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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

#141

Post by orblivion »

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…

I think you'd have to give some of those key pieces to sociopaths for this to be foolproof. Otherwise they could torture you until you reveal contact information for each of the pieces. Then they can contact each of the people, and show a live video stream of you being tortured and play on their sympathy to give up the piece of key.

Though I guess having a live video stream of you being tortured wouldn't be in the best interests of the person doing the deed. Maybe that's the catch that makes it work?

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

#143

Post by MikeCapone »

Sometimes I wonder if the intelligence community doesn't have people who's sole job is to write comments on websites/forums to help shape public opinion. It would be something fairly trivial for them to do and help further their interests...

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

#144

Post by gngeal »

ReidZB wrote: post #137
fragsworth wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Funny thing is, when he suggested splitting the key, I assumed that this is what he had in mind.

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

#145

Post by moistgorilla »

wavefunction wrote: post #119
ambientwhsiper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, SP-117 is extremely effective. FSB or any other intelligence service have ways to make people talk. Such naïveté.

You're ignoring that he can't reveal what he doesn't know.

I don't understand how people don't see this....

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

#146

Post by chc »

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.

I am well aware of all that, and I have great respect for those people who made those sacrifices, but it doesn't make sense to require that. The idea you're promoting here is "If you won't volunteer to have your life completely ruined, don't do the right thing. I'd rather you just be complicit in something that harms me if you aren't willing to be punished for doing the right thing."

Do you not see how completely bonkers it is to look at somebody who has already given you valuable information at great personal cost and demand that he suffer more for your benefit? Why on earth would you feel he owes that to anybody?

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

#147

Post by ReidZB »

gngeal wrote: post #144
ReidZB wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny thing is, when he suggested splitting the key, I assumed that this is what he had in mind.

Maybe he did! I have no idea. But just in case he didn't, or someone else had the interpretation I had, I just wanted to clarify that a real secret-sharing scheme has some pretty nifty properties.

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

#148

Post by VladRussian2 »

wavefunction wrote: post #119
ambientwhsiper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, SP-117 is extremely effective. FSB or any other intelligence service have ways to make people talk. Such naïveté.

You're ignoring that he can't reveal what he doesn't know.

he either have control over the information or he doesn't. In the case of the former, it means by transitive closure that Putin would have the control as well.

It makes me wonder though who got the best deal - Chinese or Russians - i suppose each party was thinking that they are playing off the other.

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

#149

Post by Arnor »

grey-area wrote: post #88
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 high degree of cooperation many countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law. You appear to a…

> also they are engaged in their own spying which is just as pervasive as the NSA

Also, they don't want their own Snowden copy cat to rise from their own intelligence programs. From that light, I'm a bit surprised Russia is housing him. If anyone wants to keep down descent more than USA, it's Russia...

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

#150

Post by e3pi »

>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.

>... an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence,

Not.

"Normally ciphertexts decrypt to a single plaintext and hence once decrypted, the encryption user cannot claim that he encrypted a different message. Deniable encryption allows its users to decrypt the ciphertext to produce a different (innocuous but plausible) plaintext(s) and insist that it is what they encrypted. The holder of the ciphertext will not have the means to differentiate between the true plaintext, and the bogus-claim plaintext(s)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption

with:

"Secret sharing (also called secret splitting) refers to methods for distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of whom is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number, of possibly different types, of shares are combined together; individual shares are of no use on their own."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

Let the shared secret be deniable-crypto plaintexts. Threshold T sharers may release plaintext_1 while ignorant of a different sharer subset intersection may release a different plaintext_n, benign or otherwise, for example.

At another level of deniability, Snowden may also not even know the current identities or nos of secret sharers participating.

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