #65

It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and…

> the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence.

It's not difficult - if you haven't seen all the data. You encrypt the data with a large, randomly generated password, and give pieces of the password (without looking at it) to several people in different countries. You also tell them that they need to be 100% certain you're not being tortured to get the passwords from them.

If you're tortured, then you actually cannot reveal the data. You can reveal who has the password pieces, but if they're all in different countries it will be nearly impossible to get them. It would be easier to get the data directly from the U.S. government.

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#132

Post by tokenadult »

chc wrote: post #120
tokenadult wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he comes off as naive and more than a little pompous, but I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. This is my take too. If he had had more knowledge about the historical background of the other countries he has visited, and especially if he had STRONG knowledge of another language, he might view the position of the United States in these matters a bit differently, and might resolve the trade-offs about what t…

> I would take Snowden's claims more seriously in general if he were on United States soil preparing to face trial for his alleged wrongdoing, ready to bring forward any defenses he thinks he has to possible criminal charges. So in order for you to take Snowden's claims seriously, he has to either claim that what he did is legal or willingly go to prison for the rest of his life? That seems pretty irrational.

Martin Luther King, Jr. took a greater risk than that. So did the several freedom fighters in Taiwan I know personally, some of whom did hard prison time for leading peaceful public protests before Taiwan democratized. It takes people with a lot of courage to change tough situations.

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#133

Post by homosaur »

BWStearns wrote: post #84
tokenadult wrote: post #65

It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and…

" I can be appalled by some of what I read about the NSA without agreeing that Snowden is taking the best approach to doing something about that" This. Most of the people I have discussed this issue with have failed to separate the data that was revealed with the manner in which it was. Thank you for doing so.

Yeah, he probably should have used the channels so he could have been harassed and persecuted before the data was ever out. You do realize that the Obama administration has persecuted whistleblowers and created confidential materials at a rate never before seen in the US, right?

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#134

Post by betterunix »

bobo1357 wrote: post #79
betterunix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For legal purposes, sure, but if the people disagree with the court's decision there are ways to change things. We could amend the constitution, we could throw it out and write a new one, we could change the makeup of the court, etc. Legally the ultimate authority on the interpretation of the constitution rests with the Supreme Court, but the citizens of this nation are free to express what they want out of the const…

Yes, you're free to express what you want out of the Constitution but you're not free to break laws as interpreted by our federal courts. Unless the Constitution is amended, shouldn't we be following the rule of law and let the Court interpret the Constitution?

The problem with that approach is that it allows unjust laws to persist indefinitely. Every so often someone needs to stand up and refuse to play by the rules to ensure that unjust laws are repealed.

Look at the situation Snowden faced. You have a system that widely violates basic privacy rights, based on a secret interpretation of the law, approved by a secret court that only hears the executive branch's arguments and which almost never refuses to grant a warrant (i.e. it is a rubber stamp), with oversight by people who are chosen by the executive branch and who work in secret. These programs, conducted in secret, are widely approved of by the government and widely disapproved of by the general public. Had Snowden accepted the rules and the law, these programs would remain secret and would have continued unopposed indefinitely.

The rule of law does not work when laws are kept secret from everyone. Healthy societies need everyone to follow the law, yes, but they also need for people who recognize failures of the system to stand up despite laws that forbid them from doing so.

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#135

Post by pbreit »

DanBC wrote: post #59
pbreit wrote: post #48

Can anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA, using the tools that many of us would rather they not, "keeps us safe"? Are there specific incidents that have been avoided (that wouldn't have otherwise)? Is it just that we are generally "safer"?

> Can anyone provide some concrete examples about how the NSA In the UK GCHQ provides intel to the Ministry of Defence. MoD then uses that intel. The intel is secret, and thus we don't know if it has helped or not. The intel is also misused (see, for example, the "sexing up" of documents) or ignored. But in general you don't know what the spies are doing. It's the nature of spies. You could ask your representative po…

I just wonder how true that is or is it mostly just legacy behavior (we're a country so we gotta have spies, right?).

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#136

Post by scythe »

tokenadult wrote: post #65

It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and…

>I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.

Well, assuming that torture is an effective interrogation technique, the amount he can reveal is nonetheless limited by his own memory. It is quite possible that any datum critical enough to present a risk to national security if it were revealed is simultaneously too much for an ordinary person to remember -- e.g. a private key, an organizational plan, etc.

However, I fail to see a distinction between the potential capture and torture of Edward Snowden and the potential capture and torture of any other intelligence operative or official, particularly anyone in the CIA/NCS. Snowden is probably at greater risk of capture due to his notoriety, but this is really all the more reason for him to obtain asylum in a neutral country as soon as possible. If a country such as Germany were truly concerned about this, they could certainly enter him into a national witness-protection program with a new identity, making his involuntary debriefing all the more unlikely.

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#137

Post by ReidZB »

fragsworth wrote: post #131
tokenadult wrote: post #65

It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and…

> the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. It's not difficult - if you haven't seen all the data. You encrypt the data with a large, randomly generated password, and give pieces of the password (without looking at it) to several people in different countries. You also tell them that t…

If you're generating some truly-random "password", I'd call it a key instead. Just a minor terminological note.

Anyway, while that split-the-key scheme works, I wouldn't use it over one of the real secret sharing schemes cryptographers have developed, e.g. Shamir's secret sharing scheme [1]. If you just split a key and give pieces to different people, the more pieces of the key an enemy can collect, the easier time they will have when brute-forcing it.

On the other hand, Shamir's secret sharing scheme is an information-theoretically secure threshold scheme. That is, a key is broken up into n pieces and t of those pieces are required to reconstruct the secret. In Shamir's scheme, the enemy can collect t-1 pieces of the secret and still have no chance in reconstructing the password; it simply is impossible.

The scheme works off of the idea that an m-degree polynomial is uniquely defined by m+1 points. For example, here's a point from a 1-degree polynomial (line), which would model a t=2 scheme: (1,4). Can you figure out the y-intercept? (Actually, Shamir's scheme uses finite fields, but I think asking this question drives the point home.)

So, generate a key, split it up into a bunch of pieces, and require a threshold of those pieces to be present. Coercion-free and even if an intelligence agency can compromise many pieces, they still can't do anything until they've hit the threshold. Also, if you want to require all pieces present, just set t=n.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#138

Post by b_emery »

dantheman wrote: post #60
brown9-2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that work though? Wouldn't it mean that in order to access the info he is talking about, you need something more than knowledge he has in his head - like physical access to something? But then, in the worst case scenario - how could Snowden access it himself if he needs the documents?

A very simple way to achieve something like this is to generate a random password, print it out and give half to someone else. Then you need 2 people to access the file.

Similar suggestion to what's proposed here:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_securit...

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#139

Post by jivatmanx »

tokenadult wrote: post #65

It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and…

"Some aspects of Snowden's story do NOT look like a thoughtful plan to defend freedom and fair play around the world, but rather a haphazard rash move by Snowden to see what he can get away with."

I think you're enormously overestimating the capacity for planning that any single individual could be capable of. Jason Bourne exists in the movies, not in real life.

Re: Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

#140

Post by vidarh »

tokenadult wrote: post #132
chc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would take Snowden's claims more seriously in general if he were on United States soil preparing to face trial for his alleged wrongdoing, ready to bring forward any defenses he thinks he has to possible criminal charges. So in order for you to take Snowden's claims seriously, he has to either claim that what he did is legal or willingly go to prison for the rest of his life? That seems pretty irrational.

Martin Luther King, Jr. took a greater risk than that. So did the several freedom fighters in Taiwan I know personally, some of whom did hard prison time for leading peaceful public protests before Taiwan democratized. It takes people with a lot of courage to change tough situations.

That doesn't invalidate the efforts of those who are not willing to take quite as extreme risks.
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